The End of Bonapartism and the War on Terror

NYT columnist Tom Friedman's column, "9/11 is over," sounds the death knell for the Neoconservative use of 9/11 and is in particular an attack on Rudy Giuliani.

Friedman's main arguments are that the Bush administration's approach to dealing with al-Qaeda has so damaged the US image abroad, has so inconvenienced foreign travelers and visiting business investors, and has so diverted spending from essential US infrastructure such as bridges and airports, that it risks making the US economically backward in a globalizing world.

The column is significant because it argues that Bushism- Cheneyism is bad for business. The United States is the world's foremost business society, and virtually everything in the society (low taxes on the wealthy, no health care for the middle classes and poor, no protections for labor organizers, favoring of certain kinds of international trade over lower middle class job security, etc.) is arranged for the convenience of the business classes. If Friedman's conviction becomes widespread in that community, the pressures to abandon the 'War on Terror' will be irresistible.

Bushism-Cheneyism has aspects of Bonapartism, whereby the state rules in an authoritarian way and disregards the people, representing itself as the true representative of the business classes. In fact, it serves only a small spectrum of corporate cronies of the ruling elite, disadvantaging almost everyone else. It expands government, but not into provision of useful infrastructure (bridges, airports), but toward the provision of "security" (often just a label for make-work unnecessary jobs, such as extra al-Qaeda-fighting police in Wyoming) or of artificial "investment opportunities" such as an Iraq under US military occupation..

Friedman is the voice of the non-Libertarian business interests, the ones that recognize that certain necessary public goods will not be provided by corporations and so must be provided by government. He also represents those who are unafraid of global competition (thus his slamming of Lou Dobbs), and indeed are convinced that the big money-making opportunities on the horizon lie in globalization and in removal of barriers to international trade, investment and finance. (They are undeterred for some reason by the 1997 melt-down in Asia, which occurred precisely because governments unwisely opened the door to unregulated international speculation).

For the 'globalized business' crowd, the Iraq war was not a sacred mission, as it was for the Neoconservatives, but rather just another lowering of barriers to investment and business (which might also have opened the Arab world up, which would have been all to the good). The Iraq War worked in part precisely because both the Bonapartist and the global-capital fractions within the business classes could agree that it might end Arab socialism and end the barriers to doing business among the 300 million people of the Middle East.

Friedman writes:

' I’d love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can’t keep chasing that rainbow this way. '

In other words, the Iraq War was a business investment, which was a bit of a risk but entirely justifiable at the time (you can hear the nervous CEO explaining to the Board of Directors). But the investment has gone south, isn't working out, and no successful businessman throws good money after bad.

The attack on Giuliani comes because he is still attached to the new acquisition and does want to go on hemorrhaging funds.

It is time, Friedman argues in contrast, to cut our losses and sell off this white elephant of an acquisition (the whole 'War on Terror' including Iraq), which is bleeding money, hurting the firm's image, scaring off investors, and forestalling needed new investments in key growth sectors.

USA, Inc. is moving on.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq Preachers Lambaste Senate

The USG Open Source Center translates or paraphrases sermons given in Iraq on Friday, both Sunni and Shiite.

'Round-up of Iraqi Friday Sermons 28 Sep
Iraq -- OSC Summary
Saturday, September 29, 2007

Major Iraqi television channels - Baghdad Al-Iraqiyah, Baghdad Baghdad Satellite Channel, Baghdad Al-Sharqiyah, Baghdad Al-Furat, Cairo Al-Baghdadiyah, and Baghdad Al-Diyar - are observed on 28 September to carry the following reports on Friday sermons:

Al-Iraqiyah: Within its 1700 GMT newscast, Baghdad Al-Iraqiyah Television in Arabic - government- sponsored television station, run by the Iraqi Media Network - is observed to carry the following report on today's Friday sermons:

"In a Friday sermon, Shaykh Jalal-al-Din al-Saghir [Shiite], imam and preacher of the Buratha Mosque, warned those who conspire against the Iraqi Government and the political process in the country against what they do. At the same time, he urged the Iraqis to unite in order to safeguard the political plan and to defend it in any way."

Shaykh Al-Saghir says: "Plotting against the political process, although it targets the Unified Iraqi Coalition (UIC), goes far beyond the UIC. Although it now targets Dr Al-Maliki's government and those with this government, the plotting goes far beyond this."

He adds" "Our defense of the political process should also include the essence of this process. The essence of the political process is that it has liberated the people's will and kept this will in the hands of the sons of the people themselves."

The report adds: "Shaykh Dr Samir al-Sumayda'i [Sunni], imam and preacher of the Umm al-Qura Mosque, said that the Iraqis will not be affected by any decision that seeks to drag the country to a civil war. In his Friday sermon, Al-Sumayda'i called on the Iraqis to foil the plans of those who seek to partition the country through their unity and brotherhood."

Commenting on the "recent US Congress's decision," Al-Sumayda'i says: "The zealous sons of the country have no choice but to stand as one man and to unite in order to say no to the partitioning of the country and that we are one people, one country, one soul, and one hand."

He adds: "Every Iraqi, in the north, south, central, west, and east of the country is zealous. You should know that if we stand as one man we will find some people who support us in the south, in the center, and in the north. Thus, the occupier will never be able to divide us."

Baghdad Satellite Channel: Baghdad Baghdad Satellite Television in Arabic - television channel believed to be sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party - is observed to carry at 0915 GMT a Friday sermon from an unidentified mosque in Baghdad. Shaykh Dr Harith al-Ubaydi delivers the sermon.

In his Friday sermon, Al-Ubaydi discusses the responsibilities of "man" in this world since God has chosen him to "uphold the trust." He discusses the "status" of man in the "dialogue" between God and the angels in the Koran based on the following Koranic verse: "Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: "I will create a vicegerent on earth." They said: "Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood? - whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy holy (name)?" He said: "I know what ye know not." (Koranic verse, Al-Baqara, 2:30)

In order to explain how God "honored mankind," the preacher also quotes the following verse from the Koran: "We have honored the sons of Adam; provided them with transport on land and sea; given them for sustenance things good and pure; and conferred on them special favours, above a great part of our creation." (Koranic verse, Al-Isra, 17:70)

He says that the main duty of mankind is to "implement God's laws on earth." He says that "God wants us to establish right and justice and to implement His Shari'ah."

The preacher says: "Human rights are guaranteed and protected in Islam, but the defect is in those who rule Muslims. These are rulers who are mainly preoccupied with their sensual delights and lusts."

He adds: "Their radio stations and space channels have nothing to do other than glorifying the ruler. They slaughter peoples, arrest the sons of these peoples, and torture them. They ask the peoples to celebrate their praises and glorify their status. So, the defect is in those who rule Muslims, and not in our Islam. True Muslims did not assume power, but they were deprived of it. Had they assumed power, the world would have seen the greatness of Islam and how it establishes justice and right."

Speaking about the conditions of Iraqi prisoners, the preacher says that some of them said that "they have raped us." He says: "Does Islam say rape them because they have committed a crime? Does humanity say torture them because they have committed a crime?"

Al-Sharqiyah: Baghdad Al-Sharqiyah Television in Arabic - independent, private news and entertainment channel focusing on Iraq, run by Sa'd al-Bazzaz, publisher of the Arabic language daily Al-Zaman - is not observed to carry any reports on Friday sermons for the day. Al-Furat:

Within its 1700 GMT newscast, Baghdad Al-Furat Television Channel in Arabic - television channel affiliated with the Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council (IISC) led by Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim, carries the following report on today's Friday sermons:

"Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i, imam and preacher of the Karbala Friday sermon, said that the religious authority will continue to act as a protective tent for all Iraqis. In his Friday sermon at the Al-Husayn Shrine, Shaykh Al-Karbala'i praised the recent visit by the delegation of the Al-Tawafuq (Accord) Front to Higher Religious Authority Imam Al-Sayyid Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani. He said that the religious authority will continue to serve as the safety valve for Iraq and the unity of its sons."

Al-Karbala'i is then shown delivering his sermon. (Al-Karbala'i's Friday sermon is covered separately as GMP20070928676002)

The report adds: "Friday preachers termed the visit by the delegation of the Al-Tawafuq Front to Higher Religious Authority Imam Al-Sistani as a step in the right direction of bolstering national unity. Other preachers criticized the nonbinding decision the US Senate has made on a plan to partition Iraq on sectarian basis."

Commenting on the recent US Senate's decision, Shaykh Muhammad al-Haydari, imam and preacher of the Al-Khillani Mosque, says: "This is a dangerous sign on partitioning Iraq. The Iraqis should understand this sign and approach. They should reject this decision and adhere to the unity of Iraq as well as the unity of the Iraqi people -- Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, and other minorities."

The channel carries an episode of its weekly "Friday Sermons" program at 2015 GMT, as follows:

The program begins with the Friday sermon delivered by Shaykh Jalal-al-Din al-Saghir, which is covered in Al-Iraqiyah's report within its 1700 GMT newscast.

Shaykh Muhammad al-Haydari, imam and preacher of the Al-Khillani Mosque, says: "You and the world have heard that the US Senate has made a nonbinding decision to partition Iraq into three regions; a Kurdish region, a Sunni region, and a Shiite region, along with having a weak central government."

He adds: "Of course, this decision is strange. Is it reasonable for a government or legislators in a state to legislate for another state?"

He adds: "This is a dangerous sign on partitioning Iraq. The Iraqis should understand this sign and approach. They should reject this decision and adhere to the unity of Iraq as well as the unity of the Iraqi people -- Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, and other minorities. All world states should understand that they do not have the right to interfere in the affairs of other states, including Iraq, although it is weak and occupied."

The station then carries Al-Karbala'i's Friday sermon, which is covered as GMP20070928676002.

Commenting on the Karbala incidents, Shaykh Sadr-al-Din al-Qabbanji, imam and preacher of Al-Najaf Friday sermon, says that these incidents "were preplanned on the financial, organizational, and political levels." He adds that "there was a political plan." He urges the Interior Ministry to announce the results of investigations into the Karbala incidents to the public.

Shaykh Hasan al-Zamili, imam and preacher of the Al-Diwaniyah Friday sermon, says: "You have heard in the news media that a group was arrested in Al-Najaf and another in Basra. These groups took part in assassinating some of the representatives of the religious authority."

He adds: "We call on the Council of Representatives to adopt a stand on this issue and to question the committee that has been formed. This also calls on the scholars to adopt an honorable and appropriate stand toward the Karbala incidents. The political parties also should know that the 15 Sha'ban incidents have pained the hearts and made them bleed. Silence on this issue is treason and silence on the blood that was shed is also treason. Consequently, this encourages the criminals. From this pulpit and other pulpits, we have repeatedly cautioned the government against procrastinating on this issue." . . '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saturday roundup

At the Global Affairs blog, Philip Cunningham, who teaches at Dosisha University in Japan considers the ways in which W.'s Iraq debacle has weakened the ability of the US to play a positive role in the Burma / Myanmar crisis.

Susie Madrak links to a real soldier who upbraids the chickenhawk Rush Limbaugh for calling veterans opposed to the Iraq War "phony soldiers". (No doubt he thinks the badly wounded among them are "phony handicaps" too; about 30,000 US troops have been killed or wounded bad enough to go to hospital, with perhaps 10,000 so very badly injured.)

At Tomdispatch: Guantanamo Forever, and "It's the Oil, Stupid."

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, a frank admission by an officer, Dezirad, that war in the Middle East is hell: "Since we have been in Egypt we have done nothing but suffer. The immense fatigues which we experienced in the Desert, the prodigious heat of the sun, which sets the very ground on fire, the absolute want of food, and the necessity of continual marching, have carried off a vast number of volunteers, who dropt down dead at our feet from mere exhaustion."

Dropped dead while marching in the desert? We know what Rush would think of them!
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Establishment Rejects US Senate Resolution Al-Maliki: A Disaster for Iraq and the Region

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Friday rejected the US Senate resolution calling for a soft partition of Iraq. Reuters reports:

' "They should stand by Iraq to solidify its unity and its sovereignty," Maliki told Iraqi state television . . ."They shouldn't be proposing its division. That could be a disaster not just for Iraq but for the region." Maliki also called on the Iraqi parliament to meet and respond formally to the non-binding resolution, passed by the Senate on Wednesday, which called for the creation of "a federal system of government and ... federal regions". '

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala south of the capital, called the Senate resolution "a step toward the breakup of Iraq." He said Iraqis of all religions and ethnicities should live at peace in a united country. He also called on the Arab states, especially the Arab countries neighboring Iraq, to prevent any such partition. He said, "It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states."

I don't think Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani likes the Senate plan very much.

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars also denounced the plan, but said it came as no surprise, since the break-up of Iraq had been the motive for the US invasion of that country in the first place. The AMS said that the resolution issued from a well-known wing of the present American administration and from the Zionist lobby.

On the other hand, the office of the Kurdistan Regional Government's president, Massoud Barzani, issued a statement welcoming the resolution. It insisted that loose federalism does not equal partition, but rather voluntary unity.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi appears to have rethought his initial rejection of the Senate resolution. He said in Cairo that one model for Iraq might be the United Arab Emirates, a loose association of fairly autonomous sheikhdoms. Likewise, Sawt al-Iraq says in Arabic, As'ad Sultan Abu Kalal, the governor of Najaf province, called for the implementation of loose federalism as the best system for Iraq.

The same report says that Sunni cleric Harith al-Dhari accused Prime Minister al-Maliki of having all along plotted to break up Iraq. (That Sunni leaders see him this way may explain al-Maliki's eagerness to distance himself from the US senate.)

The Gulf Cooperation Council, grouping six Persian Gulf oil states, also denounced the resolution, as did the Arab League and Yemen.

Kurdistan authorities denounced an agreement between Baghdad and Ankara to fight terrorism, which targets the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), to whom Iraqi Kurdish authorities have given safe haven.

On how Bush hasn't after all liberated Iraqi women, maybe.

In fact, Sam Dagher of the CMS reports on how Basra has become increasingly Talibanized under the rule of Shiite militias, as the British troops have withdrawn from the city.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is driving the US toward a war against Iran, and authored the draft for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution passed overwhelmingly by the US senate.

Reuters reports civil war violence on Thursday and Friday. Major incidents on Friday:

'MOSUL - A truck bomb wounded 20 people and destroyed an overpass in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

(McClatchy says: "- Around 2 p.m. a truck bomb destroyed a bridge in Al Shifaa area in Mosul. The bombing flattened the bridge and caused several injuries among civilians in the nearby houses especially, Iraqi police said."]

BAGHDAD - A U.S. air raid killed at least eight people in the Al Saha neighbourhood of Doura district in southern Baghdad, police and medical sources said. . .

[McClatchy adds:

Baghdad

- Around 2 a.m. U.S. military used aerial fire targeting a building in Al Doura area south Baghdad, Iraqi police said. The aerial fire targeted building number 139 in Al Siha district. 10 people were killed and 7 others were injured according to the Iraqi police sources. No U.S. military response was available by the time of publication of this report.

- Around 11 a.m. a mortar shell slammed in Al Ubaidi neighborhood. Two people were injured.

- Police found 5 dead bodies throughout Baghdad. . .

The Mosul bombing came on the heels of destructive suicide bombings on Wednesday. Mosul is in Ninevah Province, one of the provinces the US had hoped to withdraw from by now (this sort of insecurity has postponed that move until next summer.)

Some 130 Iraqis were killed or wounded on Thursday and Friday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Senate Partitions Iraq

The US Senate voted for a soft partition of Iraq on Thursday. First they messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it. It makes no sense to me; the US Senate doesn't even have the authority to divide Iraq. Wouldn't that be for the Iraqi parliament?

The Iraqi political elite roundly condemned the Senate vote. Note that among the more vocal denunciations came from Shiite Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi, whose own party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), favors the creation of a Shiite superstate in the south.

Iraq expert Reidar Vissar dissects the Senate vote and says it is, in Iraqi terms, unconstitutional.


The Iraqi government is incapable of even rudimentary auditing and corruption-fighting, according to a US embassy in Baghdad report. The difficulties range from the poor security situation to violent militia elements inside government ministries.

Historian Roger Owen explains why Iraq is doomed to warlord rivalry and chaos in the short to medium term, whatever the US military does in that country.

At the Global Affairs blog, Part four of Barnett Rubin's excellent series on counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, an account of the Nile river battle of Shubrakhit (Chubrakhit, Chabreisse), by General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, later the father of the author of the Count of Monte Cristo. The Dumas adventure novels were influenced by his father's exploits in the Napoleonic period, though he would only have known them second hand.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush-Aznar Transcript: The War Crime of the Century

I made two claims about the transcript published by El Pais of Bush's conversations with Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar on 22 February, 2003, at Crawford, Texas.

The first is that the transcript shows that Bush intended to disregard a negative outcome in his quest for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a war against Iraq. Bush wanted such a resolution. He expressed a willingness to use threats and economic coercion to secure it. But he makes it perfectly clear that he will not wait for the UNSC to act beyond mid-March. He also explicitly says that if any of the permanent members of the UNSC uses its veto, "we will go." That is, failure to secure the resolution would trigger the war.

Uh, that is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. If you can't get a UNSC resolution, and you haven't been attacked by the state against whom you want to go to war, then you are supposed to stand down.

Both because he set a deadline beyond which his "patience" would not stretch (the poor thing had already waited four months; I mean, is he a toddler that he lacks elementary patience?), and because he specified a UNSC veto as a signal for his launching of the war, Bush made it very clear that he was willing to trash the charter of the United Nations and to take the world back to the 1930s,to an era of mass politics when powerful states launched wars of choice at will on the basis of fevered rhetoric and fits of pique.

The second claim that I made was that Bush was aware of, and rejected, an offer by Saddam Hussein to flee Iraq, probably for Saudi Arabia, presuming he could take out with him a billion dollars and some documents on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Both provisions were intended by Saddam to protect him from later retaliation. The money would buy him protection from extradition, and the documents presumably showed that the Reagan and Bush senior administrations had secretly authorized his chemical and biological weapons programs. With these documents in his possession, it was unlikely that Bush would come after him, since he could ruin the reputation of the Bush family if he did. The destruction of these documents was presumably Bush's goal when he had Rumsfeld order US military personnel not to interfere with the looting and burning of government offices after the fall of Saddam. The looting, which set off the guerrilla war, also functioned as a vast shredding party, destroying incriminating evidence about the complicity of the Bushes and Rumsfeld in Iraq's war crimes.

The claims by some pundits that Saddam's reported desire to take documents on his WMD programs out of the country proves he had such programs in 2003 or that he wanted to somehow retain specialized knowledge involved in them, are silly. Saddam had destroyed his chemical, nuclear and biological programs and stockpiles, which we know from the most extensive postwar inspections in the history of mammal life. Almost certainly, he wanted to keep with him the documents that showed precisely that-- that he was in fact in compliance with UN resolutions (which he was) and so could not on those grounds be subject to extraordinary rendition and delivered to the Hague. Also, as I say, he may well have wanted to keep with him documents with which to blackmail the Bush family, which in the 1980s had been involved in winking at and enabling his WMD capabilities.

(The objections of some observers that Saddam could have avoided the war by just admitting he had destroyed his WMD and providing the documentation ignore what we have since found out-- that Saddam was afraid that if the world knew he had no chemical weapons left, the Shiites, Kurds and Iranians would finish him off in no time. He could not hope to stay in power if he came clean on this matter, but once he left power he knew that his actions of the 1980s could get him convicted at the Hague and so he needed to keep with him documentation on his Reagan/ Bush partners in crime as a hedge.)

Aznar asked Bush if he would grant Saddam these guarantees, and Bush roared back that he would not. (That is the answer to those who want to know where in the text Bush declines Saddam's offer to flee. Nobody in his right mind would flee without guarantees; by declining them, Bush scotched the deal.)

By refusing to allow Saddam to flee with guarantees, Bush ensured that a land war would have to be fought. This is one of the greatest crimes any US president ever committed, and it is all the more contemptible for being rooted in mere pride and petulance.

Note that even General Pervez Musharraf allowed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to go to Saudi Arabia with similar guarantees, even though Sharif was alleged to have attempted to cause Musharraf's death. A tinpot Pakistani general had more devotion to the good of his country, and more good sense, than did George W. Bush.

The passage in which Bush agrees with Aznar that it would be better if Baghdad fell without a fight refers to the possibility that the Iraqi officer corps would assassinate Saddam and decline to put up a fight. Bush would very much have liked such a fantasy to come true.

But he did not need to fantasize. He had a real offer in the hand, of Saddam's flight. He rejected it. By rejecting it, he will have killed at least a million persons and became one of the more monstrous figures in recent world history.

I have done a translation of the transcript, with some dictionary work. I would be glad of any corrections, but I think it is good enough for government work. No one can read it without recognizing that Bush was champing at the bit to go to war; that he only wanted the UNSC as a fig leaf and was determined to ignore it if it did not authorize the war; and that he had a deal on the table from Saddam but absolutely refused to pursue it, preferring instead either a sanguinary conflict or his adolescent fantasy of Baghdad falling without a shot.

=============

Transcript of Bush-Aznar Consultation in Crawford, February 22, 2003

President Bush. We are in favor of getting a second resolution in the Security Council and would want to do it quickly. We would want to announce it Monday or Tuesday [24 or 25 of February of 2003].

President Aznar: Better Tuesday, after the meeting of the Council of General Affairs of the European Union. It is important to maintain the momentum gained by the resolution at the summit of the European Union [in Brussels, Monday 17 of February]. We would prefer to wait until Tuesday.

Bush. It could be in the evening Monday, considering the time difference. In any case, the next week. We will see that the resolution is written so that it does not contain obligatory steps [for Iraq], that it does not mention the use of force, and that it states that Saddam Hussein has been unable to fulfill his obligations. That type of resolution can be voted for by many people. It would be something similar to the one passed regarding Kosovo [the 10th of June of 1999].

Aznar: Would it be presented to the Security Council before, and independently of, a parallel declaration?

Condoleezza Rice. In fact there would not be parallel declaration. We are thinking about as simple a resolution as possible, without many details regarding [Iraq’s] obligations--such that Saddam Hussein could use them as stages and consequently could neglect to fulfill them. We are speaking with Blix [head of the inspectors of the UN] and others of his team to get ideas that can serve to introduce the resolution.

Bush. Saddam Hussein will not change and will continue playing games. The moment has come to be rid of him. That’s the way it is. As for me, from now on I will try to tone down the rhetoric as much as possible, while we seek approval of the resolution. If somebody uses a veto, we will go. [Russia, China and France have, along with the U.S.A. and the United Kingdom the right to a veto in the Security Council by virtue of being permanent members]

Saddam Hussein is not disarming. We have to take him right now. We have shown an incredible degree of patience so far. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we will be militarily ready. I believe that we will get the second resolution. In the Security Council we have the three African members [Cameroun, Angola and Guinea], the Chileans, and the Mexicans. I will speak with all of them, also with Putin, naturally. We will be in Baghdad at the end of March. There is a 15% possibility that Saddam Hussein will die or flee. But that possibility will not exist until we have demonstrated our resolve. The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein. It seems that he has indicated that he is willing to go into exile if he can take a billion dollars with him and all the information that he wants on weapons of mass destruction. [Muammar] Gaddafi told Berlusconi that Saddam Hussein wants to go away. Mubarak tells us that in these circumstances it is entirely possible that he will be assassinated.

We would like to act with the mandate of the United Nations. If we act militarily we will do it with great precision, tightly focusing on our objectives. We will decimate the troops loyal to him, and the regular army quickly will recognize what is going on. We have sent a very clear message to Saddam’s generals: we will treat them like war criminals. We know that they have accumulated an enormous amount of dynamite to demolish bridges and other infrastructure and to blow up the oil wells. We foresee occupying those wells very quickly. Also, the Saudis will help us by putting on the market all the petroleum that is necessary. We are developing a package of very extensive humanitarian aid. We can win without destruction. We are already planning for a post-Saddam Iraq, and I believe that there are good bases for a better future. Iraq has a relatively good bureaucracy and a civil society. It can be organized as a federal system. Meanwhile, we are doing everything possible to take care of the political needs of our friends and allies.

Aznar: It is very important to have a resolution. It is not the same to act with it as without it. It would be very advisable to have a majority in the Security Council that supported that resolution. In fact, it is important to have it passed by a majority, even if someone exercises a veto. Let us consider that the text of the resolution would have among other things to state that Saddam Hussein has lost his opportunity.

Bush. Yes, by all means. It would be better to have a reference to “necessary means” [a reference to the type of UN resolution that authorizes the use of “all necessary means”].

Aznar: Saddam Hussein has not cooperated, has not been disarmed; we would have to summarize his breaches and to send a more detailed message. That would allow, for example, Mexico to move [a reference to a change in its negative position on the second resolution, the extent of which Aznar could have known about from the lips of president Vicente Fox on Friday, February 21, in Mexico City].

Bush. The resolution will be custom-made in such a way that it will help you. I don't care much about the content.

Aznar: We will send you some sample texts.

Bush. We do not have any text. Only a criterion: that Saddam Hussein disarm. We cannot allow Saddam Hussein to drag things out until the summer. After all, this last stage has already lasted four months, and this is more than enough time to disarm.

Aznar: Having a text would allow us to sponsor it and to be its coauthors, and to arrange for many others to sponsor it.

Bush. Perfect.

Aznar: The next Wednesday [(2)6 of February] I will meet with Chirac. The resolution will already have begun to circulate.

Bush. It seems to me all very good. Chirac knows the reality perfectly. Their intelligence services have explained it to him. The Arabs are transmitting a very clear message to Chirac: Saddam Hussein must go. The problem is that Chirac thinks he is Mister Arab, but in fact he is making their lives impossible. But I do not want to have any rivalry with Chirac. We have different points of view, but I would like that to be all. Give him my best regards. Really! The less rivalry he feels exists between us, the better it will be for everyone.

Aznar: How to combine the resolution with the report of the inspectors?

Condoleezza Rice. Actually there will not be a report on February 28, but the inspectors will present a report written on March 1. We don’t have high hopes for that report. As with the previous ones, it will be a mixed picture. I have the impression that Blix will now be more negative than he was before, with regard to the Iraqis’ intentions. After the appearance of the inspectors before the Council, we must anticipate a vote on the resolution one week later. The Iraqis, meanwhile, will try to explain that they are fulfilling their obligations. It isn’t true, and it won’t be sufficient, though they may announce the destruction of some missiles.

Bush. This is like Chinese water torture. We must put an end to it.

Aznar. I agree, but it would be good to have the maximum possible number of people. Have a little patience.

Bush: My patience is exhausted. I don’t intend to wait longer than the middle of March.

Aznar. I do not request that you have infinite patience. Simply that you do everything possible so that it all works out.

Bush: Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, and Cameroon must realize that what’s at stake is the security of the United States, and they should act with a sense of friendship toward us. [Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos should know that the Free Trade Accord with Chile is awaiting Senate confirmation and a negative attitude about this could put ratification in danger. Angola is receiving Millennium Account funds [to help alleviate poverty] and that could be jeopardized also if he’s not supportive. And Putin must know that his attitude is putting in danger the relations of Russia with the United States.

Aznar. Tony [Blair] would like to wait until the 14th of March.

Bush: I prefer the 10th. This is like a game of bad cop, good cop. I don’t mind being the bad cop, and Blair can be the good one.

Aznar. Is it certain that any possibility exists that Saddam Hussein will go into exile?

Bush: The possibility exists, including that he will be assassinated.

Aznar. Exile with a guarantee?

Bush: No guarantee. He is a thief, a terrorist, a war criminal. Compared with Saddam, Milosevic would be a Mother Teresa. When we go in, we are going to discover many more crimes and we will take him to the Court the International Justice. Saddam Hussein thinks that he has already escaped. He thinks that France and Germany have ceased fulfilling their responsibilities. He also thinks that the demonstrations of the last week [Saturday, February 15] will protect him. And he thinks that I very am weak. But the people around him know that the things are otherwise. They know that his future is in exile or a coffin. For that reason it is very important to maintain the pressure on him. Gaddafi tells us through back channels that that is the only thing that can finish him off. Saddam Hussein’s only strategy is to delay, to delay and to delay.

Aznar. In fact the biggest success would be to win the game without firing a single shot and entering Baghdad.

Bush: For me it would be the perfect solution. I do not want war. I know what wars are. I know the destruction and the death that they bring with them. I am the one who has to console the mothers and the widows of the dead. By all means, for us that would be the best solution. In addition, it would save $50 billion.

Aznar. We need you to help us with our public opinion.

Bush: We will do everything we can. Wednesday I am going to speak on the situation in the Middle East, proposing the new peace plan with which you are familiar, and on weapons of mass destruction, on the benefits of a free society, and I will locate the history of Iraq in a wider context. Perhaps it will serve you.

Aznar. What we are doing is a very deep change for Spain and the Spaniards. We are changing the policy that the country had followed for the past two hundred years.

Bush: A historical sense of responsibility guides me just as it does you. When within a few years History judges us, I do not want people to ask themselves why Bush, or Aznar, or Blair did not face their responsibilities. In the end, what people want is to enjoy freedom. Recently, in Romania they reminded me of the example of Ceausescu: it was enough for a woman to call him a liar, for the entire repressive edifice to come down. It is the uncontrollable power of freedom. I am convinced that I will get the resolution.

Aznar. All to the good.

Bush: I made the decision to go to the Security Council. In spite of the disagreements in my Administration, I said to my people that we had to work with our friends. It will be wonderful to get a second resolution.

Aznar. The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.

Bush: I am optimistic because I believe that I am in the right. I am at peace with myself. It has been up to us to face a serious threat to the peace. It irritates me a great deal to consider the indifference of the Europeans to the sufferings that Saddam Hussein inflicts on Iraqis. Perhaps because he is brown-skinned, far away, and Muslim, many Europeans think that everything is all right in his regard. I will not forget what Solana once said to me: why do we Americans think that the Europeans are anti-Semitic and unable to confront their responsibilities? That defensive attitude is terrible. I have to acknowledge I have just great relations with Kofi Annan.

Aznar. He shares your ethical preoccupations.

Bush: The more the Europeans attack me, the stronger I am in the United States.

Aznar. We would like to make your strength compatible with the esteem of the Europeans.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Birk: Sectarian Numbers in Iraq

Sectarian Numbers

Guest comment by Joshua Birk

In his September report to Congress, General Petraeus claimed “the number of ethno-sectarian deaths was down by over 55%.” His assessment stands in sharp contrast with the Government Accountability Office report from earlier in the month, which concluded that “It is unclear whether sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased.” The analysis of sectarian violence had been fraught with ill defined, constantly shifting metrics that makes analysis of these numbers difficult and has relied on a pattern of undercounting. This undercounting all but guarantees recent months will always be seen as progress and cast a cloud of doubt over the veracity of the claims of diminished sectarian bloodshed.

The Defense Department periodically issues data on sectarian killings in its reports “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq.” Comparing the last four of these reports, from October 2006, March 2007, June 2007, and September 2007 can be a maddening exercise which highlights the mutability of statistics on sectarian violence. The reports themselves use shifting terms to describe this violence, chart numbers only in imprecise graphs and frequently disagree on the number of killings which occur in any given month.

However, if you visually measure these reports against each other, a pattern begins to emerge. In the past two months the Pentagon has retroactively increased the numbers of sectarian deaths reported in previous reports. This trend gives rise to the concern that civilian deaths are being reclassified as sectarian killings in order to create the illusion of an improving security situation. If you compare the initial assessment of the post-surge period, June through August in the September ‘07 report, with the initial assessment of the pre-surge period, October through December ‘06, in the March '07 report, only a modest improvement in sectarian violence emerges. General Petraeus’ claim of a 55% drop in ethno-sectarian deaths only emerges when the numbers from October through November sharply increase.

The June 2007 report did not address these concerns and offered no explanation for the retroactively shifting numbers. It was only after facing question about these numbers from reporters that MNFI (Multi-National Force Iraq) Combined Intelligence Operations Center offered an explanation for the changing assessment of sectarian killings. The Iraqi National Command Center, which processed data on these killings, had been overwhelmed with increases in casualties during the fall of 2006. They had developed a tremendous backlog of cases, which were only now being classified as “sectarian murders.”

The September report continued to retroactively inflate numbers of sectarian deaths. In a September 25th article in the Washington Post, Defense Department officials explained the increase as a result of a shifting methodology. In previous reports, they had only calculated deaths that resulted from “murders with distinct sectarian characteristics” but were now charting, “deaths resulting from any sectarian incident.” Broadening the metric they assessed, resulted in another retroactive rise in the level of sectarian deaths. While public discussion of the increases in the September report focused on shifting methodology, the report itself added that the increases were also based on “further data not available for the June 2007 report.”

The lack of distinction between increases based on shifting methodology and increases based on backlogs and unavailable data make these reports exceptionally problematic. The existence of backlogs in particular creates a situation in which recent months will almost always seem to be successful in reducing violence. The illusion of progress may very well disappear by the time that data is processed, but, by that time, we will have a new report, once again incomplete because of backlogged data, and once again showing progress because it only charts a fraction of the sectarian violence in Iraq.

The June report, in which the accounts from February through April radically underestimated sectarian violence, according to the September report, serves as an example of this phenomenon. This undercount is almost certainly the result of unprocessed data, rather than changing methodology. In shifting to calculate “Sectarian Deaths” rather than “Sectarian Murders” the September 2007 report shows an increase of 20% from July 2006 to January 2007. No single month has an increase of more than 30%. That number represents, in rough terms, the impact of the shifting metric. The September report increases numbers of Sectarian deaths in the last months charted in the June report, February through April, by roughly 70%. The vast disparity between this number and the number from previous months suggests a massive undercount.

All of this statistical parsing is necessary to understand the most recent Pentagon reports and to evaluate the claims made about the improving security situation. Undercounts occurred in the June report and there is no reason to assume that the September forecast for the last few months is any more accurate. In fact, given that the report provides data on August, while previous reports stopped tracking two months before the report was issued, the September report may prove to be less accurate than its predecessors. If the undercounts in the September report parallel what we now know about the June report, the level of sectarian violence in Iraq is roughly equivalent to where it was in the summer of last year. This would be an improvement over the horrible chaos and bloodshed of fall and winter, but would fall short of the reduction which General Petraeus has asserted.

Because of the Pentagon’s refusal to release its data, much of this statistical parsing is reading tea leaves. Clarifying the source of these retroactive increases, data which the Department of Defense most certainly possess, would alleviate much of the mystery that surrounds these numbers. The American public has become increasingly doubtful about this war and the military’s constant claims of progress in Iraq. If the Department of Defense wants to reverse that trend, they must become more transparent with the data they release, and the way in which they explain discrepancies in their reports. Until that occurs both the American public and the media should treat all such numbers with skepticism.

Joshua Birk
Assistant Professor
Department of History
Eastern Illinois University.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Transcript Reveals Impeachable Offenses by Bush Re: Iraq War

El Pais published a transcript of the conversation between George W. Bush, Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, and Condoleeza Rice held at Crawford before the Iraq War. Bush is typically bullheaded, impatient, conspiratorial, bullying, arrogant, ill-informed and way over-optimistic. The transcript shows the true colors of the man-- a sort of thuggish, ignorant Mafia don-- who destroyed the United States and destroyed Iraq. (The introductory El Pais article is translated here.)

At one point Aznar prophetically says, "The thing that worries me is your optimism."

The transcript, it seems to me, provides a whole rack of smoking guns that could be a basis for impeaching George W. Bush. The transcript shows that Bush consciously intended to go to war without a United Nations Security Council resolution. The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a treaty signatory (so that it has the force of American law), forbids any nation to launch an aggressive war on another country. The only two legal mechanisms for war are either that it came in response to a direct attack or that the attacker gained a UNSC authorization. The transcript shows Bush actively plotting to sidestep the UNSC if he could not, gangster-like, threaten its members into compliance.

The second grounds for impeachment is that Bush rejected out of hand a deal brokered by the Egyptians whereby Saddam Hussein would leave the country with a billion dollars and some documents about his WMD program. Reuters reports:

'The Egyptians are speaking to Saddam Hussein. It seems he's indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he's allowed to take $1 billion and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction," Bush was quoted as saying at the meeting one month before the U.S.-led invasion.'

The transcript in Spanish then says (my translation):

'Aznar: Is it certain that any possibility exists that Saddam Hussein will go into exile?

Bush: The possibility exists, including that he will be assassinated.

Aznar: Exile with a guarantee?

Bush: No guarantee! He is a thug, a terrorist, a war criminal.

Bush goes on to say, "Saddam won't change and he'll keep on playing games. The time has come to get rid of him. That's the way it is. We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March."

In other words, Bush could have sent Saddam off to exile in Saudi Arabia and avoided the whole war, but refused to do so because of the family vendetta between the Bushes and the Tikritis. Nearly 4,000 US soldiers have died and thousands have been wounded because Bush would not take the deal Saddam offered him. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, and millions displaced.

Going to war unnecessarily is an impeachable offense.

The whole immense catastrophe could have been avoided.

There is more evidence of thuggery in the transcript:

Excerpts courtesy Harper's:

' Bush to American Allies: support war or starve

[Condoleezza Rice has just described the diplomatic situation to Bush and Aznar, explaining that Iraq is continuing to insist that it has no weapons of mass destruction.]

Bush: This is like Chinese water torture. We have to put an end to it.

Aznar: I agree, but it would be best to have as much support as possible. Have a little patience.

Bush: My patience has ended. I’m not thinking of waiting beyond mid-March.

Aznar: I’m not asking that you have endless patience. Simply that everything is done to [have maximum international support].

Bush: Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, and Cameroon should know that what’s at stake is the security of the United States . . . [Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos should know that the Free Trade Accord with Chile is awaiting Senate confirmation and a negative attitude about this could put ratification in danger. Angola is receiving Millennium Account funds [to help alleviate poverty] and that could be jeopardized also if he’s not supportive…

Aznar: Tony [Blair] wants to wait until March 14.

Bush: I prefer the 10th. This is like a good cop, bad cop routine. I don’t care if I’m the bad cop and he’s the good cop.


Bush on Iraq: the future is bright

“We’re developing a very strong package of humanitarian aid. We can win [the war] without much destruction. We’re planning for a post-Saddam Iraq and believe there is a strong base to build a better future. Iraq has a good bureaucracy and relatively strong civil society.”

Bush on French President Chirac: Mister Arab

“Chirac knows perfectly well the reality. His intelligence services have explained. The Arab countries are sending Chirac a clear message: Saddam Hussein must go. The problem is that Chirac thinks he’s Mister Arab and is making life impossible.” '

Reuters has more:

' In case the war endangered energy supplies, "the Saudis would help us and put all the oil necessary into the market," said Bush, who considered Europeans to be complacent about Saddam.

"Maybe it's because he's dark-skinned, far away and Muslim, lots of Europeans think everything's okay with him," he said. . . '

He was accusing the Europeans of racism! He!
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hundreds Dead and Wounded in Wave of Violence in Iraq Deadliest Bombing in Baghdad since July

McClatchy reports that a wave of bombings shook Iraq on Wednesday. In double bombing in the Baghdad market of Baya` left 32 dead and nearly that many wounded. From Sinjar in the north to Basra in the south, the country seemed consumed in a paroxysm of violence.

Reuters reports that on Wednesday,

' BAGHDAD - Two car bombs killed 32 people and wounded 28 shortly before dusk in Bayaa, a mainly Shi'ite district in southwestern Baghdad, police said. . .

SHIRQAT - Two car bombs killed seven people and wounded five in the town of Shirqat, 300 km (190 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. The first one targeted a police patrol in a crowded market and the second exploded near a police station.

MOSUL - A suicide truck bomber targeting a court under construction killed three workers and wounded 47 others in Mosul, 390 kilometers (240 miles) north of Baghdad, Nineveh police chief Major-General Wathiq al-Hamadani said. '

McClatchy has more on violence in Iraq for Wednesday:

Baghdad

- 7 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad by Iraqi Police today. . .

Mosul . . .

- Suicide car bomb slammed into a construction contractor's house who is the son of one of the tribal Sheikhs of Shammar tribe, one of the largest tribes in the country in Um al-Diban village near the Iraqi Syrian border to the west of Sinjar at 07:30 this morning. The Kia minibus detonated killing 8 civilians and injuring 10. . . .

- Car bomb targeted an Iraqi military convoy on the highway from Mosul to Irbil ths afternoon injuring 3 Iraqi soldiers.

Basra

- IED explosion in Abu al-Khasib, Hamdan neighborhood, near Hathlool mosque, 15 km to the south of Basra city killed 5 civilians and injured 4. The IED detonated as people started leaving the mosque after evening prayers at around 07:30 pm.

Fallujah

- 12 gunmen attacked al-Shuhadaa Police Station, south Fallujah. 6 of the gunmen were killed, 5 captured and one escaped. 3 policemen were seriously injured.

- A suicide bomber detonated at a police checkpoint in west Fallujah this afternoon. No casualties were reported. . . '

Joseph Galloway at McClatchy is shrill, riffing on a shrill H. L. Mencken from 1920:

Mencken: ' " . . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." '

Meanwhile, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani lashed out at pan-Arab satellite stations on Wednesday, according the Mehr News Agency. At a meeting with Shiite tribal leaders, he said:

' “Your country is rich and I want you to set aside differences between yourselves and your Sunni brothers and stand like a formidable mountain against attempts by certain satellite networks which try to disrupt this unity because these networks exaggerate about the reports of deaths and explosions and depict them in a way as if tribal war is underway in Iraq,” the statement read which was released by the information office of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. '

Iraqis frequently accuse Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya of being pro-Sunni and as exaggerating the sectarian violence in Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iranian Border Closure Roils Kurdistan; Is Weapons Baiting a War Crime?

Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up an internal pipeline bringing petroleum from Baiji to the refinery at Doura in Baghdad. It is the second such act of sabotage in the past week.

A frightening spread of cholera and cholera-like symptoms up and down Iraq is now being reported, with cases in Basra in the deep south and also in the north. The outbreak is rooted in the breakdown of water purification plants and possibly in an interdiction of chlorine trucks by the US military, for fear the guerrillas will take them over and use them for truck bombings (it has happened). But at some point the US military will have to choose between the risk of chlorine truck bombs and the deaths or illness of thousands of Iraqis.

The bombing at the mosque in Baquba has ended up taking 26 lives, including that of the city's police chief, and wounding 50. Baquba has a Sunni Arab majority but is being ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

The Iranian closure of the border with Iraqi Kurdistan has stranded whole lines of trucks on the Iranian side and raised the prospect of Iraqi Kurds being forced to buy more expensive goods from Turkey and Syria. Iran closed the border in part to protest the US military's kidnapping of an Ianian merchant and accused operative of the Revolutionary Guards.

The Washington Post's revelation of a 'baiting' operation by US snipers raises the possibility that it may have involved war crimes, according to Raw Story. The snipers put out material that could be used to make weapons, and then killed anyone who tried to pick it up. The problem is that Iraqis are extremely poor and you couldn't know why they were picking it up (most of the country's scrap metal is being sold off to China). Raw Story writes, 'The baiting program should be rigorously examined, says Eugene Fidell, the president of the National Institute of Military Justice, because it raises frightening possibilities. "In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war," he said, "if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back." '

John Fout looks at the likely impact of loose federalism (soft partition) in Iraq on the oil industry and foreign contracts.

The Iraq parliament is crafting laws regulating foreign security firms in that country. There are tens of thousands of private contractors supporting the US military there. Parliament hasn't been able to pass a petroleum bill or to make and strides toward national reconciliation, but it has been galvanized by Blackwater's recent killing of 11 Iraqis.

AP argues that the prosperity in Iraqi Kurdistan is built on shaky foundations, especially with regard to banking and finance.

Reuters reports that

' Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman said State Department officials had told the Oversight and Government Reform Committee he chairs they could not provide details of corruption in Iraq's government unless the information was treated as a "state secret" and not revealed to the public. "You are wrong to interfere with the committee's inquiry," Waxman said in a letter to Rice. "The State Department's position on this matter is ludicrous," added Waxman, a vocal opponent of the Bush administration's Iraq policies. '

So obviously they wouldn't want to classify the extent of corruption in Iraq unless it was bad news for the Bush administration.

The SF Chronicle suggests that even if the Dems win the White House in 08, the US military will be in Iraq for some time to come.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband conceded Tuesday that British involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had alienated millions of Muslims:

' He admitted that British foreign policy had alienated millions of Muslims. Speaking of a recent visit to Pakistan, he said: "I met young, educated, articulate people in their 20s and 30s who told me millions of Muslims around the world think we're not seeking to empower them, but to dominate them. So we have to stop and think. "The lesson is that it is not good enough to have good intentions. To assert shared values is not enough, We must embody them in shared institutions." He gave the example of Turkish membership of the EU, saying Europe must not be seen as a closed Christian club. '

If Tony "Lapdog" Blair were still PM, Cheney would just order him to fire Miliband for such frank and rational statements.

Reuters reports civil war violence on Tuesday; major attacks:

'DIYALA - A U.S. soldier was killed in Diyala province when an explosion hit his vehicle, U.S. forces said.

BAGHDAD - Two car bombs killed six people and wounded 20 in the Zayouna district of eastern Baghdad, police and hospital sources said. . .

BAGHDAD - Twelve bodies were found in different parts of Baghdad on Monday, police said.

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded four in eastern Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb near a police station wounded seven people, including a policeman, in the Karrada district of central Baghdad, police said. . .

MOSUL - A suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt blew himself up near a police colonel, wounding the officer and nine others in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

FALLUJA - A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed one policeman and wounded another in Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. . .

BASRA - A suicide car bomb killed three people in an attack targeting a police station in the southern Shi'ite city of Basra, police and a health official said. Up to 20 people were wounded. Basra lies 550 km (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad. . .

KIRKUK - A roadside bomb wounded two people in southern Kirkuk, police said.

HAWIJA - Hussein Ali Saleh, head of Hawija City Council, was wounded when a suicide car bomber targeted his convoy on a road near the town of Hawija, 70 km (40 miles) southwest of the city of Kirkuk, police said. Two of his guards were wounded.'

The rash of bombings in Basra may force British troops back into the city.

At the Global Affairs group blog, Manan Ahmed on the "Bhutto complex.'
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

"There are no homosexuals in . . ." More Common a Sentiment than you Might think

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bigotted statement that there are no homosexuals in Iran derived from his rightwing religious commitments. What he said is very serious. He erased gays right out of existence. The ultimate in denying people their rights is to deny they even exist (the nonexistent obviously have no rights.) There could be a debate over whether the gay lifestyle exists in Muslim countries, as a matter of identity politics, of course, but Ahmadinejad is not that sophisticated. He was saying that all Iranians are straight. Of course, gays are punished very severely in Iran, in reality.

It would be nice for the US Right to have us forget that they pull the Ahmadinejad act with regard to gays every day. Denying gays the right to marry is a way of erasing them from civil society. It is a way of denying that they really love one another, as straights do. It is a way of asserting that they do not exist.

The "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the US military (so unlike the one followed by many NATO allies) is also a way of erasing gays. They don't exist unless they themselves press the case that they exist. In order to remain in their jobs, they are forced to erase themselves by their silence. The 'don't ask, don't tell' policy is a way of pretending that there are no gays in the US military. For if it could be proven that anyone is gay, he is immediately expelled. It is just as silly as what Ahmadinejad said, and just as pernicious. That policy is supported by the entire American Right, which is no better than Ahmadinejad in this regard.

Here are a couple of Christian statements resembling the vile ones spewed by Ahmadinejad, just for comparison.

Catholic Ahmadinejads from Hannity and Colmes:

' COLMES: group that is where I am. Let me just show you another quote, and you'll be surprised at who's saying this.

"Based on the facts that are known to us, we continue to find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq, lacking clear and adequate evidence of an imminent attack of a grave nature."

The Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that, Congressman, Dornan.

DORNAN: Did you watch the -- did you watch the debate? I watched six hours of debate, and I had a face-to-face fight with Cardinal McCarrick, who told me to my face there are no homosexuals in our seminaries. This is a discredited bunch of once holy men.

----FOX: HANNITY & COLMES, November 15, 2002 '

For the full irony of Dornan's reported conversation, see this link.

Evangelical Ahmadinejads. Bishop John Shelby Spong observes:

[Conservative] 'commentators have not mentioned the blatant homophobia in both Africa and Southeast Asia. Christian leaders in Africa still maintain that there are no homosexuals in their countries, or if homosexuality is admitted, that it was "caught" from white Europeans. Christians throughout the Third World still assert that homosexuals are either evil people who can be changed if they are converted, or that they are mentally sick people who can be healed if properly treated. Such theories are dismissed as nonsense in Western medical circles today. Homosexual people in Africa have told me that they risk murder if they come out of their closets. They believe that if they were killed, the act would be endorsed by many Christian leaders of that continent, who quote scripture to justify it.'

So if some American Republicans, Catholics and evangelicals want to have the standing to laugh at Ahmadinejad for his prejudice, they have some work to do at home first.

----

PS: to get a sense of what Iran is really like these days, see this slide show.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shaman Drum Book Party for Napoleon's Egypt

Many thanks in advance to Karl Pohrt and his great independent bookstore Shaman Drum for this party.

Shaman Drum Events Calendar
Academic Reception:

Title: Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East
Author: Juan Cole
Location: Shaman Drum Bookshop

Time: Mon Oct 01, 4:00 PM

In this vivid and timely history, Juan Cole tells the story of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Revealing the young general's reasons for leading the expedition against Egypt in 1798 and showcasing his fascinating views of the Orient, Cole delves into the psychology of the military titan and his entourage. He paints a multi-faceted portrait of the daily travails of the soldiers in Napoleon's army, including how they imagined Egypt, how their expectations differed from what they found, and how they grappled with military challenges in a foreign land. Cole ultimately reveals how Napoleon's invasion, the first modern attempt to invade the Arab world, invented and crystallized the rhetoric of liberal imperialism.

Juan Cole, internationally respected historian, celebrated blogger, and Middle East expert, teaches history at the University of Michigan and is the former president of MESA. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.


Bookshop | Events | Textbooks
Shaman Drum Bookshop | 311-315 South State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104 | 734.662.7407

---------

Meanwhile, at the Napoleon's Egypt blog, two letters from Frenchmen trapped in Cairo with Bonaparte.

One, whose author is not identified, declares a failure Bonaparte's expedition to Salahiya to rescue the wealthy pilgrim caravan coming from Mecca from his nemesis, the Mamluk leader Ibrahim Bey. Bonaparte failed to rescue most of the caravan, and failed to trap or defeat Ibrahim, who escaped with much treasure and with the Ottoman viceroy, to Syria. Bonaparte's own accounts of Salahiya (Salhieh) hardly depict a failure.

The other writer, an officer named Benoit Pistre (18th Dragoon Regiment), tells us of the desperation of the French soldiers on finding themselves in a country of adobe huts, desert and plague:

' From the slight sketch which I have given you of Egypt, you may easily conceive that the army is by no means pleased with this expedition, to a country of which the usage, diet, and excessive heat, are totally repugnant to our manner of living in Europe. The major part of the army is labouring under a diarrhea and ALTHOUGH VICTORIOUS, WILL TERMINATE ITS CAREER BY PERISHING MISERABLY, IF OUR GOVERNMENT PERSISTS IN ITS AMBITIOUS PROJECTS. Many officers are throwing up their commissions; and I freely confess to you, that I would also throw up mine, if I had the least prospect of obtaining any thing in France . . . '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ahmadinejad lectures at Columbia University

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Huge Bombing in Baquba Iranians close border with Iraqi Kurdistan

Iran has closed its border with Iraqi Kurdistan. This move appears to come in part in reaction to the US kidnapping of an Iranian commercial agent, on the grounds that he is a covert operative, from Sulaimaniya (a city in Iraqi Kurdistan). In addition, Kurdish guerrillas of the PEJAK organization have been taking refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan and carrying out terrorist attacks inside Iran, in response to which Iran has shelled Kurdish border villages.

The closure of the border will hurt Kurdistan, which is landlocked and already has bad relations with Turkey and Syria, its other windows on the world.

McClatchy also reports on the Kurds that Iran is seeking.

The LAT reports on Iranian President Ahmadinejad's popularity in the Arab world, which is mostly Sunni. They take him as a symbol of anti-imperialism.

Reuters reports civil war violence for Monday:

' BAQUBA - A suicide bomber killed 26 people including the police chief of the city of Baquba in a mosque compound where local Shi'ite and Sunni Arab leaders were holding reconciliation talks, police said. They said 50 people were wounded in the attack in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad.

TIKRIT - A U.S. soldier died after being wounded by gunfire in Salahuddin province, the U.S. military said. . .

MOSUL - A suicide truck bomb killed at least six people, including two policemen and a soldier, and wounded 17 in an attack on a checkpoint near a village between Tal Afar and Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

KIRKUK - A bomb in a parked car wounded six people near a police brigadier-general's house in Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

KUT - Gunmen killed one man and wounded another in Kut, 170 km (105 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said. . .

LATIFIYA - A roadside bomb killed one soldier and wounded three others in Latifiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

MOSUL - A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded three west of Mosul, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed Jawad al-Daami, a journalist for Baghdadiya television, on Sunday in al-Qadissiya district of southwestern Baghdad, an Iraqi journalists' association said.

KIRKUK - Kirkuk province police chief Jamal Tahir escaped unhurt from a roadside bomb attack on his convoy in the city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. One of his guards was wounded. . .

BAGHDAD - U.S. forces killed one suspected insurgent and arrested four members of an Iranian-backed special groups cell during an operation in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

KIRKUK - A car bomb targeting a local mayor's convoy killed one of his bodyguards and wounded seven, including three civilians in Kirkuk, police said. . . "

McClatchy has more, including the discovery of 9 bodies in the streets of Baghdad.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Sermons

The USG Open Source Center translates or paraphrases Iraqi Friday Prayer sermons from last week.

"Round-up of Iraqi Friday Sermons 21 Sep
Iraq -- OSC Summary
Sunday, September 23, 2007

Major Iraqi television channels - Baghdad Al-Iraqiyah, Baghdad Baghdad Satellite Channel, Baghdad Al-Sharqiyah, Baghdad Al-Furat, Cairo Al-Baghdadiyah, and Baghdad Al-Diyar - are observed on 21 September to carry the following reports on Friday sermons:

Al-Iraqiyah: Baghdad Al-Iraqiyah Television in Arabic - government-sponsored television station, run by the Iraqi Media Network - is not observed to carry any reports on today's Friday sermons due to a technical failure.

Baghdad Satellite Channel: Baghdad Baghdad Satellite Television in Arabic - television channel believed to be sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party - is observed to carry at 0919 GMT a Friday sermon from an unidentified mosque in Baghdad. Shaykh Dr Harith al-Ubaydi delivers the sermon.

In this Friday sermon, Al-Ubaydi discusses the "great importance Islam attaches to the social field in life," as well as the special care, taking into consideration that the "foundation of the structure of societies is based on the organization of relations among the members of that society."

The preacher says that God created people with different languages and different colors. He says that this is one of the signs of God which urges people to cooperate with each other. The preacher then quotes the following verse from the Koran: "If thy Lord had so willed, He could have made mankind one people: but they will not cease to dispute. Except those on whom thy Lord hath bestowed His Mercy: and for this did He create them." (Koranic verse, Hud, 11:118)

The preacher urges "positive and peaceful relations" among peoples in order to exchange benefits. He then quotes the following verse from the Koran: "O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise (each other)." (Koranic verse, Al-Hujurat, 49:13) The preacher also urges solidarity and sympathy among Muslims.

On Muslims' relations with other non-Muslims, he says that God urges us to treat them kindly and with the best means based on the following Koranic verse: "And dispute ye not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation)." (Koranic verse, Al-Ankabut, 29:46)

The preacher concludes by urging the government to achieve security to the citizens, adding that the "Armed Forces and the Internal Security Forces should play their national role in achieving security and peace for every Iraqi individual and family." He calls on the government to make efforts to "return the Iraqis who left Iraq to neighboring and other states and to compensate them so as to allow them to live in their country."

Al-Sharqiyah: Baghdad Al-Sharqiyah Television in Arabic - independent, private news and entertainment channel focusing on Iraq, run by Sa'd al-Bazzaz, publisher of the Arabic language daily Al-Zaman - is not observed to carry any reports on Friday sermons for the day.

Al-Furat: Within its 1700 GMT newscast, Baghdad Al-Furat Television Channel in Arabic - television channel affiliated with the Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council (IISC) led by Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim, carries the following report on today's Friday sermons:

"Ammar al-Hakim has called on the blocs that withdrew from the government to return to it and to effectively participate in the political process. In a Friday sermon at the Buratha Mosque in Baghdad, Ammar al-Hakim said that the political process has witnessed a great impetus over the past period in favor of the government after achieving security successes in Baghdad and the governorates. He added that the withdrawals were among the negative phenomena of the political process, noting that this will not be confined to certain blocs. He said that this method weakens the political process."

The report adds: "His Eminence stressed that the Al-Tawafuq Front is an important and main partner in the political process. He called on it to return to the government to contribute to safeguarding the interests of all Iraqis. Ammar al-Hakim has also called on the Al-Sadr and Al-Fadilah blocs to return to the Unified Iraqi Coalition (UIC)."

Al-Hakim says: "From this holy place, and from the Friday pulpit, I call on the dear brother, Muqtada al-Sadr to make a brave decision, along with our honorable brothers in the Al-Sadr bloc, to return to the UIC and to seriously and persistently work to make the political process succeed, support the Iraqi Government, and avoid and solve any problems. Through serious and constructive dialogue we can solve problems and continue work to serve the citizens' interests."

The report adds: "Ammar al-Hakim rejected indiscriminate arrests of the Iraqis. He stressed the need that the security forces and the multinational forces should be accurate and do not target anyone other than offenders. Reacting to some statements to the effect that the agreement among the four effective forces was the reason behind the withdrawal of the Al-Sadr bloc, Ammar al-Hakim said that the UIC did not make it difficult to any side to conclude agreements in favor of the political process."

Commenting on the Petraeus-Crocker report, Al-Hakim says: "It spoke about great positive achievements in the political process and the successes on the security, political, and economic levels. It also spoke about the strong will the international community sees in the Iraqi leaders to advance forward and to make their achievements, including national reconciliation. However, despite its positive points, this report ignored many important and key files concerning the objective assessment of the developments of the situation in Iraq. Among the most important of these files is the role of the religious authority in this cohesion and national accord and in standing in the face of the civil war plan, which some others used to advocate, such as the takfiris (holding other Muslims to be infidel), Al-Qa'ida, and their likes. They issued statements and made speeches on this issue. The religious authority served as a safety valve. It supported and backed the entire political plan and called for self-restraint, something which calmed down many people and prevented a civil war."

The report says: "Ammar al-Hakim said that the Petraeus-Crocker has foiled many of the internal and regional wagering on disrupting the political process or harming the achievements of the Iraqi people."

The report adds: "Friday preachers in the country denounced attacks on the representatives of the religious authority, particularly in the Basra Governorate. They also called for expediting the results of investigation into the Karbala incidents and for revealing the criminals. Other preachers urged the government to work seriously to render services to the citizens after the improvement of the security situation." . . .

The channel carries an episode of its weekly "Friday Sermons" program at 1810 GMT, as follows:

The program begins with Ammar al-Hakim's Friday sermon, covered in the Al-Furat's above 1700 GMT report. Here, he says: "What contributed to the growing impetus of the political process is the sharp drop in the number of terrorist operations, which used to target citizens everywhere and led to the fall of entire areas which became outside the government's control. These areas were controlled by the terrorist, takfiri, and criminal gangs."

Shaykh Muhammad al-Haydari, imam and preacher of the Al-Khillani Mosque, says that "it is clear that the security situation is improving." He adds that the government and local councils should "benefit from this improvement to improve their performance." . . .

Shaykh Sadr-al-Din al-Qabbanji calls on the Al-Sadr bloc to return to the government and to "reexamine their position to see whether it is in the interest of the Iraqi house, or the Shiite house in particular." He adds: "We do not accept the fragmentation of the Shiite house. We also do not accept this to the Iraqi house. You are part of the Shiite house. You are a key element and component in the Shiite house. The withdrawal means a rift. We hope that they will reconsider their position and maintain their real, effective, and positive participation. We do not support the option of violence or the option of withdrawal. We say this to all sides. We said this to Al-Tawafuq (Accord) Front and to others."

Shaykh Hasan al-Zamili, imam and preacher of Al-Diwaniyah Mosque, says that the "government is called upon to provide security to the nation's scholars, preachers, and honest ones." He adds that the "government should implement the law against the criminals."

Al-Baghdadiyah: Cairo Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television in Arabic - Private Iraqi television known for its opposition to the US presence in Iraq - is not observed to carry any reports on the Friday sermons for the day. . . "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Let Slip the Dogs of War and Demonize Ahmadinejad

My column at Salon.com is online: Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1: Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war." Excerpt:

'Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament. . .

The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state. '

Read the whole thing.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq Relents on Blackwater Bush to ask for Nearly $200 bn.

The Iraqi government is backing off its demand that the Blackwater security firm be expelled from Iraq in the wake of apparently unprovoked shootings that left 11 Iraqis dead, according to the LAT. Apparently the argument has been made to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that the 1,000 Blackwater guards who escort US embassy personnel would have to be replaced by troops, who would have to be pulled out of their current attempt to drive Sunni Arab militants out of Baghdad neighborhoods.

Tom Engelhardt analyzes the Bush administration legal framework that keeps US companies and personnel unaccountable in Iraq.

A big feature of the literature on decolonization is the delight leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ruhollah Khomeini took in abrogating laws bestowing 'extra-territoriality' on colonial personnel and even just civilians from the metropole, while in the subject country. Now extra-territoriality is back with a vengeance; and, of course, no colonial enterprise can be run without it. One can't have persons of the superior race hauled before a native judge; bad show, old boy, to let the wily oriental gentlemen get the upper hand that way.

The argument about whether Cheney/Bush went into Iraq over petroleum is not interesting. Of course they did, one way or another. The question is what exactly they thought they were doing about Iraq's petroleum. I would argue that they threw public resources (perhaps as much as two trillion dollars worth when all is said and done) to secure profits for private companies. Otherwise, the US public will never, ever realize the sort of savings from the development of Iraqi petroleum that would compensate them for the blood and treasure they have spent in Iraq. (Not to mention the opportunity costs of squandering so many resources on a quagmire, when the public investment could have been put to much better uses).

Over twenty retired generals have now spoken out against the Iraq War, a gut-wrenching decision for these highly conservative lifelong Republicans.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat writing in Arabic reports that Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned against any partition of Iraq. He urged national reconciliation, instead. He also criticized Iran for intervening in Iraqi affairs and called for restraint among the country's neighbors.

At the Global Affairs group blog, Barnett Rubin imagines what he would say about accountability and the Bush administration if he were a politician rather than an analyst:

' The Bush-Cheney administration has surrendered much of Afghanistan to the Taliban and much of Pakistan to al-Qaida. They have turned most of Iraq over to Iran, creating the very danger over which they now threaten another disastrous war; they have strained the U.S. Armed Forces to the point of exhaustion, turned the Defense Department over to private contractors, the Justice Department over to the Republican National Committee, and the national debt over to foreign creditors, while leading a party whose single most basic belief is supposed to be that individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions. And they dare to lecture us on national security?'

Then Rubin restates the case from an analytical point of view. It is a beautiful thing to behold. Read the whole thing.


At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, Lacuee writes:

' Egypt has not the slightest resemblance to what has been said of it by our writers. Its soil, indeed, is fruitful, but there is little of it. Nature asks only to produce; but the land is bare, and almost uncultivated. The natives, degraded by slavery, are relapsed into the savage state, retaining nothing of their former civilization but superstition and religious intolerance. I have found them resembling, in every circumstance, the islanders of the South Sea, described by Cook and Forster.

In a word, this country is nothing at present. It merely offers magnificent recollections of the past, and vast, but distant hopes of the future. It is not worth conquering in its present condition: but if statesmen, above all, if able administrators should undertake the management of it for ten years;--if for the same space of time we should employ all our care on it, and sacrifice the whole of its revenues, it might become the most valuable colony of Europe, and effect an important change in the commerce of the world!

But where are they,--these able administrators? '

Where, indeed?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pentagon Report Gives Lie to Surge Success

Reprinted for Monday readers:

An article on how the schedule for turning Iraqi provinces over to the Iraqi army and police for security purposes has slipped to August 2008 notes of a new Pentagon report:

' The Pentagon report cited a litany of problems with the police. For example, it said as few as 40 percent of those trained by coalition troops in recent years are still on the job. Also, due to combat loss, theft, attrition and poor maintenance, a "significant portion" of U.S.-issued equipment is now unusable.'

Just to underline what is said here, 60 percent of the policemen who got even the very minimal training on offer to them have disappeared from the force; and not much is left of the weaponry ("equipment") that the US gave the Iraqi police.

The report is here (pdf).

The report also has two graphics that should make us very suspicious about all the declarations that the troop escalation or 'surge' has significantly reduced violence in Iraq. I cut the graphs in half, so they show only 2006 and 2007 and relabled them, but you can scroll down at the pdf link above to see the originals. I did not modify them in any other way.

The first graph shows average daily casualties (dead and wounded badly enough to go to hospital) by month in Iraq.



This graph shows that there was no significant reduction in daily casualties in Iraq this summer. June saw a dip, mainly in civilian Iraqi casualties; coalition and Iraqi security force casualties were as bad as ever. Since the reduction in civilian casualties was not sustained, it is not significant, and could just have been a fluke (a few car bombs in markets failed to kill as many people as usual, e.g.) Somewhere around 150 persons continued to be killed or wounded every single day according to this chart, with a very minor daily reduction in the hot months of the summer when it is harder to fight.

The second graph gives the number of attacks per month. Obviously, a lot of attacks produce no casualties. Mortars land uselessly in the desert, e.g.



This graph shows that with regard to attacks May and June (when the 'surge' was well under way) were two of the most violent months ever since the US occupation of Iraq began. The June average was 177.8, the highest ever seen. July was more like the violent fall-winter 2006 than it was like the slightly less violent summer.

The graph does show a reduction in attacks for August, but what I notice is that the reduction in attacks did not come with regard either to Iraqi civilians or Iraqi security personnel, which seem the same height as previous months. The only significant reduction for August was with regard to attacks on coalition forces. (Since troop casualties do not seem to have been down very much for August, this statistic suggests that there were fewer attacks but they were more deadly. That is not good news.)

The Pentagon is trying to give us the impression that August was a 'trend', but statistically that is silly, since it was just one month and what came before it was pretty horrible. The dip in attacks in August does not seem to have come with much of a dip in casualties, in any case. And if all that is happening is that fewer US troops are being attacked, but similar numbers are being wounded or killed, I'm not sure that is even significant. Since some of the attacks were on the British in the south, changes in the way they were deployed could have had a small impact on these statistics.

The Pentagon tells us that violence in Baghdad is back down to the levels of summer, 2006. But whether that is true or not, the generalization cannot be made for Iraq, by the Pentagon's own statistics. If you do a three-month rolling average for months prior to September, whether you look at numbers of attacks or numbers of casualties, there has not been a significant improvement with regard to violence in the country as a whole.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tzipi Livni Aboutface: Now Against Terrorism

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, now grandstanding at the UN, is the daughter of Eitan Livni, the chief operations officer of the Irgun terrorist organization. Among Irgun's most spectacular operations was the blowing up of the King David tourist hotel in Jerusalem, which killed dozens of innocents (also some British intelligence officers). Just to give you an idea of how things change, the Irgun bombers disguised themselves as Arabs. Obviously, in 1946 Arabs could be presumed not to be dangerous, which explains the disguise; it was people who looked like they might be violent Zionists that would have attracted suspicion. Later generations of rightwing Zionists have attempted to convince the rest of the world that the Arab kaffiyah is an icon of terrorism; but their parents were perfectly willing to display it as a sign of innocence (and perhaps with the intention that the Arabs should take the fall).

Likud leader Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu actually attended a celebratory commemoration of this cruel act of terror in 2006 along with elder Irgun members!

Irgun also carried out the infamous massacre of Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin in 1948. Note that this village had a peace agreement with the Haganah, which Irgun refused to honor.

Since she has never repudiated Irgun's actions, she does not make a convincing poster child for the condemnation of terrorist groups that field candidates in elections, her current campaign.

One wonders if Livni regrets her own father's having been elected to parliament as a member of the Likud Party, or if she thinks Netanyahu should be allowed to run for office. Or, um, there is the question of her own good self.

Her government fired 1.2 million cluster bomblets into Lebanon last summer, mainly in the last days of the war. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons that are only useful on the battlefield if fired into massed troops. The Israelis did not use them that way. They spread them around on civilian farmland as the war was clearly ending. That is an act of naked terror fulfilling no war aim, and Lebanese children are still being killed by the bomblets. Israeli President Shimon Peres has called the action a mistake (as he has called the whole war a mistake.)

About Livni, UK blogger and human rights activist Charlie Pottin wrote:

' Livni, 47, first came to political notice as a teenager, taking part in violent demonstrations by right-wing Greater Israel nationalists against US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when he tried to arrange territorial deals between Israel and Arab states with his shuttle diplomacy.

"My family is part of the founding history of Israel," she has boasted. Her father's gravestone bears the inscription, "Here lies the head of operations of the Irgun Z'vai Leumi" . The stone also bears a carved map of 'Greater Israel' extended to take in the opposite side of the Jordan river. in keeping with the old right-wing Zionist ditty that went "The River Jordan has two sides, and both of them are ours!" '

Livni's current campaign is not even a good idea. It was only after the Irish Republican Army fielded candidates from its political wing, Sinn Fein, that Britain and the US gradually had someone they could negotiate peace with. You can hardly hold talks with someone who is blowing you up. But you can talk to his colleague who is just doing ordinary politics. Over ten to fifteen years, such arrangements can create the political distance necessary to bring conflicts to a close. But then the Livnis only know one way to bring conflicts to a close.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Escobar on Palestinian Refugees in Brazil

Pepe Escobar writes with regard to my posting about Brazil's granting of asylum to Palestinian refugees expelled from Palestine by the Israeli military in 1948, who had taken refuge in Iraq but have now been forced out of that country, as well.

Escobar writes regularly for the Asia Times and has a recent book, Red Zone Blues: : a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge .

Escobar writes:

"
I happen to be in Brazil at the moment. Re: one of your posts this Sunday, I guess you and your readers might be interested to know something about the Palestinian refugees in Brazil.

Up to next month Brazil will receive 117 Palestinian refugees. They lived in Baghdad during Saddam; before the invasion they were taken to Ruweished, a refugee camp in the middle of the desert in Jordan 60 km away from the Iraqi border. I visited the camp in 2003 - the living conditions were absolutely appalling.

Some of the refugees will be settled in cities in Rio Grande do Sul, a wealthy agricultural/industrial state in the south neighboring Uruguay. Others will se settled in Sao Paulo state, the wealthiest in the nation. They chose Brazil; others opted for Canada and New Zealand.

According to the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, they will all have juridical and diplomatic protection. Each person - including kids - will receive a modest salary, equivalent to US$ 200 a month, during their first 12 to 24 months in the country, plus social benefits. The government will pay their rent and utility bills. They will have a Brazilian ID like everybody else, a work permit and a diplomatic passport. 300 volunteers from civil society are involved in their integration in Brazilian society.

Among the refugees we find teachers, businessmen, housewives, whole families. Their first impression was predictably ecstatic. Brazil is not involved in wars (although there is an undeclared civil war in the big cities between the haves and have nots; they will be living in smaller, peaceful cities in the countryside). Women can use the veil and they won't be harassed. There's simply no ethnic and religious discrimination, no "clash of civilizations" paranoia.

There are no less than 14 million Arabs and people from Arab ancestry living in Brazil, especially in the south. It was up to Luis Vasere, from UNHCR, to put it all in perspective: "The Brazilian government has given an effective response to a humanitarian drama. It's part of official state policy".

All the best, Pepe "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq: Videotape of Blackwater Attack Jaafari Maneuvers in Najaf

Iraqi authorities said Saturday that they have a videotape of the shootings in Nisur Square last Sunday by Blackwater security guards, which shows that they fired without provocation. The company has maintained that its personnel were responding to incoming fire. There is now talk in Baghdad of trying the guards, though a decree by US viceroy Paul Bremer may hold the US nationals harmless.

Meanwhile, charges surfaced that Blackwater employees had shipped weapons to Iraq without proper paperwork, which could be interpreted as a form of arms smuggling. The company denies the charges.

Meanwhile, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani wrote a letter to Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker demanding that Iranian national Mahmoud Farhadi Farhad Aghaie be released. The US military detained him in Sulaimaniya, alleging that he is actually an Iranian intelligence officer. Talabani seems confused as to whether he is president of Iraq or a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government, since he complained that the US raid injured the sovereignty of the KRG. Uh, I don't think provincial administrations have sovereignty. And, shouldn't Talabani be representing the interests in sovereignty of all the provinces?

Plus, Mam Jalal, if you are a president and have to plead with a foreign general to release your own guest from prison, you don't have any sovereignty left and haven't had for some time. You've been colonized.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf on Saturday. Jaafari was expected to meet with representatives of the Sadr Movement later that day. Al-Hayat says that two main interpretations of the visit have been put forward. One is that Jaafari is attempting to repair the rifts in the United Iraqi Alliance, the ruling Shiite fundamentalist bloc created by Sistani in the fall of 2004. In that case he was getting Sistani's blessing for the effort and seeking his intercession with Muqtada al-Sadr, who has withdrawn his bloc from the coalition.

The second interpretation is that Jaafari is attempting to make a new bloc in parliament that would include the Sadrists, and which would undermine Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. In that case he was seeking Sistani's blessing for the effort or at least ensuring that the grand ayatollah was not dead set against it.

Al-Hayat also reports on the worsening security situation in the south. It reports one member of the federal parliament as complaining about a wave of assassinations in Basra. Some 100 persons were cut down just in the past week, he alleged, including two aides to Sistani. He demanded the resignation of the Basra police chief and threatened a vote of no confidence against the minister of the interior if nothing was done to stem the killings.

Sawt al-Iraq in Arabic says that not just one but several parliamentarians are called for the resignation of Minister of the Interior Jawad al-Bulani because of the downward security spiral in the south.

The head of the parliamentary committee on security, Hadi al-Amiri, agreed about the worsening situation but said that the security forces were doing the best they could. Al-Amiri is head of the Badr Organization paramilitary, attached to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), and many police and other security men in Basra were drawn from Badr. So, ironically, the head of the parliamentary security committee is also the leader of one of Iraq's best-trained Shiite militias.

Brazil is giving asylum to the Palestinian refugees whose families were expelled from their homes by the Israelis in 1948 and who had taken refuge in Iraq, but now have been forced out of Iraq, as well. (Argentina will take some, too). The Palestinians are the eternal Boat People. It would have been better for them to be able to go home than to a Portuguese speaking country half way around the world. But, well, Rio is rather better than three years in a tent in the desert, and at last they are no longer stateless. But on what will they live? It would be nice to send them some charity. If anybody knows how, please post in comments. (Brazilian Red Cross e.g.?)

At the Global Affairs group blog, Gershon Shafir reads the tea leaves on the possibility of a Hamas truce with Israel.

UN Human Rights chief Louise Arbour has expressed alarm about recent Israeli statements on depriving Gaza of humanitarian infrastructure.

At the Napoleon's Egypt Blog , the naked truth about Mamluk theft of French officers' uniforms.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Aides Killed UIC Unconcerned with Sadrists' Departure

AP reports that two more aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani were assassinated on Friday, bringing the total since late August to 5. Some worshippers who follow Sistani in Basra cancelled Friday prayers, and their mosques stayed empty, in protest. AP says that the governor of Basra, Misbah al-Wa'ili, called for better security for these clerics. That is pretty pitiful, since al-Wa'ili is, like, the governor of Basra.

Some sources intimate that Sunni Arab guerrillas are killing Sistani's aides, in order to foster Shiite on Shiite violence. It seems a little unlikely, however, that Sunnis could function so effectively in mainly Shiite areas, including the holy city of Najaf itself, where aides were killed earlier. The most likely culprits in my view are some small fringe offshoot of the Sadr Movement (not
, I emphasize, the mainstream Sadrists of Muqtada al-Sadr).



Meanwhile, the USG Open Source Center analyzes the reaction of the United Iraqi Alliance [the main Shiite fundamentalist coalition] to the recent withdrawal from it of the Sadr movement.

"Iraq: Al-Sadr Trend Withdrawal Unlamented by UIC Leadership
Iraq -- OSC Report
Friday, September 21, 2007

Iraq: Al-Sadr Trend Withdrawal Unlamented by UIC Leadership; Advocates of Internal Reform Express Frustration

The leadership of the Unified Iraqi Coalition reacted with equanimity to the 15 September withdrawal of the Al-Sadr Trend from the ruling Shiite coalition, with some figures playing down the significance and bluntly charging their erstwhile ally as having been a hindrance to the UIC's agenda.

Elsewhere within the UIC, however, party leaders who had expressed hopes to see the coalition reorganized and reoriented pushed for a return of the Al-Sadr Trend -- apparently out of fear of losing a counterweight to the dominant Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council (IISC) and the Islamic Da'wah Party (IDP). In explaining the Al-Sadr Trend's decision to withdraw, representatives of the movement pointed to the unilateral decisionmaking and negotiating typical of the IISC and IDP's manner of conducting UIC business.

UIC leaders showed no alarm at the withdrawal of the Al-Sadr Trend, maintaining that it would pose no real obstacle to the UIC achieving its goals. Indeed, officials representing the bloc's leadership implied that the Al-Sadr departure would only improve the UIC's progress.

Shrugging off reports that "bands" within the UIC were seeking to bring the Al-Sadr Trend back to the coalition, senior IISC official Jalal al-Din al-Saghir charged that for the past 10 months the Sadrists had "failed to operate in harmony with the UIC" by "not voting on most occasions and not adopting the position of the UIC" (Buratha News, 18 September).

Ascribing the Al-Sadr Trend withdrawal to an "ancient fight" with the IISC, Al-Maliki adviser Sami al-Askari complained that the Sadrists "would not vote with what the coalition voted, and most of their proposals ran counter to its proposals" (Al-Mashriq, 19 September). In addition, senior IDP official Ali Adib charged the Sadrists with delaying the long-awaited cabinet reshuffle (Buratha News, 16 September).

In contrast, leaders of UIC parties who have been pushing for a reassessment and restructuring of the Shiite coalition pressed for a return of the Sadrists.

Abd al-Karim al-An[i]zi, leader of the Islamic Da'wah Iraq Organization (IDIO), threatened that his party would follow the Al-Sadr Trend's example if the UIC did not respond to his plans for a major overhaul of the group. Although the IDIO subsequently disavowed his threat, one IDIO MP agreed that the UIC needed to be "rebuilt" for the sake of its unity and future effectiveness (Buratha News, 17 September).

Complaining that "the other forces (in the UIC) feel that they have been isolated," Al-Anzi stressed the importance of repairing the rifts that have plagued the UIC and observed that it was necessary to "think seriously about forming a new Coalition with the Al-Sadr Trend, the Fadilah Party, and others" (Aswat al-Iraq, 16 September). He described the August alliance drawn up directly between the IISC and the IDP and the two ruling Kurdish parties as the UIC's ruling groups' "diplomatic withdrawal" from the bloc.

Qasim Dawud, who heads the "Solidarity Bloc" -- a small group of independent MPs formed within the UIC to combat what Dawud called its "narrow and odious sectarian atmosphere" (Al-Hayah, 31 January) -- urged that the Sadrists' grievances be taken seriously.

Dawud viewed the Al-Sadr Trend's withdrawal as "certainly negative" but voiced hope that the Sadrists would return to contribute to a "fundamental transformation of perspective, philosophy, and structure" that would enable the UIC to "get out of the bottleneck and the sectarian regimentation" (Nahrayn news site, 17 September).
Solidarity MP Muhammad al-Haydari called for "fast and frank dialogue" with the Sadrists, adding: "We in the Solidarity Bloc call for reforms within the UIC and a transparent, responsible review of all matters and issues" (Belagh, 19 September).

According to statements from Sadrist officials, it was the unilateral moves of the IISC and IDP leaders -- and especially the surreptitious negotiations behind those parties' August four-member alliance with the Kurdish parties -- that soured the Sadrists' view of the UIC.

Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq al-Nidawi, an Al-Sadr Trend media official, identified as "perhaps foremost" of the reasons behind the withdrawal the fact that "the UIC leadership has for the past span of time been discussing alliances here and there without consulting the Al-Sadr Trend" (Al-Huda website (www.al-hodaonline.com), 17 September).

Al-Sadr Trend MP Ghafran Sa'd reported that the UIC leaders "do many things without consulting (the member parties)," complaining: "The Al-Sadr Bloc had no (prior) knowledge of the four-member alliance" (Nahrayn Net, 16 September).

On the eve of the withdrawal's announcement, an Al-Sadr-oriented news website cited an unidentified "leader" in the movement as complaining of the "control of certain parties over the (UIC's) decisions" (Fighting Al-Amarah News Net, 15 September). "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Allawi Rejects al-Maliki's charge of Treason US Kidnaps another Iranian from the KRG

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki slammed his rival, Iyad Allawi of the National Concord Movement, for engaging in secret talks with the Izzat al-Duri branch of the Baath guerrilla movement, aimed at bringing it in to the political process. Al-Maliki said that such activities equated to terrorism. On Wednesday, two members of Allawi's 25-member bloc, Safiya Suhail and Hajim al-Hasani, announced their withdrawal from it according to al-Sharq al-Awsat, saying that Allawi was behaving high-handedly and that they could not understand what the party's strategic vision was.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Allawi responded on Thursday, saying that it was the al-Maliki government that was talking to the Baathists, not he, and that he rejected what were clearly "hollow threats" by al-Maliki.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat also reports in Arabic that Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, says that Iraqi politicians are maneuvering to call a vote of no confidence in the al-Maliki government. Only 55 MPs are needed for such a move, and it is not clear that the government could survive the maneuver.

The US kidnapped another Iranian from Iraqi Kurdistan, alleging that he is an officer in the Quds Force section of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and an arms smuggler. The Kurdistan Regional Authority says that he is Aghai Farhadi, a trade representative of Kirmanshah Province in Iran.

Either the US suspicions about Farhadi are baseless, or the Kurds are the major conduit for Iranian arms into Iraq. Five other Iranians were kidnapped from Irbil by the US military. Farhadi would not be doing what he was doing in Sulaimaniya unless he was the guest of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. If he was smuggling in arms, he was smuggling them to the Peshmerga, the Kurdish paramilitary, which is allied with the United States. Presumably this means that the Peshmerga is either transfering the weapons to the Badr Corps or selling the arms off on the Iraqi black market. If this scenario is correct, then it is pure propaganda for the USG to complain so loudly and bitterly about Iranian meddling in Iraq, when it is being facilitated by some Kurds, who are in turn putative US allies.

The cholera outbreak in northern Iraq has now reached Baghdad. This article reveals that chlorine shipments into Iraq from Jordan are being held up, presumably by the US military. Sunni Arab guerrillas have launched several chlorine truck bomb attacks, and presumably the chlorine ban responds to such threats. But without chlorine, water purification plants won't work, which means Iraqis downstream of a big city are drinking sewage.

The Turkish military has launched an operation in eastern and southern Anatolia against guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party. The Turks charge that the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government is harboring Kurdish terrorists who hit targets in Turkey, so the operation could have spill-over effects in northern Iraq.

Tareq Y. Ismail presents a severe evaluation of the 'surge' or troop escalation and its architects from an Iraqi point of view.


At the Napoleon's Egypt blog: A French officer writes home about preparations to rescue a caravan from the predations of the deposed beys and their Mamluks.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Republicans vote Down Webb Plan for Troops; Al-Maliki Accuses Blackwater

Iraqi guerrillas killed four US troops on Tuesday.

Republican senators succeeded in blocking the Webb plan to give US troops off as much time between deployments as they spent in Iraq. The Bush administration managed successfully to lobby Senate Republicans to defeat the measure, which would have resulted in a reduction of the number of US forces in the field (or a big increase in the use of National Guard units). The Dems needed 60 in the Senate to get a consensus, and could only muster 56. They could not, in any case, have over-ridden a presidential veto, which veto Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had urged on W.

This sort of outcome underlines my point last week that the Democrats in Congress are unlikely to be able to force significant troop drawdowns before Bush goes out of office. See below for an important argument that at least they should try to mandate preparations for troop withdrawals (preparations that appear not to have been made, much to the annoyance of a lot of endangered Americans in Iraq, including those in the Green Zone). I know some readers favor a sort of Democratic Gingrichism, using power over the budget to shut down the Defense Department, but realistically speaking such a strategy would likely boomerang big time and might well cost the Democrats the next election. The Republicans would blame every American death in Iraq on them from now to the election, on grounds of their 'irresponsibility.' They would be accused of being allies of 'al-Qaeda in Iraq,' helping kill US troops by defunding them in the face of a vicious enemy. Sitting Democrats in Congress are just not going to go this route, folks, and if they did they likely wouldn't be sitting there much longer. (All of the House of Representatives has to face the voters every two years!) I don't know why proponents of this tactic don't recognize that the war will actually be much prolonged if the Democrats act in ways that may rehabilitate the electoral chances of the Republicans in '08. At the least, it is a chance that has to be taken into serious account.

My guess is, the Republicans will go on standing up for an increasingly unpopular war until November, '08 and will take a bath. And then the new Democratic administration will swiftly move to draw down the troops, with most out by the end of 2009. This scenario contains extreme dangers for the Democrats, since 2010 could then be a very, uh, interesting year in the Middle East.

McClatchy reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has suspended the license of Blackwater to operate in Iraq while it is under investigation for recklessly killing civilians. Al-Maliki pointed to seven discrete incidents. An aide said that the Americans seemed shocked that the Iraqis were making a stand on the issue. Apparently sympathy with Iraqis about their innocent civilians being shot up by cowboys hired by a private American firm is not widespread in the Green Zone.

One experienced reader wrote me that the Iraqi government stance is reasonable, that foreign security guards should be accountable in some legal system. If Iraq cannot try them (by virtue of a fiat issued by American Viceroy Paul Bremer), and if they are not all Americans and so can't all be tried in US domestic courts, then they are essentially operating beyond the reach of any court of law. That situation is unacceptable to anyone who cares about the rule of law.

By the way, complaints about the immunity of foreigners to prosecution in local courts (called 'extra-territoriality' by historians) were among the grievances that fueled the Khomeini movement in Iran from the 1960s (servicemen on bases in Iran had such immunity, and Khomeini used the unpopularity of this injury to national sovereignty to whip up anti-American sentiment). Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld appear not to have learned any lessons from all that.

The US Congress may attempt to intervene by passing legislation on accountability for private US firms operating in Iraq. There are some 180,000 private individual contractors in Iraq, mostly working for US firms or subcontracting from the US government.

In Wednesday's violence, there was a significant firefight between guerrillas and the Iraqi military in Mosul, car bombs in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Muqdadiya, and assorted other mayhem.

"LUKoil will have an advantage in a new tender for the West Qurna-2 field in Iraq, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said, Interfax reported Wednesday. LUKoil's investments and work at the field will be taken into consideration should the oil producer bid, Zebari said, Interfax reported. "

That's why Americans are dying in Iraq?

The Iranians have released Kian Tajbakhsh from prison.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wagner Guest Op-ed: Democrats Should Fund Demobilization

Guest Op-Ed by David Wagner:

"It seems to me that political polarization in Congress prevents action on common sense measures that are needed, regardless of how fast this war winds down. The consensus for getting back to 130K troops, even by next summer is a significant load on our existing withdrawal capacity. Nothing in this world runs at 100%.

The strategy I would explore is for the Senate to mandate (and the House to fund) full demobilization planning. Prepare the southern roads and port facilities for large scale withdrawal, and future oil development. We need the development and enhancement of infrastructure, including contingency planning for partial use of alternate routes, say through Kurdistan/Turkey or Jordan. We can't use what we aint got, and we don't want to leave war-fighting gear behind.

While we have troops in Iraq, we should be paying Iraqis for the detection and demolition of remaining explosives, and demining operations from the Iran and Kuwait wars. This should be a priority, since our participation can slow the xfer of explosives to militias.

We need to leave the Iraqis with the best demining and UXB capability, as rapidly as they can absorb it. Likewise, the massive deficit in Iraqi medicine and education needs to be addressed, as a legacy our role in three decades of Mesopotamian war. Building medical rehab and education infrastructure would be the best way to employ primary laborers and jump-start their economy, while colleges are repopulated.

US Democratic leadership needs to building consensus for meeting our very real responsibilities in Iraq, even as we debate how to stop combat ops in the midst of a civil war, with both sides pursuing a murderous sectarian cleansing strategy. We need to force this admin to fund those humanitarian measures that we can all agree on.

I grant you that these proposals are hugely optimistic, but talking about them emphasizes to all parties that we need to spend big money on solutions, not in growing the war to the next level. By keeping the full cost of the war in center focus, including our own growing TBI cohort, we stand witness to the need to begin shrinking this madness now. . .

The end-state in Iraq is unknowable, an exercise in futurism and theory. The important thing is to get started, achieve some accommodation here in Congress, uncover the bottlenecks and jobs in Iraq that need to be shared and handed off.

There is no reason why the Iraqi's shouldn't get a dredged waterway, port upgrade and payroll out of our withdrawal, as opposed to the Kuwaiti consortia pocketing all the marbles. If I remember the way in, it went past Um Qasr (?), which is probably a secure coalition/MNFI operation now, more securable than sprawling Basra.

If we do draw down from today's 170K to 130K in the next 10 months, that will be 4K/mo, with a big balloon at the back end. I think Cordesman, Korb etc. are calling our current capacity for careful withdrawal at 5K/mo, given a shooting war. A lot depends on the gear load-out, as opposed to the last four years of 10K/mo rotations using in-country vehicles and heavy weapons.

There are also some 50,000 blackwater type gunmen, and another 150K unarmed KBR types that will need a ride out, once Big Army security starts to fold in toward the large airbases.

I hate to sound like such a war weenie, but in the best scenario it'll be a huge, complicated, multi-player game of SIM City.

David Wagner "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rice Apologizes to al-Maliki for Blackwater Shootings Was Abu Rishah a Fake?

McClatchy reports from Baghdad that Iraqi eyewitnesses maintain that Blackwater security guards fired at civilians without provocation on Sunday, in contrast to the company's own story about the incident. Probably they were firing at a car that neglected to stop when told to, or neglected to stop fast enough. Since such vehicles might be driven by suicide bombers, American military and civilian security forces have often opened fire on innocent Iraqis who just did not hear or did not understand the command to halt their vehicles, or who panicked and sped up. The offending car in this instance had a family of three in it, including a toddler who ended up being melted to his mother's body in the resulting conflagration.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Condi Rice personally apologized to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for the killing of 10 Iraqis by Blackwater guards and promised that steps would be taken to ensure the tragedy was not repeated. The Iraqis are from all accounts absolutely furious about the Blackwater cowboys running around their country armed and dangerous and acting with impunity. The State Department, which employs Blackwater, is highly embarrassed and has ordered State Dept. personnel in Iraq not to circulate for the time being. Debate is raging over whether Iraq has the right to try the apparently trigger-happy civilian security men of Blackwater.

Al-Hayat also says that a US officer in Salahuddin, Col. Barry DiRosa, admitted that the US was paying the salaries (but not the weapons costs) of the tribal irregulars recruited to fight "Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia." The paper says he admitted in a telephone interview that "Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" as it operated in Salahuddin Province is mainly an Iraqi organization, not primarily made up of foreign fighters.

Greg Palast argues that Sattar Abu Rishah, the leader of the Al-Anbar Salvation Council who was assassinated last week, was a 'phony sheikh' who had no real tribe behind him and is opposed by the very powerful and very real sheikh of the Dulaim tribe. He points to video reportage produced by Rick Rowley and David Enders and carried by Aljazeera English, which includes interviews with Iraqis who doubt Abu Rishah's bona fides. The videos had earlier been blogged by Marc Lynch, who had been following Abu Rishah and had blown the whistle on him as having an unsavory past.

My own feeling is that Palast is generally on to something but is exaggerating a bit. The al-Anbar Salvation Council does have representation on it from the Dulaim tribe, and weekly attacks in al-Anbar have fallen from 400 in summer of 2006 to 100 this summer, according to the US military. Al-Anbar is hardly quiet, and it is easy to exaggerate the changes (more especially since at least one major city, Fallujah, has had a private vehicle ban since late May, an artificial policy that cannot continue much longer). But to say that the Al-Anbar Salvation Council is a complete fake and no tribal leaders are cooperating with the US, if that is what Palast is saying, would be to go too far in the other direction.

Another 50,000 persons were displaced in Iraq since July bringing the total to 2.25 million. I don't think the optimism about the 'surge' 'working' included this data.

McClatchy reports attacks in Iraq on Tuesday:

' Baghdad

- Around 7 a.m. a road side bomb targeted police patrol in Zafaraniyah. One civilian was killed and 2 policemen were injured.

- Around 8 a.m. a bomb inside a bus exploded in Zayuna. Two civilians were killed and 5 were injured.

- Around 9 a.m. Two parked car bomb exploded in parking yard not far away from Baghdad morgue. 5 people were killed and 20 were injured.

- Around 1 p.m. a parked car bomb targeted civilians in Ur neighborhood near Al Firdous mosque. 8 civilians were killed and 15 others were injured.

- Police found 9 dead bodies throughout Baghdad . . .'

Another attack was launched on an aide of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Basra, but the aide, Imad Abdul Karim, escaped injury.

At the Global Affairs Group Blog, Barnett Rubin comments on Afghan reactions to recent saber-rattling by Tehran against 'US interests" in Iraq and Afghanistan if Washington attacks Iran.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, Sucy writes to Joseph Bonaparte of France's new conquest, Egypt: 'There is much to be hoped for from this country; but then this hope is of the nature of those which a length of time alone can realize. ' It is always the way in colonial conquest, that the military maintains there is hope but it just needs more time . . .
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Jihadis Threaten to Kill Leaders of al-Anbar Council

The USG Open Source Center summarizes and partially translates a threat by the 'Islamic State of Iraq' [Salafi Jihadis] to kill more members of the al-Anbar Salvation Council, tribal sheikhs who are cooperating with the Americans. The organization claims to have killed the ASC leader, Sattar Abu Rishah, last week.

Statement Says Islamic State of Iraq Threatens To Kill Al-Anbar Salvation Council Members
Jihadist Websites -- OSC Summary
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 . . .

' Terrorism: Statement Says Islamic State of Iraq Threatens To Kill Al-Anbar Salvation Council Members On 15 September, a forum participant posted to a jihadist website an unsigned statement that was intended to appear as though it had been issued by The Islamic State of Iraq. The statement discussed how The Islamic State of Iraq has succeeded in killing Abu-Rishah, the late leader of the Al-Anbar Salvation Council, and boasted that The Islamic State of Iraq will continue killing others like Abu-Rishah because Abu-Umar Al-Baghdadi has "decided to once again free Al-Anbar and purify it from the filth of the apostates, beginning in the blessed month of Ramadan." The statement lists the names of the individuals targeted and their pictures in the form of a deck of cards.

A summary of the statement follows:

The unsigned statement is said to have been copied from another source, although the latter is not named. The statement says that The Islamic State of Iraq killed Abu-Rishah, the late leader of the Al-Anbar Salvation Council, and promised to continue killing others like him. The statement is accompanied by pictures, listing the names of the individuals targeted and their pictures on cards in a deck. The statement promises that "we will not allow the majority of your leaders to pray the Id prayer (holiday following Ramadan)" and that "the men have turned Ramadan into a graveyard for the apostates."

The individuals named in the statement are:

--Abu-Rishah's brother, Ahmad Abu-Rishah: "Ahmed Abu Reesha, Al-Anbar Salvation Council senior member"

--Hamid Al-Hayis: "Hamid Hayes, Al-Anbar Salvation Council senior member"

--Ali Hatim: "Ali Hatem, Al-Anbar Salvation Council senior member"

--Falih Al-Dulaymi: "Faleh Al Dolaimi, Al-Anbar Salvation Council senior member"

--Jabbar Al-Fahdawi: "Jabbar Al Fahdawi, Al-Anbar Salvation Council senior member"

The statement promises that "just as the mujahidin hunted down the head of the apostasy, Abd Al-Sattar, hours before he escaped to Jordan and right from the arms of the Americans, the mujahidin will overpower you too, God willing." This, they say, is because Abu-Umar Al-Baghdadi has "decided to once again free Al-Anbar and to purify it from the filth of the apostates, beginning in the blessed month of Ramadan." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Marshall/ Cole interview on Iraq

I am interviewed on al-Anbar province at Veracifier by Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists Demand US Withdrawal UIA asks Sadrists to Rejoin Will Blackwater be Expelled?

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Shiite fundamentalist ruling bloc in the Iraqi parliament, the United Iraqi Alliance, has called on the Sadr Movement to reconsider its decision to withdraw from the UIA, given the latter's willingness to discuss all outstanding issues. The statement said it was important for all political forces inside the political blocs to remain united, given the situation in Iraq. The UIA formed a committee to work on enticing the Sadrists back in. AFP has more.

Al-Hayat says that the Sadr Movement is refining its statement of national principles, which most factions in the UIA signed off on 2 years ago. It will include a demand that US forces withdraw, or that a timetable be set for their withdrawal, with a commitment that no American bases will remain in the country.

Ned Parker casts doubt on whether Iraq really will expel the Blackwater security firm. The implication is that State Department personnel in Iraq could not accomplish anything unless they are guarded by Blackwater operatives.

Gary Kamiya at Salon.com ponders how the Iraq stalemate might be broken: "The Iraq war has moved into a weird purgatorial endgame. Almost no one believes in it anymore, but it keeps going. Americans keep dying, Iraq continues to fall apart, there is no end in sight, but nothing changes. Much of the country wants the war to end, but the political system is deadlocked."

One of the great tragedies of Washington's Iraq war has been the destruction or looting of Iraq's historical heritage, as Robert Fisk explains. Not only, as Fisk says, has the archeological heritage been deeply damaged but as he has pointed out elsewhere, it seems clear that the 20th century history of an entire country is gone.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, Bonaparte writes a despairing letter to his brother.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Postponement of Kirkuk Referendum?

The USG Open Source Center reports on the possible postponement of the referendum on the future of oil-rich Kirkuk province, which the Kurds want to annex to Kurdistan.

Iraq: Kurdish Leaders Raise Possibility of Delay on Kirkuk Referendum
Iraq -- OSC Report
Monday, September 17,

In the wake of the Kurdistan Parliament vote on 13 June reaffirming the 31 December deadline for the implementation of Article 140, some Kurdish officials, including Mas'ud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Region and head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), have suggested that it might be possible to delay holding the Kirkuk referendum beyond the deadline. At the same time, other Kurdish officials are insisting that the referendum cannot be postponed. Meanwhile, Kurdish officials are pushing ahead with the implementation of other aspects of Article 140.

In spite of the 13 June vote, a number of Kurdish officials have suggested that delay on the referendum may be acceptable.

On 19 June, Barzani, who has taken a hardline position on Article 140 in the past, told Peshmerga forces: "We oppose any postponement of Article 140 through a political decision. However, if the postponement is for a short time, and due to technical and not political reasons, the Kurdistan Parliament can make a decision on that. We will adhere to any decision make by the Kurdistan Parliament" (Kurdistan Satellite TV).
Fu'ad Ma'sum, head of the Kurdish bloc in the Baghdad parliament, stated: "We have no problem with delaying the referendum on the fate of Kirkuk for two or three months, maybe more . . . The important thing is that we begin effective steps in normalizing the situation in Kirkuk" (www.aswataliraq.info, 10 September).
The Kurdish financial official for the High Commission for Implementing Article 140 and Iraqi Environment Minister Narmin Uthman offered her view of a possible delay in the referendum: "It might be delayed two or three months from its scheduled time, but this does not mean postponement" (Aso, 10 September).

Other highly placed Kurdish officials have shown no softening on the position and insisted on full implementation by the end of the year. Kamal Kirkuki, Deputy Speaker of the Kurdistan Parliament (www.peyamner.com)

In an interview with Al-Jazirah, Kamal Kirkuki, deputy speaker of the Kurdistan Parliament, said: "We insist on the implementation of this article without any amendment, postponement, or action that may undermine it. On 13 June 2007, the Kurdistan Parliament adopted a unanimous decision against postponement, change, or amendment of the article" (Al-Jazirah Satellite TV, 28 August).
Speaking to PUK members in Kirkuk, Mala Bakhtiyar, head of the political bureau for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), said: "There are many Iraqi sides who do not believe in the implementation of (Article 140), and we, as the Kurdistani side, will not compromise on this issue" (Kurdistani Nuwe, 29 August).
According to an English-language weekly published in Iraqi Kurdistan, Qadir Aziz maintained that "the primary condition for the Kurds to remain in the Al-Maliki government" is the implementation of Article 140 (The Kurdish Globe, 28 August). Moving Ahead on Implementation of Article 140

(1)

At the same time, media are reporting that Kurdish officials are taking significant steps to implement other aspects of Article 140.

Kosrat Rasul Ali, vice president of the Kurdistan Region, along with a joint delegation of highly placed PUK and KDP officials, visited Khanaqin in Diyala Province in order to discuss speeding up implementation of Article 140 (Al-Ittihad, 13 September).
Narmin Uthman, on 9 September, reportedly signed $6 million in compensation checks payable to Arab settlers who had agreed to leave the city and return to their places of origin (Aso, 10 September).
Additionally, the Kurdistan Region's Ministry for Extra-Regional Affairs, designed to coordinate efforts to annex the Kurdish areas into the region, issued an order to form councils in all the areas in question in order to ascertain what needs to be done to further the implementation of Article 140 (www.krg.org, 11 September).

(1) Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution stipulates that by 31 December 2007, the city of Kirkuk, along with the other disputed Kurdish areas, will be "normalized" by moving settler Arabs out of the areas and moving formerly displaced Kurdish families in. A census will then be taken in all the disputed areas, followed by a referendum to determine whether the areas will be incorporated into the Kurdistan Region.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Right-Zionists try to Silence Walt at the University of Montana

Richard Drake, chair of the History Department at the University of Montana, describes what it is like to invite Stephen Walt, a respected political scientist at Harvard University and author of a best-selling book on the Israel lobby, to lecture on campus. The techniques of smearing and pressure politics deployed against his appearance can only be described as a form of Zionist-fascism (whether deriving from Christian Zionists or Jewish ones), which is a much more potent danger to open intellectual inquiry in the United States than is usually realized.

At Walt's own university, Harvard, there have been a number of disinvitees-- academics asked to speak and who then saw the invitation withdrawn, apparently on grounds of disagreeing with Alan Dershowitz.

See also Elliot Colla's article at the Chronicle of Higher Education on how the Likudnik "David Project" and a Hillel Center rabbi attempted to interfere with the holding of a conference on threats to academic freedom, held at Brown University last May!

I hope academics all around the country will step up to thwart this dangerous attempt at silencing views not approved by the Right-Zionists (i.e. people who would vote for Bibi Netanyahu if they lived in Israel, and who think they have the right to decide who the chair of the history department at the University of Montana should be and who that chair can invite to speak on campus).

Some of the policing of thought, of course, is by Right-Zionists against liberal Jews, a form of anti-Semitism that seeks to brand other Jews as unpatriotic. Tony Karon argues that this ploy is running out of steam.

Norman Finkelstein reflects on his recent travails and seems suprisingly optimistic (essentially agreeing with Karon). (For our Committee on Academic Freedom letter on the Finkelstein denial of tenure, see this link.)

And see George Bisharat's Op-ed in the Baltimore Sun: "Two hundred thousand Palestinian children began school in the Gaza Strip this month without a full complement of textbooks. Why? Because Israel, which maintains a stranglehold over this small strip of land along the Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from there in 2005, considers paper, ink and binding materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs."

Gaza is the worst outcome of Western colonialism anywhere in the world outside the Belgian Congo.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Greenspan: War about Oil; Bloody Sunday in Iraq

Alan Greenspan confirms that he urged the Bush administration to take out Saddam on grounds of petroleum security for the US, and says one official told him, 'unfortunately we can't talk about oil.' Long-time readers know that I think restructuring the architecture of US energy security was among the major motives for the Iraq War. This thesis does not contradict the Mearsheimer-Walt theory that the Israel lobby and Israeli security formed a major impetus to the war, since US and Israeli interests in energy security overlap. It is just circumstantial, but I see a nexus in the American Enterprise Institute of Exxon-Mobil money and former officials and Neoconservative intellectuals, both with the ear of Dick Cheney.

A lot of violence was reported around in Iraq on Sunday in the wire services. It is worth going and looking at the Reuters and McClatchy roundups, just so that one is not lulled into thinking that the security situation is all cleared up. This is still a no man's land, with guerrilla hijacking vehicles with people still in them (a child was kidnapped this way in Kirkuk), with bombs and mortars going off, and with vicious firefights between private armies, all with overtones of a set of creeping ethnic civil wars. Although some reports talked of 30 killed, I count many nearly twice that, and of course only a fraction of deaths are reported.

McClatchy reports significant violence in Iraq on Sunday.

' - 5 civilians killed and 22 injured in a café in the centre of the town of Tuz Khurmatu, to the south of Kirkuk as a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest detonated himself at 11:15 this morning. The suicide bomber was riding a bicycle and detonated as he reached the café; the numbers given are a primary estimation. The explosion also caused the destruction of nearby houses and shops. . .

Security personnel of a Convoy Escort Team of a Private Security Company [working for the US State Department] opened fire, killing 9 civilians and injuring 15 in Nisoor Sq, central Baghdad, at 12:30 this afternoon, said Iraqi Police. . .

Reuters reports more civil war violence in Iraq for Sunday. I see patterns here. There were two major attacks in Diyala northeast of Baghdad, one killing 14 and wounding 7, and the kidnapping of 8 persons in an ambulance hijacking in the provincial capital. In the Sunni Arab center of Samarra there was a mortar attack with casualties. There were several major bombings in Sunni Arab parts of Baghdad itself, and two district council members were assassinated, surely a sign that someone is attempting to displace municipal leaders. Some sort of major altercation broke out between a US private security company and guerrillas in the capital. In the north, there were bombings in Kirkuk, Tuz Khurmato and Tal Afar, and a Kurdish fundamentalist preacher was killed in largely Sunni Arab Mosul. Underneath these details, you can see the slow war for control of Baghdad between Shiite Arab and Sunni Arab guerrillas unfold, with the US forces largely irrelevant to it (the Shiites are winning the capital). You can see Sunni-Shiite or Sunni-Sunni violence an hour and a half northeast of the capital in Diyala province. Then in the north the ethnic battle for Kirkuk and its hinterlands continues. You can see ethnic and political violence in the north, with Kurds killed in four cities, probably by guerrillas of other ethnicities. Details:

' MUQDADIYA - Suspected al Qaeda in Iraq militants killed 14 people and wounded seven in the predominantly Sunni Arab town of Muqdadiya [Diyala Province], 90 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

BAQUBA - Gunmen hijacked an ambulance carrying eight people in the city of Baquba [Diyala], 65 km (40 miles) north[east] of Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Twelve bodies were found in various parts of Baghdad in the past 24 hours, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed five people and wounded six in Mansour district in western Baghdad, police said. A separate roadside bomb killed one person and wounded two, also in Mansour, police said. .

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded three in al-Harthiya district of western Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed a member of the Municipality of Bayaa district of southern Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed a member of the Municipality of Doura district of southern Baghdad, a hospital source said. . .

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded two near al-Shaab National Stadium in central Baghdad, police said. . . .

KIRKUK - A roadside bomb exploded near the convoy of a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (PDK), wounding a guard and a pedestrian in the city of Kirkuk, police said. . .

MOSUL - A Sunni mosque preacher who belonged to the Kurdish Islamic Union was shot dead in northwestern Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

[Tal Afar] - At least two policemen were wounded by a roadside bomb in the centre of the town of Tal Afar, 420 km (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad, police said.

SAMARRA - Several mortar rounds landed in a residential district, killing two people, including a child, and wounded four on Saturday night in the city of Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

NEAR HILLA - Shi'ite militias attacked a Shi'ite tribe, killing two men and wounding three in a town near the city of Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .

At the Global Affairs group blog: Farideh Farhi on willingness to compromise on Iran's part and Gershon Shafir on Israeli PM Olmert's unwillingness to compromise and Mahmoud Abbas's fatal weakness.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog: an account of the naval defeat inflicted on the French by the British.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists withdraw from Government; Say they Will not Bring Down al-Maliki; Iraqi Military called Unprepared

The unstable al-Maliki government is on its last legs. The Sadr Movement (32 seats) has now formally withdrawn from the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalist bloc that is the largest in parliament (though no longer by much). The Sadrists had withdrawn from al-Maliki's cabinet a few months ago, but had said they would still vote with him in parliament as part of the UIA. They complain that he has cut them off, ceased consulting them, and is targeting their Mahdi Army militia over violence in Karbala during a recent holy festival.

Al-Maliki is increasingly open to being unseated by a vote of no confidence, which can be called by 55 MPs. Since the UIA is still the largest bloc, with 70-some MPs, it would still form the next government, however, so it is not entirely clearly what would be gained from unseating its current leader. The new PM might more plausibly come from the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the Sadrists' main rival.

The Sadrists say they do not intend to try to unseat al-Maliki.

The Boston Globe reports that

' The number of Iraqi Army and police battalions considered ready to conduct combat operations without help from the United States has declined from 15 at the beginning of the year to 12 this month, according to data that Petraeus provided to Congress last week. . . At the same time, Pentagon assessments show that the number of Iraqi battalions considered "not ready" increased from 13 in November 2006 to 43 this past summer. '

Questions are thus being raised as to whether they can maintain the security gains in the capital of the recent troop escalation. [It is also not clear why Congress did not press Petraeus on this point.] Bryan Bender and Farah Stockman write,

'many American military officials now acknowledge that when Iraqi forces took the lead in 2006 in a series of operations known as Together Forward I and II, the strategy failed, in part because of abuses committed by largely Shia Muslim Iraqi troops against minority Sunnis and their inability to hold area cleared of insurgents.'

Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times demolishes the 'al-Anbar myth' being promoted on the American Right. He does so on the basis of an actual interview with the late Sattar Abu Rishah, on the basis of a close analysis of tribal alliances in al-Anbar, and on the basis of recent opinion polling that shows 92 percent of Sunni Arabs support attacks on US troops and 98 percent despise the al-Maliki government. The tragedy is that Escobar is right about everything he says, but that virtually no one in the Washington power or journalism elite will probably ever read his important piece. Some nonentity who wouldn't know the Dulaim from the Jubour will declaim some nonsense at NRO, and that will be what the Repub staffers on the Hill believe, having fed the nonentity the warped info in the first place.

James Denselow of the Guardian argues that the 'bottom up' approach of Gen. Petraeus in Iraq may lead to an Iraq that is so decentralized as to be dysfunctional, a la Lebanon in the 1980s.

Was traveling and missed this link to my interview in the Metro Times on where we are in Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rep. Doggett: Congress must Respond to the Propaganda Surge

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Iraq:

Plus:

International Atomic Energy head Mohammad Elbaradei walked out of a meeting where he felt a Portuguese diplomat's speech was insufficiently supportive of his call for new inspections in Iran.

On the other hand, Elbaradei has been critical of the US for pushing confrontation with Tehran.

Despite Elbaradei's findings that no nuclear material had been diverted from Iran's civilian nuclear energy research program ( a civilian program is legal under the NPT), Bush keeps insisting that Iran is trying to get a nuclear bomb.

[Sorry for the earlier old link. Google.news software glitch.]

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog: French complaints at loneliness and setbacks in Egypt.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cholera Spreads in North Iraq

The cholera epidemic in northern Iraq continues to grow, with 16,000 persons now estimated to have been infected.

I grew up traveling and have seen cholera up close. You lose liquids from both major orifices and have trouble keeping anything down, and eventually if you are not treated you are dehydrated to death. It is not pretty, it is fairly highly contagious, and it is always caused by poor public health systems (i.e. bad governance).

I fear that this epidemic is only the beginning of Iraq's health problems given the breakdown in governmental and public systems.

Is everyone else as offended by Bush's phrase, 'return on success' as I am? I mean, are the Iraqis cattle that he is getting a return on?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush's 'Troop Withdrawal' Branded Phony; Sattar Assassination a blow to Bush Optimism; 1 million Dead in Iraq?

Our national discourse has now reached a point where it is a journalistic coup just to point out when a politician is lying. Thus, the headlines that Bush's 'troop cuts,' announced in his speech last night, are phony, and reflect normal rotations.

Patrick Cockburn, whose excellent reporting is deeply informed by his risky forays into the real Iraq,, analyzes the meaning of the assassination of Sattar Abu Rishah for Bush's policies, and finds that ' His killing is a serious blow to President Bush and the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who have both portrayed the US success in Anbar, once the heart of the Sunni rebellion against US forces, as a sign that victory was attainable across Iraq. '

Tina Susman reports the results of a recent British poll done in Iraq, which concludes that as many as a million Iraqis have died in war-related violence since late March of 2003. This estimate is higher than that in the Lancet study of last fall, since that study simply looked at excess deaths from all kinds of violence above what one would have expected from the baseline of 2002. That is, the Lancet study included criminal violence, tribal feuding, etc., not just military or guerrilla actions. The combination of the two, however, makes the Lancet study's conclusions seem unassailable and if anything conservative.

David Broder thinks that US Ambassador in Iraq Ryan Crocker was admitting to Lindsay Graham that the US might push for a vote of no confidence in the al-Maliki government. Graham should please explain to us how the biggest bloc in parliament, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, is going to come up with a candidate substantially more effective than al-Maliki is. The UIA under the Iraqi constitution would form the next government.

Frank Davies confirms my own analysis that the Democrats lack the ability to get the US out of Iraq. Many readers suggested the route of cutting off funds and refusing to present any other Defense budget, but realistically speaking that is a very dangerous ploy that could get them defeated in the next election as obstructionists. And if they are defeated, the Republican Party will keep the US in Iraq, so what would be the point?

The NYT reports that the compromise on the draft petroleum bill crafted by oil minister Hussein Shahristani with the Kurdistan Regional Government appears to have collapsed amid acrimony. Passing an oil law was put forward by Bush last January as one of four benchmarks that had to be met by June. The Kurds are now demanding Shahristani's resignation, since he calls independently-negotiated oil deals struck by the Kurdistan government with Hunt and other oil companies 'illegal' because they were not cleared by Baghdad. Children, can you spell 'Fort Sumter'?

The Kurds are also upset that the referendum on adding oil-rich Kirkuk province to the Kurdistan Regional Government is certainly going to be postponed from the planned date of late 2007.

At the Global Affairs blog, Barnett Rubin reflects on how his posting on a possible 'Iran war rollout' has been received in the blogosphere.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, an eyewitness account of the Battle of the Nile.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shaikh Sattar Killed in Bombing; Anbar State of Emergency

Shaikh Sattar Abu Risha, leader of the Council for the Salvation of al-Anbar Province, has been killed by a bomb set at the entrance to his farm near Ramadi. Sawt al-Iraq says that a state of emergency has been declared in the province as a result. Bush met with him on the recent trip to a US base in al-Anbar and he was being held up as an American success story in finding tribal allies against the Salafi Jihadis that Washington styles "al-Qaeda."

The Bush adminstration has presented a lot of statistics on Iraq this week. Aljazeera English presents some others:

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rice's Circular Colonial Logic All Pressure off Reform in Baghdad after Crocker/Petraeus Report

Colonial logic is always circular. Thus, Condi Rice: the US needs to stay in Iraq to protect the US from Iraq. Also, the US needs to stay in Iraq to protect Iraq from Iran. The next part of the circle will be that the US needs to stay in Iran to accomplish both of these aims much more efficiently.

Robert Reid of AP reports that Iraqi politicians in Baghdad feel *no* pressure to move forward quickly with reforms or reconciliation, in part because they are assured that Bush will keep a big US troop presence in Iraq through early January 2009. Money graf:

' Iraq's national security adviser was asked Wednesday to explain why the government has been so slow to enact power-sharing agreements that Washington deems necessary for lasting peace. He had nothing new to offer. "Of course we want to do it, but they are so complicated," Mouwaffak al-Rubaie said. '

Fred Kaplan thinks the senators showed more gumption in receiving the Crocker/ Petraeus report than had the congressmen.

Tina Susman of the LAT reports on reactions to the testimony among Iraqis. Her general conclusions are that the fundamentalist Shiite bloc, which is in power, liked the upbeat parts; the Sunni Arab bloc, which is in opposition, liked the negative/ realistic parts; an ordinary Iraqi said the US troops were hated occupiers but shouldn't leave yet because they were helping keep order. And secular ex-Baathist and former appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi thought it was irrelevant and didn't bother to listen in:

' There is nothing new that it was going to tell us," said Allawi, whose Iraq National Accord holds 22 seats in the parliament. "What's going on here is not that good: sectarianism, violence, no institutions, services almost totally halted." A few minutes earlier, a loud bomb had gone off at a busy intersection about half a mile from his Baghdad office. Police said the blast killed one civilian and injured five. '

Susman also reports that the "al-Anbar model" of paying and arming Sunni tribes and mafias to fight the Salafi Jihadis probably won't work in other provinces. One US military officer asserted, "There is no Anbar model."

Hundreds of Shiite and Sunni Iraqis marched in protest on Wednesday against the barrier the US military is putting in to separate the Ghazaliya (Sunni) and Shu'la (increasingly Shiite) neighborhoods in Baghdad. Such physical separation of districts has been a major tool for the military in cutting down on death squad violence.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Developments in Iran and Pakistan

At the Global Affairs group blog:

Farideh Farhi discusses negotiations between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency over inspections of the latter's nuclear programs. She also tells us about the imminent release of Iranian-American intellectual Kian Tajbakhsh, from prison.

Barnett Rubin discusses the collapse of the legitimacy of the Pakistani government in the wake of the deportation of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He also examines what it means for the Afghanistan crisis.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Subjects not Subjected

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, several letters are available on the early days of the occupation, some of them by members of the team of scientists Bonaparte brought with him. Excerpt:

' The port of Alexandria is divided into two very beautiful bays (with no great depth of water), separated by a dike or causeway near 1200 yards in length, and reaching to the Pharos, that is to say, to the site of that ancient and magnificent edifice, from whence vessels were discovered at the distance of thirty or forty leagues. . .

I shall say nothing more of this city; except that is inhabitants, though vanquished, are not in a state of complete subjection, nor likely to be so for a long time to come. We must use policy here, for we are not strong enough to do otherwise(7). For the rest, we respect their religion, their manners, and above all, their women; these last, it must be confessed, are not mightily engaging. In short, they are a hideous, and abominable race.'
'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Reactions to the Petraeus/ Crocker Testimony

The USG Open Source Center translates transcripts of Iraqi reactions to the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker.

Iraqi TVs Carry Further Reporting, Commentary on Congressional Testimonies 11 Sep
Iraq -- OSC Summary
Tuesday, September 11, 2007

This summary highlights select Iraqi TV reporting and commentary on the testimonies before Congress made by General David Petraeus, commander of the Multinational Force in Iraq, and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, in Washington on 10 September. It covers reports carried on: -- Cairo Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel in Arabic -- Pro-Sunni, anti-US Iraqi channel believed to be affiliated with the Association of Muslim Scholars -- Baghdad Baghdad Satellite Television in Arabic -- television channel believed to be sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party -- Cairo Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television in Arabic -- Private Iraqi television known for its opposition to the US presence in Iraq -- Baghdad Al-Furat Television Channel in Arabic -- Television channel affiliated with the Shiite group, the Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council, led by Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim -- Al-Sulaymaniyah Al-Fayha Television in Arabic -- A private, independent satellite channel that addresses Iraq-related issues, supervised by Muhammad al-Ta'i, an Iraqi media figure Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel

Within its 1300 GMT newscast on 11 September, Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel carries the following reports:

--"Incumbent National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubay'i has welcomed the reports submitted by the commander of the US occupation troops in Iraq and the occupying power's ambassador, claiming that they were positive in general. Furthermore, he claimed that such assessment reports confirm the transparent handling and assessment of the situation, as he put it. For his part, Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for the incumbent government, said that the incumbent government would be comfortable with a gradual withdrawal of the US occupation troops as long as such plans are discussed with the government in Baghdad. He added: Any precipitous withdrawal would not be in the interest of any party; it would not be in the interest of Iraq or the region."

Within its 1400 GMT newscast on 11 September, Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel carries the following reports:

--"In his testimony before Congress, Gen David Petraeus, commander of the occupation troops in Iraq, has claimed that an early withdrawal from Iraq would be catastrophic. However, he recommended that an initial reduction of troops totaling 4,000 be implemented in December. For his part, Ryan Crocker, ambassador of the US occupying power to Iraq, warned that Iran would gain from a US withdrawal from Iraq, as this would allow it to consolidate its control of resources and perhaps territory in Iraq."

This is followed by a commentary read by an unidentified Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel correspondent, who says: "There is nothing new or unexpected in the reports submitted by US General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, ambassador of the occupying power, in the course of the false testimonies they made before Congress." The commentary adds: "The paragraphs containing lies and the allegations made by the two US officials were the hallmarks of the theatrical show performed at a tumultuous session that was marked by disorder and chaos, which were pretty similar to the disorder and chaos the US occupation troops created in Iraq. Nonetheless, the Congress's microphones in the state which considers itself the global policemen stubbornly remained silent for some time as if they were saying: Stop the lies and allegations. War General David Petraeus, commander of the occupation troops in Iraq, repeated the claim that the strategy of the occupiers in Iraq is largely achieving its military objectives."

The commentary continues: "Despite the admission of failure seen every now and then, the US arrogance continued to demonstrate itself through the words of Petraeus, who alleged that it is possible to achieve the US objectives in Iraq as well as peace therein -- the peace that has turned into a weird term in the lexicon of the Iraqis and their daily routine. Petraeus said that it is possible to achieve peace. He explicitly accused Iran of waging a proxy war on Iraqi territory through its support for militias and armed groups and aiding them, either through weapons supplies or training."

The commentary says: "Ryan Crocker, the ambassador of the US occupying power, joined Petraeus by warning that Iran would gain from a US withdrawal from Iraq, and that if such a withdrawal were to be carried out, it would consolidate Iran's control of resources, and maybe territory in Iraq. Crocker, who shared Petraeus's views, admitted that the situation in Iraq is difficult. However, he claimed that the alternatives are worse. He repeated the allegation that it is possible to achieve the US goals in Iraq and achieve peace therein. What kind of peace, security, and stability can be achieved in Iraq in the midst of these bloodbaths and this stench of death, which is being smelled across Iraq?

Immediately afterward, an unidentified anchorman conducts a live telephone interview with Nizar al-Samarra'i, a writer and political analyst, in Damascus.

When asked about the Congressional testimonies by Petraeus and
Crocker, Al-Samarra'i says: "First, what can we expect from a report prepared by officials of the US Administration? The US ambassador is associated with the State Department and acts upon the directives of the US president. Likewise, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (corrects himself) the commander of the US troops in Iraq is associated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense secretary. What can we expect from an official government report on the situation in Iraq except embellishing the image of the US behavior in Iraq by saying that the US strategy is making big successes in Iraq? This report seems to be a response to the Hamilton-Baker report, which recommended a change in the US strategy in the Iraqi arena."

Al-Samarra'i adds: "What is important is that the US president wagered immensely on the reports prepared by the commander of the US troops in Iraq and the US ambassador. This is due to the pressures that could be put on officials. Given this, it is easy to understand that the report was fully harmonious with the wishes of the US president." In conclusion, he notes partisan rivalries and differences between the Democrats and Republicans over Iraq. Baghdad Satellite TV

Within its 1700 GMT newscast on 11 September, Baghdad Satellite Channel carries the following reports:
--"Gen David Petraeus, commander of the US troops in Iraq, has said that the number of US troops could be reduced to some 130,000 by next summer, which is the number of troops before the surge ordered by US President George Bush this year. But, it is too early to say when this number could be reduced to below 130,000, Gen Petraeus noted."

This is followed by a report, which says: "With regard to the local political elites, veteran Iraqi politician Mahmud Uthman, MP for the Kurdistan Alliance, said that President Bush's recent visit to Iraq was driven by a desire to hold consultations with Ambassador Crocker and Gen Petraeus before they submit their reports to the US Congress." The report adds: "Commenting on the testimonies of the two men, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih expressed regret over the government's political performance, which has not measured up to the required level of handling the unseen challenges posed to the country. He affirmed that the US troop surge achieved palpable security gains, but noted that these gains will be squandered unless Iraqi politicians work to achieve national reconciliation. For his part, Adnan al-Dulaymi, head of the Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front, said that the two reports were realistic and reflected the situation in Iraq. He noted that the two reports stressed the need for national reconciliation, and for the government to heed real interests, which could foster the construction of Iraq. Izzat al-Shahbandar, MP for the Iraqi List, was not surprised by the content of the reports submitted by Petraeus and Crocker. He noted that the two men had earlier stated that a US withdrawal from Iraq would give Iran the opportunity to control Iraq. Nasir al-Isawi, MP for the Al-Sadr bloc, said that the reports are an attempt to buy more time ahead of the laying out of a new strategy in Iraq."

Then, Iraqi laypersons are shown expressing their views on the Congressional testimonies. An unidentified middle-aged Iraqi man is shown saying: "By God, I am personally opposed to the notion of an immediate withdrawal by US troops, the international troops. Why? Because the situation here in Iraq is unstable. There is a need for a timetable for the withdrawal of the US Army."

Afterward, a young man is shown saying: "Definitely, we are all sure that a US withdrawal is inevitable. We do not disagree over this matter at all. Meanwhile, we have a good government, enlightened people, and good field commanders. If a sort of general solidarity is achieved, we will support and bless a US withdrawal." Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television

-- At 1400 GMT on 11 September, Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television begins to carry a live relay of the closing session of the US Congressional testimonies by Petraeus and Crocker. Crocker is shown making his testimony. Then, Petraeus is shown making his testimony.

At 1420 GMT, Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television conducts a live telephone interview with Iraqi MP Mufid al-Jaza'iri for comments on the testimonies of both Crocker and Petraeus. Al-Jaza'iri says: "I think that this report was largely harmonious with the approaches of the US policy in Iraq. To do it justice, this report was largely honest in depicting developments in the security situation."

Al-Jaza'iri adds: "Following this report, I think that many tensions here in Iraq will be defused. Better conditions for rapprochement and understanding among the various political forces will be made available. Likewise, in general, an environment that is conducive to addressing outstanding issues, particularly those pertaining to national reconciliation, which is key to any true progress in the coming period, will be created."

When asked on whether this report backs the Iraqi Government or casts doubt on its successes, Al-Jaza'iri says: "In general, I think that this report came to lend a measure of credibility to (the performance of) the Iraqi Government. This report certainly noted some aspects over which the US side represented by Petraeus and Crocker and the Iraqi Government were in disagreement. Nonetheless, in general, all in all, the report can be considered positive, given how it viewed the evolution of the political process. Of course, the report did not fail to mention an important issue; namely, that there are many aspects which still need to be addressed. Greater efforts could have been made in the past to address these aspects. "

When asked to respond to some detractors who described Petraeus's remarks regarding the security situation in Iraq as "fabrications," Al-Jaza'iri says: "I do not think that they are fabrications. Many of the things he talked about are palpable things that we feel every day in our daily life. The security situation has certainly improved. There is no doubt about this, but the political situation has not improved."
When asked about the remarks that Petraeus and Crocker made on Iran and Syria, and whether there could be US military action against them, Al-Jaza'iri does not rule out this possibility. However, he adds: "The use of military force against either Syria or Iran because of Iraq is a matter that has thus far remained out of the question or unlikely. However, the United States might wage a war against Iran due to the (Iranian) nuclear reactor or other pretexts."

In conclusion, Al-Jaza'iri says: "We must take into account that the reports submitted by Petraeus and Crocker are not directed to the Iraqi or Arab public. Rather, they are directed to the American public and meant to address the political situation in the United States. They are meant to be factored in the struggles among various political forces in the United States. They are meant to provide some sort of ammunition for the battle being waged by President Bush against his Democratic opponents, who, for their part, are sharpening their weapons and getting prepared."

Immediately afterward, Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television says: "US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had warned that Iran would stand to gain from any US withdrawal from Iraq. In his testimony before the US Congress, Crocker noted the possibility of Iran carrying out an intervention in Iraq in case the United States withdraws its troops from there."

At 1433 GMT, Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television says: "Husayn al-Falluji, member of the Council of Representatives for the Al-Tawafuq Front, has said that the reports su bmitted to the US Congress by Gen David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have affirmed that the problem in Iraq is political rather than security-related. He added that the reports constitute a message addressed to the United States, given the fact that they noted that the US strategy is being implemented properly."

--"Mustafa al-Hiti, MP for the National Dialogue Front, today criticized the Crocker and Petraeus reports, saying that they painted a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq at a time when life comes to a standstill at 1800 in Baghdad."

The Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television report adds: "Al-Hiti expressed the belief that the reports came to embellish the image of the Al-Maliki government, or the image of the Bush administration and his party, which is facing opposition and crises in the United States." Al-Furat Television Channel

Within its 1700 GMT newscast on 11 September, Al-Furat Television Channel carries the following reports:

--"Ammar Al-Hakim (son of Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim, chief of the Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council) has received Australian Ambassador to Iraq Marc Innes-Brown. During the meeting, the two sides discussed the key points enshrined in the reports submitted (to Congress) by Gen David Petraeus, commander of the Multinational Force in Iraq, and US Ambassador in Baghdad Ryan Crocker. They also discussed the enhancement of friendly bilateral ties. Furthermore, they discussed the latest political and security developments in Iraq and the region."

--"The US Congress listened to two reports submitted by US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Gen David Petraeus, commander of the Multinational Force. In his report, Crocker commended the efforts made by the elected government on the political and economic fronts, and also in the area of national reconciliation. He also praised the high sense of national responsibility felt by Iraqi leaders in the course of their handling of national issues. For his part, Petraeus stressed that any progress on the political front is contingent upon progress on the security front."
--"The (Iraqi) Government has welcomed the two reports submitted by US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Gen David Petraeus, commander of the Multinational Force. At a news conference, National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubay'i affirmed that the issuance of such assessments of the political and security situation in the country confirms that there is transparency in assessing the political and security situation in the country."

Afterward, the Al-Furat Television Channel carries a report saying: "The Al-Tawafuq bloc has described the results (enshrined in the two reports) as realistic. The Kurdistan Alliance considered the two reports positive, noting that they harmonize with the government's efforts to safeguard security and stability."

Salim Abdallah, MP for the Iraqi al-Twafuq Front, is shown saying: "My preliminary assessment is that they (the two reports) are somewhat realistic, particularly with regard to the issues pertaining to the security situation and the improvements that have taken place." Then, Muhammad Khalil Qasim, MP for the Kurdistan Alliance, is shown saying: "We welcome this assessment. We within the Kurdistan Alliance support the government, his excellency the prime minister, and the efforts to render the political process a success."

--"Parliamentary quarters have described the two reports submitted by Crocker and Petraeus as positive and constructive, and considered them as additional boost to the momentum of the political process, and to the elected government as well. MPs indicated that the two US reports underlined the (Iraqi) political leaders' efforts and their determination to face up to challenges in the country. Besides, these reports highlighted the notable progress made on the security front, they added."

--The Al-Furat Television Channel adds: "Shaykh Khalid al-Atiyah, first deputy speaker of the Council of Representatives, has considered the reports submitted by Crocker and Petraeus as positive in general. He added: The two reports highlighted the key obstacles facing the national unity government in the course of its efforts to achieve national reconciliation and consolidate security and stability in the country, which were identified by government officials.

"MP Ali al-Allaq affirmed that the US reports contained positive and constructive aspects and underlined the (Iraqi) political leaders' efforts to face up to challenges in the country, noting that the two reports, in general, support the ongoing political process in the country. For his part, MP Qasim Dawud called for handling the reports submitted by Crocker and Petraeus seriously to ensure su pport for the march of the democratic process. He added that the reports noted many positive points, including the stabilizing security situation being witnessed in Baghdad and Al-Anbar compared to what it was last year." Al-Fayha Television

Within its 1300 GMT newscast on 11 September, Al-Fayha Satellite Channel carries the following reports:

--"US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and Gen David Petraeus, commander of the US troops in Iraq, yesterday, Monday, submitted their anticipated reports on field developments in Iraq on the political and security levels. Gen Petraeus affirmed that US troops, in cooperation with Iraqi troops, managed to largely weaken the clout of the terrorist Al-Qa'ida Organization in Iraq over the past eight months, and to deprive it of a safe haven in Iraq, which strongly boosts the troop surge strategy. He commended the Iraqi tribes' role in cooperating with the Iraqi Government to help achieve security and stability. For his part, US Ambassador to Iraq Crocker affirmed that Iraq is currently experiencing a revolution, and not only a political regime change. This is because Saddam Husayn left a sectarian regime behind him, Crocker argued. He noted the Iraqi leaders' determination to confront tough problems. The Crocker-Petraeus report harmonizes with the views of the Iraqi Government, which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki expressed before the Council of Representatives."

--"Gen David Petraeus painted a positive picture of developments in the security situation in Iraq. In a testimony before the US Congress, he affirmed that the US troop surge in Iraq resulted in defeating the remnants of the terrorist Al-Qa'ida Organization in Baghdad, and that the effort to clear the remaining cities is under way."

This is immediately followed by another report, which says: "Americans view the dialogue with Petraeus and US Ambassadr Ryan Crocker in Congress as an important milestone in the ongoing debate in the United States on the status of US troops in Iraq, which Bush pledged will stay in the country until full security is achieved. However, many Democrats, who control the two houses of Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, are saying that the presence of these troops must be brought to an end."

--"Iraqi Government Spokesman Dr Ali al-Dabbagh has described the report Petraeus submitted to Congress as positive. However, he added that this report mentions some difficulties encountered in the field, and that it is important to provide time to fully prepare Iraqi security troops. Al-Dabbagh went on to say that Iraq will be comfortable with a gradual withdrawal of US troops as long as such plans are discussed with the Baghdad government in advance. He said that a precipitous withdrawal would not be in any party's interest; such a withdrawal would be in the interest of neither Iraq, nor the region."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Can Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker Save the Next Democratic President?

Despite what the pundits will say, I fear the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the Hill Monday and Tuesday is not a turning point, does not give Bush breathing room, and is largely irrelevant.

To any extent that what they do in Iraq ends up making a real positive difference, Petraeus and Crocker will likely be doing the Democrats a big favor, not Bush, who won't be in office much longer.

The central question is whether the Democrats can force a significant reduction of troops from Iraq on Bush's watch, so as to avoid Iraq becoming exclusively their headache when they (as is likely) take over the White House in January of 2009. If they could, this drawdown would be the best option. Certainly, that is what a majority of Iraqis thinks, according to the new BBC/ABC poll.

But the answer is: No. The Democrats cannot get the troops out of Iraq because they cannot overturn a Bush veto in the House of Representatives, and because they cannot overcome the need for a consensus of 60 senators in the Senate. Some Democrats, such as Joe Lieberman, oppose a rapid withdrawal. And the likelihood that 11 Republican senators will suddenly become withdrawalniks between now and November, 2008, is negligible.

The testimony of Petraeus and Crocker may marginally reinforce the will of the Republicans to stay the course, but I do not think it is decisive. In all likelihood, the Republican senators would have continued to block their Democratic colleagues from doing anything really dramatic, anyway.

If the Democrats cannot prevail in withdrawing before Bush goes out of office (and they cannot), and if they then rapidly draw down the troops on taking office in 2009, they face the real prospect of a "Gerald Ford meltdown" of the sort that occurred in 1975 when the North Vietnamese and their VC allies took over South Vietnam.

You will note that Ford only served a couple of years as president and lost his election bid to a relative unknown named Jimmy Carter. Although economic stagflation and the stain of Watergate contributed to his defeat, I think the spectacle of the debacle in Indochina harmed Ford a great deal. The United States lost a war, and lost out to its ideological rival in an entire subcontinent of Asia in the midst of the Cold War. That would cause at least some Republicans to stay home in 1976, a sure way for Democrats to win an election.

Could 2010 look for Iraq like 1975 looked in Vietnam? Yes. I just do not see evidence that either the new Iraqi political class or the Iraqi security forces are likely to have the maturity to avoid a conflagration when the US military withdraws.

There are three major wars going on in Iraq: 1) for control of oil-rich Basra, among Shiite militias and tribes; 2) for control of Baghdad and its hinterlands between Sunni Arabs and Shiites; and 3) for control of oil-rich Kirkuk in the north, between Kurds on the one side and Arabs and Turkmen on the other.

Gen. Petraeus believes that the Sunni-Shiite struggle for Baghdad is the central struggle, and that if it cannot be calmed down, nothing can be accomplished. His main energies have been put into reducing violence in Baghdad itself, in which he has succeeded to a limited extent (i.e. getting violence back down to summer, 2006, levels instead of astronomical January 2007 levels).

The successes in Baghdad are ambiguous, not clear-cut. The year 2006 was particularly bloody, so getting to that level is not satisfactory. The reduction in statistics on sectarian violence has not prevented hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs from being ethnically cleansed (mainly displaced) from Baghdad, turning it from a city that was 65 percent Shiite and 35 percent Sunni into one that is 75 percent Shiite and rising. The Sunni Arabs of al-Anbar, whether they hate "al-Qaeda" or not, say in interviews that they support the withdrawal of the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front from the al-Maliki government, precisely on the grounds that al-Maliki is entangled with the Shiite militias that are displacing the Sunni Arabs from Baghdad.

Further, Gen. Petraeus has frankly admitted that whatever successes he has had in Baghdad militarily (and he has had some there) have not yet translated into solid political gains in Sunni-Shiite reconciliation. He continues to entertain hopes that they will be so translated, but all he can proffer us in this regard is exactly that, hopes.

Petraeus's perspective ignores the over-all rise in civilian deaths in 2007 compared to 2006, and pays no attention to Shiite-Shiite violence in Basra and Karbala. He also codes the Arab attack on Yazidi Kurds as an "al-Qaeda" act of violence. In fact, it was part of an ethnic struggle for control of land and oil in the Iraqi north that is just as destabilizing, potentially, as is the battle for Baghdad. He points to Iraqi security forces policing provinces such as Muthanna and Nasiriya in the Shiite south. It has to be acknowledged, however, that those provincial security forces are dominated by the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which was trained and may still be being partially funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they are in an ongoing struggle with the Mahdi Army militia, also Shiite but more Iraqi nativist.

My own expectation is that unless Iraqi politicians become far more canny and powerful during the next two years, then when the American forces withdraw, the ethnic and sectarian militias will fight the three wars (Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk) to a conclusion. It will likely be a bloody war similar to that in Afghanistan in the 1990s. With the Americans not around, it is possible that large militia forces will fight set piece battles.

There is also a danger of the neighbors being drawn into a big proxy fight in Iraq (including the Saudis, the Iranians, the Jordanians, the Syrians and the Turks).

Neither outcome is inevitable. If al-Maliki learns how to cultivate the Sunni Arabs as well as Petraeus has been (and if the Sunni Arabs will accept it from al-Maliki, which is not assured), then he might be able to draw them into his orbit just as King Feisal did in the 1920s. Al-Maliki's government is said to have $10 bn. in oil revenue that it refuses to spend; that could buy some loyalty.

Likewise, the US, the Europeans and the Arab League could work hard diplomatically to avoid a proxy war among the neighbors, and it might be avoided. I am heartened that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad of Iran seem intent on continuing to dialogue, and to avoid tensions reaching a fever picth between the two countries. If the US had any sense, it would be warmly encouraging this diplomacy, not trying to get the Arabs and Israelis to gang up on Iran.

But in all likelihood, when the Democratic president pulls US troops out in summer of 2009, all hell is going to break loose. The consequences may include even higher petroleum prices than we have seen recently, which at some point could bring back stagflation or very high rates of inflation.

In other words, the Democratic president risks being Fordized when s/he withdraws from Iraq, by the aftermath. A one-term president associated with humiliation abroad and high inflation at home? Maybe I should say, Carterized. The Republican Party could come back strong in 2012 and then dominate politics for decades, if that happened.

It is all so unfair, of course, since Bush started and prosecuted this disaster in Iraq, and Bush is refusing to accept responsibility for the failure, pushing it off onto his successor.

But life is unfair.

So what can the Dems do to avoid being made the fall guy this way?

They could try to legislate stronger US diplomacy aiming at ensuring peace between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran even if there is sectarian violence on a greater scale in Iraq. They could resist the temptation to demonize Iran or to push it onto a war footing with threats or even bombings.

As for Iraq itself, the best hope for the Dems may be that Gen. Petraeus actually succeeds, over the next year, in significantly reducing ethnic tensions. It is a slim reed to hold onto, as they recognize.

But from the moment Bush went into Iraq, Americans were screwed. And that includes the Democratic Party, which is being set up to take the fall.

I'm a severe skeptic on the likelihood of anything that looks like success in Iraq. But I don't think career public servants such as Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus are acting as partisan Republicans in their Iraq efforts. I think they both are sincere, experienced men attempting to retrieve what they can for America from Bush's catastrophe. They may as well try, since the Democrats can't over-rule Bush and get the troops out, anyway. If the troops are there, they may as well at least be deployed intelligently, which is what Gen. Petraeus is doing. I wish them well in their Herculean labors. Because if they fail, I have a sinking feeling that we are all going down with them, including the next Democratic president. And their success is a long shot.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

McClatchy: Civilian Deaths Steady through Surge; August Secret Official Toll Staggering 2,890; Mahdi Army Continuing Ethnic Cleansing

Everybody's got a status report on Iraq these days.

The consistently best and most clear-eyed wire service on Iraq, whose Pentagon correspondents are pointedly not invited to fly with the Secretary of Defense, is McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder). It has a long article on Sunday on how the security situation is not in fact better in Iraq now than last January. I'm going to pull out snippets below, some of them out of order:

"Civilian deaths haven't decreased in any significant way across the country, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary. The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim. . ."

". . . Overall, civilian casualties in Iraq appear to have remained steady throughout the siege, though numbers are difficult to come by.

". . . According to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, 984 people were killed across Iraq in February, and 1,011 died in violence in August. No July numbers were released because the ministry said the numbers weren't clear.

But an official in the ministry who spoke anonymously because he wasn't authorized to release numbers said those numbers were heavily manipulated.

The official said 1,980 Iraqis had been killed in July and that violent deaths soared in August, to 2,890. . ."

"Services haven't improved across most of the capital — the international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30 percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent in 2003 — and tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes each month in search of safety. . ."

" . . . Oxfam estimates that 28 percent of Iraqi children are malnourished, compared with 19 percent before the U.S. invasion. . ."

"Baghdad has become more segregated. Sunni Muslims in the capital now live in ghettos encircled by concrete blast walls to stop militia attacks and car bombs. Shiite militias continue to push to control the city’s last mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in the southwest, by murdering and intimidating Sunni residents and, sometimes, their Shiite neighbors. . ."

"[In Baghdad] the push to drive Sunnis from Shiite neighborhoods continues in a city that U.S. military officers say has gone from being 65 percent Sunni to being 75 percent Shiite . . .

Unidentified bodies continue to show up daily in Baghdad, though the pace is lower than it was last December, when 1,030 bodies were found . . . dropping . . . to 428 in August. Some military officials and many residents attribute the generally lower numbers not to the U.S. security plan, but to the purges in mixed neighborhoods that have left militants with fewer people to kill.

Of an estimated 1 million Iraqis who’ve fled their homes since February 2006, 83 percent are from Baghdad, the IOM says.

“There have been very few returns,” Ladek said. Those that have come back have done so only briefly to gather belongings. “They are waiting for long-term stability. . ."

Iraqi security forces remain heavily infiltrated by militias, and political leaders continue to intervene in their activities. . ."

Officials agree that the anti-Islamist coalition in Anbar has yet to ally itself with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and a recent National Intelligence Estimate warned that it might even threaten it. . .

In the north since the surge began, suspected Sunni extremists have carried out some of the deadliest terror attacks of the war, killing hundreds in car and truck bombings. . .

Sunni militants remain openly active in the north. Three weeks ago, fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaida in Iraq front organization, paraded through the streets of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, said tribal sheik Fawaz Mohammed al Jarba. "It's very bad," Jarba said. "There are so many attacks that never make it in the media." . .

In the Shiite-dominated south, violence is rising as Shiite militias vie with one another for control.

At least 52 people were killed this month when fighting broke out between the Mahdi Army and the rival Badr Organization during a religious festival in Karbala.

In Basra, the strategic port city on the Persian Gulf, those militias and one from the Fadhila party have fought pitched battles for control, with the death toll rising throughout the year, from 59 in January to 134 in May. In August, 90 people died there. . .

Maliki’s cabinet still has nearly as many vacancies as it has sitting ministers, and no major legislation governing Iraq’s major issues, including a militia disarmament program, has made it to the floor of the Iraqi parliament.

Last week, the parliament, back from its summer vacation, barely had a quorum in its first meetings. . .

". . . No Iraqi McClatchy spoke to in preparation for this article said he or she had confidence in the government. . ."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Oil Bonanza for Hunt; Displacement, Hunger, Alcoholism, Addiction for Iraqis

My Texas oil theory of the Cheney wing's decision to go to war against Iraq got some (admittedly ex post facto) support on Sunday when it was announced that Hunt Oil is doing a deal for petroleum development in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Such Kurdistan deals are not typically being put through the federal government in Baghdad, and Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani is threatening to cancel them out if they are not approved centrally.)

One of the things that has prevented Iraqis from just starving to death, given the very high levels of unemployment and insecurity, is the old government food rationing system, which is still in place but increasingly tattered. Rations have been reduced by 35 percent, and of the 5 million Iraqis who depend on them (about a fifth of the country), two million are having trouble receiving the rations because they live in high-risk areas. Now the news is that with Ramadan looming, where square meals at sunset and in the morning before dawn are all that keep people going during the fast, the rations may not be available in nearly the required amounts. Iraqi foodstuffs are increasingly threadbare or rotten, and delivering the rations to risky areas is very difficult. (Imagine the difficulty in feeding the 200,000 Fallujans, 80 percent of whom are unemployed, given that no one is allowed to drive vehicles in that city).

Hunger is already a widespread problem in Iraq, and is likely to become more of one as time goes on.

Iraq's physician shortage is also worsening dramatically:

' According to the Iraqi Medical Association (IMA), the shortage of doctors and nurses in Iraq is now critical and having a devastating effect, especially on small towns and villages.

“Our latest research shows that up to 75 percent of doctors, pharmacists and nurses have left their jobs at universities, clinics and hospitals,” Walid Rafi, a senior member of the IMA, told IRIN. Of these, at least 55 percent have fled abroad, he added.

According to Rafi, low salaries and the shortage of equipment and medicines, are other push factors. “Medical staff earn US$50-300 per month. They might persevere for a while but if the opportunity arises, they don’t think twice and leave the country,” Rafi said.'

The Iraqi Psychiatric Association estimates that in the past two months, the number of patients treated for alcoholism grew to be 36 percent greater than during the same period a month ago. Anecdotal evidence suggests that drinking to excess is widespread and getting worse rapidly. It is, of course, a further sign of despair, like massive out-migration. I saw it happen in Lebanon in the early years of the civil war there. Drug use and drug smuggling are also big problems.

The new chairman of the Expediency Council, Akbar Rafsanjani, is suggesting that Iran and Iraq establish an "Islamic Common Market."

Another general, Wesley Clark, gives his report on Iraq. His conclusion: diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria is the only realistic way out.

Former State Department diplomat John Brown has some advice for General Petraeus: which is that the US is occupying Iraq, and therefore will never really have the allegiance of the people, just as the Soviets could not actually convince the Czechs about that universal workers' solidarity thing.

As always, check out Tomdispatch.com.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Helman: Refugees a Measure of Security Conditions

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:

In current discussions of the situation in Iraq, insufficient attention is being paid to perhaps the most sensitive barometer available, that of refugee flows. To date, of Iraq's pre-war population of about 30 million, about 13% have either fled their country or are internally displaced--a historically very large proportion of a population. That means that a very large percentage of the Iraqi people have found conditions so dangerous or otherwise unacceptable--constant threats to life, polluted water, uncertain electricity, broken medical facilities, bad sanitation, uncertain educational opportunities and more--that they have left home, family, friends, jobs for the uncertainties and often miseries of the life of a refugee. Think about what that means in personal terms. And, according to reports of refugee organizations such as the IOM, the outward flow continues.

Organizations such as the IOM and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees have learned from decades of experience that refugees flows also constitute a sensitive barometer of when conditions in the home country have improved. Refugees maintain contact with family and friends still in place and typically will be sensitive to their advice on when conditions are safe for return--no one wants to stay a refugee if there is an alternative. Clearly, that's nowhere near happening in Iraq, a more telling fact then all of the other contradictory statistics of attacks and deaths being bandied about in the current debate. It says that life in Iraq remains dangerous, brutish and, too often, short.


Gerald B. Helman "was United States Ambassador to the European Office of the United Nations from 1979 through 1981."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Questions about Authenticity of Bin Laden Video

Some evidence that the audio track of the recent Osamah Bin Laden video was laid down over an older video has been given.

If true, this manipulation would not in my view prove that the audio was fraudulent.

One problem is that the video would have to be awfully old to have Osama with a short black beard, and I don't know of any old footage that looks like that.

The audio sounds like Osama to me.

See Barnett Rubin's analysis of the new speech as a form of market rebranding on Bin Laden's part.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole on CSPAN-2 Tonight at 10 EDT

Note: My talk on Napoleon's Egypt will be shown in the US on CSPAN-2 at 10 pm EDT on Sunday evening, September 9.

At the Napoleon's Egypt Blog, a letter from one of Bonaparte's scientists (a botanist) exhibiting the disillusionment the invaders felt on seizing Egypt. My assistant said it reminded him of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

Also, for those who missed it, The Nation review of the book is online.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Global Affairs: Israel Peace Conference; and Roy on the Neocons

At the Global Affairs group blog:

Gershon Shafir writes

' The focus of political debate in Israel between now and November will be the planned Peace Conference. Two approaches seem to be shaping up.

One is expressed by the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, who argues that no withdrawal from the West Bank should take place until Israel has developed an anti-rocket system . . .

The other is represented by Olmert’s deputy and confidant, Vice Premier Haim Ramon. '

and Barnett Rubin gives us a preview of Olivier Roy's new book, "The Crescent and Chaos," which is about the "Double Defeat of the Neoconservatives."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

2.2 Million Internally Displaced Iraqis; Sadrists Warn US on Basra; 37 Killed in Bombings, Shootings Saturday

The Sadr Movement in Basra is warning the US military not to try to come into the province to replace the departing British troops. Suspected Mahdi Army roadside bombs have inflicted unusually high casualties on British troops in the deep south this year.

The International Organization for Migration is reporting that its data show that 2.2 million Iraqis have been kicked out of their homes by threats and violence, about half of them since the February, 2006, bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra.

That is, 1.1 million Iraqis have been forced to flee their neighborhoods for other places in Iraq in the past 18 months, which is an average of 61,000 per month. But in fact, the rate was a bit less than that in 2006, and accelerated to 100,000 a month beginning in February, 07. That's right. More displaced people by far since the troop escalation began. What is worse, there are fewer and fewer places for them to go. The Sunni Arab provinces are very dangerous. So you'd go to the Shiite areas, which are mostly quieter. But 11 of 15 provinces in central-south Iraq have put restrictions on immigration from other provinces! It is like it already isn't one country (inside your own country surely you can live in any province you like).

KUNA reports:

IOM says 2.2 mn Iraqis internally displaced

GENEVA, Sept 7 (KUNA) -- A new report issued by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says nore than 2.2 million Iraqis were internally displaced.

IOM spokesperson Jean-Philippe Chauzy said that data . . . estimates that the number of persons displaced since the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra on February 22, 2006 to be 1,011,870 individuals.

This figure combined with the 1.2 million individuals who were internally displaced before February 22, results in a total of over 2.2 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Iraq to date, he said.

According to Chauzy, eleven out of fifteen central and southern governorates are now severely restricting the entry and registration of IDPs. . .

Sawt al-Iraq reports that 2,000 Iraqis are fleeing into Syria every day. That's 730,000 a year! Syria is reaffirming that it will require visas, so this flow may taper off. Otherwise, about 35 years, and the Iraq problem would be solved; no Iraqis left there.

And you wonder why the Pentagon's figures for 'sectarian conflict' are falling. Most of those fleeing are Sunni Arabs. [A kind reader corrected this; Sunnis are over 30% of those fleeing to Syria; I think they would be higher among those fleeing to Jordan.] Since February 15 when the troop escalation got underway, 420,000 Iraqis would have gone to Syria alone at that rate, 120,000 of them Sunnis. There were only 5 million or so Sunni Arabs. Then we have the 600,000 internally displaced since February, the proportion of Sunnis among them being not specified. It is probably the case that nearly 10 percent of Sunni Arabs are no longer living in the same neighborhoods as they were just this past January! A lot of mixed neighborhoods are obviously much quieter; nobody here but us Shiites, boss. And lots of Shiites gone from Sunni neighborhoods.

Robert Reid of AP confirms that many mixed neighborhoods in Iraq are now monochrome. He also confirms that nearly 1/5 of US troops killed this year in Iraq were killed in al-Anbar Province, which isn't as quiet as Fred Kagan thinks it is.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that 37 Iraqis were killed in bombings or shootings on Saturday.

Reuters reports that: "Police said a parked car exploded near a police station in Baghdad's Shi'ite area of Sadr City at dusk, when people were shopping. The blast killed 15 people and wounded 45, they said."

McClatchy adds: "11 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad today by Iraqi Police. 1 in Sadr City, 1 in Ur, 1 in New Baghdad, 2 in Amil, 2 in Hurriyah, 1 in Jami'a, 1 in Saidiyah and 2 in Bayaa."

and

"Tikrit - 2 civilians killed in IED explosion in Dor district, this evening."

Reuters reports other civil war violence on Saturday:

[KUFA] - A roadside bomb exploded in a market in the holy Shi'ite town of Kufa, killing five people and wounding eight, a police official said. . . [Near the shrine of Muslim bin `Aqil]

NAJAF - Gunmen killed an official in the office of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Mohammed al-Gara'awi, on Friday in front of his house in northern Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

KIRKUK - A car bomb exploded near a police station in the Shi'ite Turkmen town of Basheer, 20 km (12 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, police said. One police source said one policeman was killed, while a second said two died. Police said Turkmen residents launched a revenge attack on the Sunni town of Albu-Faraj, burning six houses.

KIRKUK - Police found two bodies with gunshot wounds and signs of torture in a small town north of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

DAQUQ - Four bodies, including one of a woman, were found with gunshot wounds in Daquq, 45 km (28 miles) south of Kirkuk, police said. . .

AL-ZAB - Gunmen killed three people in a drive-by shooting in Al-Zab, 35 km (20 miles) southwest of northern Kirkuk, on Friday, police said . . .

MOSUL - Gunmen killed three policemen in a drive-by shooting on Friday in eastern Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists Reject Moves to Unseat al-Maliki 7 US Troops Killed Bush was Told Iraq Had no WMD

7 US troops were killed 4 of them in al-Anbar profince and the other 3 in Ninevah proince.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Sadrist spokesman Baha' al-A'raji says that his bloc in parliament is not exploring new alliances with a view to unseating Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. He said such a move would destabilize Iraq politically and economically.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic to the opposite effect, that efforts are intensifying among parliamentarians to unseat Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The Islamic Virtue Party (al-Fadhila) is said to be talking to the Sadrists. Another effort is being made by the Sunni fundamentalist coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front.

Sidney Blumenthal exposes the sad story of how intrepid CIA operatives extracted from Naji Sabri, a member of Saddam Hussein's circle, the information that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 2002. But the operatives could only pass the information up their reporting line, to Tenet and Bush, who ignored it. One argument used to marginalize them and their hard won intelligence was to say it was contradicted by another source, Curveball, supplied by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraq National Congress, who was then trusted by US and British officials but who was a drunk and a liar.

Fred Kaplan of Slate suggests that Cheney and Chalabi are the chief suspects in dissolving the Iraqi army. This is certainly correct, but I'd add a third leg to this stool, which is John Hannah and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the AIPAC think tank. Hannah, the former deputy head of WINEP, was one of two officials authorized to receive "intelligence" from Chalabi's Iraq National Congress. That elements of the Likud Party in Israel to whom Hannah is close, and which had come to have special influence in WINEP, wanted the Iraqi army dissolved is just as plausible as the other elements of Kaplan's canny theory of the thing. One of Fred's more important insights is that Cheney, Chalabi & Co. over-ruled decisions already made by the Bush cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff-- and that there has never even been an inquiry into this enormous crime. He also points out that the testimony of Col. Paul Hughes demonstrates conclusively that the Rumsfeld/ Bremer line that the Iraqi army just fell apart and could not have been reconstituted is plain wrong and also silly.

Check out Aaron Glantz's blog, War Comes Home. Especially interesting is "Top V[eteran] A[ffairs] Official: Bible Study "More important than doing [my] job." (Scroll down.)

Also, don't miss Marc Lynch's canny comments on Bush and Abu Rishah.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bin Laden Brandishes Jihadi Threat against US in Iraq

I don't know why so many press commentaries keep saying that the new videotape from
Usama Bin Laden does not contain any threats.

It contains a clear threat: to escalate regional jihadi resistance against the US troops in Iraq.

(The text is here in PDF format.

Bin Laden, however, is not now and perhaps never has been a credible actor in Iraq. Most Iraqis are nationalists and would not want a Saudi telling them what to do. He made a big but perhaps unavoidable error in attacking the Shiites, and so denying his movement a nationalist platform. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a small cult of hyper-Sunni bigots and serial murderers. Instead of playing Abdul Nasser, who attracted the allegiance even of many Shiite Arabs in his day, Bin Laden long ago chose to play the role of a cultist, a David Koreish with better explosives.

A lot of jihadis consider Bin Laden a jinx, since he brought ruin on the Arab Afghans, who were killed, captured or had to go to ground.

And, the Iraqi Sunni Arabs are from all accounts increasingly acting to exclude the foreigners from their struggle against the Shiite government. The main antagonist of the US in Iraq has all along been elements in the local Sunni Arab population.

Bin Laden is stuck in the 1980s intellectually, when he was used by one superpower (the Reagan administration) against another (the Soviet Union). That bipolar world is gone, succeeded by a period of unipolarism. Jihadis with $10 bn. in aid from the US and Saudi Arabia and a national cause are one thing. Jihadis with no superpower patron, no united nation, and little or no money just become terrorists.

Ironically, Bin Laden has adopted the jejune leftist rhetoric of his erstwhile Soviet foes, making everything into a conspiracy of some corporations. But instead of calling for the workers to unite and overthrow their chains, he ends by assuring us that a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship would be benign.

Bin Laden is like a venomous snake, always dangerous, and you never want to underestimate a cobra if it is in striking distance. But Iraq isn't the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, and if Bin Laden thinks it is, he is very out of touch.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

French Fear Guerilla War in Egypt, 1798

Note: My talk on Napoleon's Egypt will be shown in the US on CSPAN-2 at 10 pm EDT on Sunday evening, September 9.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, a late 18th century complaint from a regular officer about the enemy's guerrilla tactics:

"The Mameloucs [Mamluks]*, though beaten, may re-assemble. Their manner of making war authorizes the idea, that the country which we have traversed, and from which we have just driven them, ought not to be looked upon as conquered; since there is nothing to prevent their re-occupying it. In a country where the enemy attaches no kind of importance to the maintaining of a particular position, it is very difficult to determine him to quit the ground altogether. What secured our conquests in Italy, was the absolute refusal of the Austrians to advance, the moment they discovered their route lay near a fortress garrisoned by the French. The Mameloucs attack us at the distance of fifty paces, flee, and return the next day to attack us, in the very position from which we had driven them."

Read the whole thing.

----

*The martial ruling caste of Egypt, fickle vassals of the Ottoman Empire.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

David Enders on Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria

Via Fareed Zakaria's "Foreign Exchange," an interview with David Enders, a journalist just back from Iraq with an unvarnished view of the situation. As I understand it, this is a 4-minute preview, with the whole interview to be available at Foreignexchange.tv from Saturday forward.

Hat tip to the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Nation Review of Napoleon's Egypt

Roger Owen's review of my new book, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East is now online at The Nation.

Owen, who teaches at Harvard, is among our foremost historians of modern Egypt, and one the few who have worked both on economic and on political history. He is author of State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Middle East and several other seminal books.

He writes:

' Try as we might, it is difficult for most of us to imagine what it's like for a country to be invaded and occupied. Photographs help: pictures of German troops marching down the Champs-Élysées in 1940 with not a Frenchman in sight, pictures taken that same year of a British policeman on patrol with a German officer in the newly captured British Channel Islands. The terrible incongruity of it all, the violation of what seemed the natural order, the sinister sense of foreboding, of a world turned upside down without any of the familiar certainties to hang onto.

Our best bet, though, for understanding what it's like to be on the receiving end of a military occupation by foreign soldiers is to watch films made recently in Iraq from an Iraqi point of view. There the sudden appearance of helicopters, or a checkpoint on the road ahead, or the spectacle of British or American soldiers in battle gear entering a busy square, bring an immediate sense of menace. All at once there is shouting from one side, screaming from the other, the sound of doors being kicked in, orders harshly given (often in a foreign language: English, that is), weapons cocked, shooting and explosions. Such confrontations are hardly more pleasant for the soldiers, who find themselves in a strange place, surrounded by what always seems a hostile crowd. If these men have itchy fingers, it's partly because they are insecure, frightened, angry and scarred from having seen some of their comrades blown to bits.

So it was in Egypt when the country was unexpectedly invaded and occupied by Napoleon's army in the summer of 1798. The French troops first landed in Alexandria before marching--tired, thirsty and beset by Bedouin irregulars--through the towns and villages to Cairo, parts of which soon turned violently against their new occupiers. Then further military expeditions up and down the land, with none of Napoleon's soldiers safe anywhere as the initial efforts to woo the native inhabitants only provoked further ambushes and violent acts of resistance and revenge. As Ahmed Hashim puts it so succinctly in his book Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, occupations are resisted simply because they are occupations . . .

Read the whole thing.

The book:

Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

At the Napoleon's Egypt blog: Bonaparte establishes the Egyptian Institute.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fears of Sunni Arab Tribal Feuding in Diyala Cheney, Rumsfeld blamed by Blunkett for Dissolving Iraqi Army

With regard to the recent dust-up in the pages of the NYT between Bush and Bremer over the dismantling of the Iraqi Army, Ward Harkavy at the Village Voice reminds us that the mystery has already been solved by former British Home Secretary David Blunkett. He revealed in his memoirs that Cheney and Rumsfeld were the ones pushing for dismantling the Iraqi army, much to the dismay of the British. Bremer was taking orders from Rumsfeld, but being a good soldier has all along declined to blow the whistle on the Neoconservatives who ordered him to do implement several disastrous decisions. My guess? Dismantling the Baath army and the professional bureaucracy was intended as a way of ensuring there were no obstacles to putting corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi in charge of Iraq (that was the Rumsfeld- Wolfowitz- Feith plan). What they didn't know was that Bremer had been charged by his old boss, the State Department, with derailing the Chalabi conspiracy and ensuring that the US ruled Iraq directly for a year or two. The combination of the Neocon plot to install Chalabi and destroy the Baath institutions, and the Powell-Blair plot to destroy Chalabi and ensure that Iraq was properly administered for a while, resulted in the worst of all possible worlds-- Bremer trying to run Iraq without an indigenous army or professional bureaucracy. Feith personally blackballed even seasoned Republican Arabists, depriving Bremer of even minimal expertise. Bush's inability to choose between Rumsfeld and Powell led to a muddle. Apparently W. now thinks he wasn't even informed of the decision to get rid of the army. This recollection is faulty, but it is proof that he did not make the decision. Blunkett says Cheney and Rumsfeld did.

Riverbend the most well-known Sunni Arab blogger of Baghdad , is no longer a Baghdadi. Like some 2 million other Iraqis, she is now a refugee in a neighboring country (she is in Syria, where there may now be 1.5 million Iraqis; there are some 800,000 in Jordan). Her family had decided that it was just too dangerous to remain in Baghdad, where Shiite militiamen have been ethnically cleansing them. Clearly, they were afraid of a home invasion by the Mahdi Army. She is lucky to have gotten out a couple of months ago. Syria just decided to tighten up visa requirements for Iraqis trying to flee there. Al-Hayat reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had been apprised of this decision earlier.

Many formerly middle class Iraqis are suffering in Syria, running out of money, facing increasingly steep rents, even facing water and electricity shortages (which have followed them to Damascus!) Ninety percent of their children are not in school,creating the prospect of a generation of displaced juvenile delinquents. The UNO and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society say that the US troop escalation has been accompanied by an increase in the number of displaced Iraqis. (There has also been an increase in the number of civilian Iraqi casualties). Many Sunni Arab families in Baghdad have been ethnically cleansed by Shiite militias. Riverbend has joined their number, one more tragedy among millions of tragedies.

Al-Hayat reports that the Iraqi army has been put in charge of security by the US military in Diyala province, and that the residents of the province (east and northeast of Baghdad)are afraid that the war on "al-Qaeda" (i.e. Salafi Jihadis) might turn into a battle among the armed paramilitaries and organizations that make up the US-backed "Council for the Salvation of Diyala Province." (That is, these tribal councils the US is supporting are made up of tribes, and tribes are notorious for feuding among one another as much as for fighting outsiders. The anthropologists call it segmentary politics and contrast it to the unified state.) Local fears have been provoked because the US has allowed its new allies to establish 100 bases in recent months. Sheikh Ali al-Burhan al-`Azzawi of the al-`Izzah tribe in Diyala raised the alarm about the prospect of tribal vendettas. He dismissed the transferral of security duties to the Iraqi army as "pro forma."

At the same time, the Association of Muslim Scholars has warned that fighting could break out among guerrilla groups after the withdrawal of the Americans. It called on the groups to put forward a realistic program that takes into account the conditions of Iraq and the region, emphasizing that "the Resistance cannot rule by itself." AMS stressed that carrying a gun does not make someone a good administrator. (AMS is saying this!)

In other words, a lot of people in central Iraq are afraid that the tribal and political militias in the Sunni Arab may well, having been armed and helped to garrison themselves by the US, fall on one another when the Americans have left.

That this article is appearing in al-Hayat is a little worrisome to me. This Saudi-funded London daily was an early supporter of the policy of getting the tribes to fight al-Qaeda, reporting that such fights were going on in 2005 when they probably were pretty desultory affairs. It appears that the editors may be rethinking whether this approach is a good idea; and, if anyone knows Sunni tribal politics it is the Saudis.

Bravo to Andrew Tilghman for his new essay at Washington Monthly, "The Myth of al-Qaeda in Iraq."

An invaluable new blog has been launched by Ben Lando of UPI: The Iraq Oil Report. He reports on the privatization of Iraq's electricity sector.

The Shingetsu Institute in Japan has links for Japanese-Islamic relations, including with Iraq.

Barnett Rubin has more on the threatened Iran war rollout at the Global Affairs group blog.

McClatchy reports Iraqi political violence for Thursday and for Wednesday. Seem still to be bombs going off in Baghdad.

McClatchy conducts an admirable open discussion of a recent article alleging that US troop deaths in combat have trended down this summer. Regular readers know that I think such allegations depend on not taking into account seasonal falls in guerrilla activity during torrid Junes and Julys. The McClatchy case depends almost solely on August, which I maintain is bad statistics; you can't prove anything at all with one month. Moreover, if you don't let an entire city like Fallujah drive--beginning in May-- you obviously cut down on guerrilla activity (Fallujah is about 1/3 of al-Anbar). It is artificial and cannot be sustained, and it looks to me like one of a series of steps taken to manipulate the numbers leading up to the September report.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

What would the founding fathers have thought of George W. Bush?

Just promoting a book I just found out about. You all know about my thing for the Founding Generation of Americans.


What would the founding fathers have thought of George W. Bush?

Founders v. Bush is a comparison in quotations of the policies and politics of the Founding Fathers and the administration of George W. Bush. See what
the Founders really thought about the Constitution, Liberty, Patriotism, Religion, War, Truth, Lies, Wealth, and more...in their own words.

Here's a few good ones (600 more in the book)

GEORGE WASHINGTON
"Beware of pretend patriotism." - Farewell Address, 1796

JOHN ADAMS
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws." - letter to Jefferson, 1816

THOMAS JEFFERSON
"By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves." - letter to John Melish, 1813

JAMES MADISON
"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." -
letter to Jefferson, 1798

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
"Being ignorant is not such a shame as being unwilling to learn." - Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Helman: Bush's Stage-Managed Photo Op with Sunni Sheikhs May Spell Trouble in Future

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:

Perhaps the most telling commentary on the situation today in Iraq is the choice of a remote, heavily fortified US airbase in Anbar province for the President's third visit to Iraq. He was joined by his senior national security officials, all kinds of four-stars, including General Petreus, and Ambassador Crocker. Iraq's senior government officials were summoned from Baghdad, as well; President Bush had the pleasant task of introducing them to some local cooperating Sunni Sheiks. One can imagine that everyone was coached to dutifully smile for the cameras.

Last year, by contrast, when the President visited Iraq he held his meetings in Baghdad's Green Zone, met and sought to encourage, identify with, and thus strengthen Iraq's constitutional government. Democracy was messy, the security situation dire, but still Iraq's was a democratically elected government, ruling over a newly sovereign country, a living expression of the President's vision of spreading democracy and freedom. It thus merited our support.

The visit to Anbar was pure theater. Bush did not need to go there to get briefed by Petreus and Crocker. He certainly has received the elaborated substance of their reports, which will be incorporated, probably in some modified fashion in the report Bush is required to send to Congress on September 15. It is hardly believable that their solo testimony next week to Congress will hold any unpleasant surprises for the White House.

The point of the elaborately staged Anbar soundbite was not to tout the claimed (modest) success of the Surge--that has been done many multiple times in the briefngs, the "dog and pony shows," given to visiting congressmen, journalists, and analysts. Rather, it was to build up an alternative story of political success in response to the clear failure of political reconciliation among the contending parties in the Government of Iraq. It was only a few months ago that Congress and the Administration went clearly on record that the strategic point of the surge was to bring about such reconciliation, as defined by the benchmarks contained in our law. But not even the Administration, Petraeus or Crocker could claim that the political benchmarks have been met or that they are likely to be met in the foreseeable future. Rather than admit the obvious--that the Surge has been a failure because it has not and probably will not meet its strategic goals--the President and his men are now developing an alternative to the political goals set by Congress and the President three months ago. Rather than "top/down" political progress to be evidenced by meeting the stated benchmarks, what is really valuable is "bottom/up" progress, the kind that is represented by Sunni Sheiks cooperating with the US by taking our weapons to chase down largely other, radical Iraqis under the banner of al Qaeda of Mesopotamia. What we will hear next week, is testimony by Petraeus and Crocker, combined with a largely staged campaign of articles, backgrounders and op-ed pieces, that seek to redefine the political goalposts and conclude that they are being met through the newly identified "bottom-up" phenomenon.

But what really appears to be happening is that the US, for valid near term tactical military goals, is supporting local traditional political structures that are tribal, authoritarian and non-transparent to combat radical Sunnis associated with local al Qaeda affiliates. The sheiks are not democratic or elected. But they are certainly important. And they also, not surprisingly, have their own political agendas. These Sunni tribal sheiks were one of Saddam Hussein's central constituencies. They supported him, provided him with manpower and officers, and benefited hugely from his largesse. They and their constituencies were the ones who suffered most from the fall of Saddam, the rise of Shiite power, the growing Iranian influence, the Kurdish efforts to recover claimed territory, the adoption of a national constitution that failed to take account of Sunni interests and the looming possibility that they will be denied what they would consider a fair share of future oil revenues. And to top it off, radical Sunni Islamists were challenging their traditional authority, and the American army was decimating their population and landscape.

So the Sunni sheiks appear now to be doing what the Shiites and others have done: find ways to bring the US to support their objectives. The main Shiite objective was to assert its majority status in Iraq to gain political control. Democracy served that purpose at least to the extent that it allows control of substantial state assets and means of coercion, gives Shiite militias operating room, and suppresses the Sunnis. The Kurds have also improved their already favored position with the US in order to establish an almost independent state, assert their additional territorial claims largely against the Sunnis (which also would bring more oil). Both the Shiites and the Kurds have an interest in a limited government in Baghdad, under their control.

To now compete, the Sunnis can offer the US to fight the radical al Qaeda types in their midst, a truce in their armed resistance to the US army, and undying opposition to the "Persians." In exchange, they receive weapons, training and "reconstruction teams." But it is the arms and training that count, to be used now against radical Islamist elements, but later to help recover the status and power they lost when Saddam was overthrown. We also should not assume that by making "nice" today, the Sunni sheiks will not in their good time turn on us.

There are reasons why "reconciliation" at the Federal level has been so hard to achieve. Those benchmark measures would largely serve to restore some of the position that Sunnis have lost and assure them of some cut in the nation's oil wealth. The same fear of Sunni revanchism leads the Shiite federal leadership to view with concern the arming of Sunnis by the US. They know what's coming and will have none of it. From the standpoint of the US, the short-term gain in Anbar has to be weighed against the further distancing of federal reconciliation prospects and additional reliance by the Shiites on the Iranian connection. "Bottom-up," while suggesting something snappy and positive, instead will further confirm Shiite fear of Sunni purposes and reinforce the continuing suspicion that the Shiites will again be abandoned by the US. Wittingly or otherwise, the US reinforces that suspicion through active speculation on changing the leadership or even the nature of Iraq's government.

As far as real US policy is concerned, much of this will make little difference. President Bush continues to demonstrate that he will not budge from Iraq. He does not want his heritage to carry the weight of retreat and defeat, regardless of the lives lost and treasure wasted. He'll leave that to the next president. Profile in courage?

Gerald B. Helman "was United States Ambassador to the European Office of the United Nations from 1979 through 1981."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rubin: How to Stop War with Iran

Barnett Rubin gives us a thoughtful call to arms on how to prevent war with Iran at the Global Affairs blog.

After analyzing the way the Bushies would probably go to war if they can, Rubin writes:

' The immediate goal for Democratic presidential candidates and the Democrats (and sensible Republicans) in Congress should be to use the power of the legislative branch to prevent the administration from launching a war. I can think of two possible ways to do this:

* Pass an Act of Congress stating that the 2001 AUMF does not authorize a preemptive strike against Iran (or a strike in response to an alleged provocation – recall Tonkin Gulf). In this case, Congress would claim that war with Iran requires new authorization.
* Cut off funding for any war with Iran not specifically authorized by Congress in accordance with the law after September 30, when spending starts out of next year’s budget. Presumably they won’t be able to start the war by then and rely on the “support the troops” argument.

In coordination with this immediate response, responsible leaders in both parties should articulate an alternative policy toward Iran starting with the same principle as the Helsinki Accords of 1975 – no regime change. '

Read the whole thing.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

MESA Letter on Mearsheimer & Walt

The Committee on Academic Freedom (North America) of the Middle East Studies Association has written a letter protesting the cancellation of a talk by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt scheduled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

CCGA maintains that the speakers, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, needed to be balanced by an opposing viewpoint. But both have spoken there before without needing to be immediately contradicted by someone else. (Personally, I object to this idea of 'balancing' speakers during their events; lots of controversial views have been expressed at CCGA without a counter. If they want balance, they can invite someone else later in the year or the next year. And note that in the US public sphere and media, "balance" almost never requires that a real living Palestinian be allowed to speak for him or herself, alongside representatives of the Zionist point of view. Otherwise Abraham Foxman would have to carry a Palestinian around with him everywhere he spoke, to provide 'balance'.)

MESA, with about 2600 members, is just the professional organization of the researchers at North American universities who mainly teach and write about the Middle East. You'll never see most of them on television and they aren't often consulted by politicians, but they are the ones who know Middle Eastern languages and spend a lifetime trying to understand the place.

Anyway, here's MESA's letter:

4 September 2007

Marshall M. Bouton, President
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
332 S. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1100
Chicago, Illinois 60604-4416

Dear Mr. Bouton:

I am writing to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). We wish to convey to you our distress regarding your decision to cancel a forum, scheduled for September 27, 2007, in which two of this country’s most distinguished professors of Political Science, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, were to speak about their new book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. This action on your part constitutes a serious violation of the principles of free expression and the free exchange of ideas. We urge you to invite professors Walt and Mearsheimer to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs at a mutually convenient time in the near future. It is important to rectify the effect that your cancellation on July 24 has had in reinforcing an intellectual environment that seeks to restrict informed and critical discussion of issues that are vital to this country’s future.

The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has more than 2600 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

According to numerous press reports, pressure from supporters of Israel who are critical of Walt and Mearsheimer led you to take the highly unusual step of canceling the previously scheduled event. In these reports, you are cited as saying that the speakers are controversial and that you preferred that they appear in “an appropriate forum” balanced by an opposing viewpoint. Yet, John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, have spoken before the Council on numerous occasions in the past without being forced to share the podium with those who oppose their points of view. It is only in this case, that of a presentation critical of Israeli policy and its supporters, that they have been subjected to the litmus test of “balance.” We regret that you chose to succumb to pressure exerted on the Council and are dismayed that in justifying your actions you have adopted the argument that controversial ideas should not be aired unless they are immediately and at the same event “balanced” by opposing views.

As the Association of American University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many other organizations have persuasively argued in official statements, the argument of “balance,” selectively invoked, has been repeatedly used to stifle the free exchange of ideas, especially when it comes to discussions about Israel and U.S. foreign policy. We are concerned that your decision --reminiscent of that taken by the Council-General of the Polish Consulate in New York to cancel a talk on Israel and U.S. foreign policy on October 3, 2006 by the renowned historian New York University Professor Tony Judt-- contributes to raising the wall of censorship. Indeed, three other organizations in Chicago as well the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, among others, have since either cancelled or turned down appearances by the authors.

We strongly urge you to reconsider your decision of July 24, and in the process affirm your support for free expression and the free exchange of ideas, by inviting Professors Walt and Mearsheimer to give a talk at the Council without requiring that they share the podium and without restrictions on the content of their presentation.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Zachary Lockman
MESA President

(MESA also weighed in on the Finkelstein case, here, in which there now appears to be a settlement.)

And, see Paul Craig Roberts, "Who are the Fanatics?"
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Josh Marshall on the Numbers Game in Iraq

From Josh Marshall's Veracifier site, "Iraq by the Numbers".

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists Threaten Civil Disobedience Da'wa Leader Slams Bush for Base Visit

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr movement is complaining bitterly about the ongoing detention of its leaders. A spokesman for the Sadr office of Muqtada al-Sadr in Diwaniya threatened a campaign of civil disobedience if the arrests do not stop and if those arrested are not let go. Someone should tell Sheikh Abu Zaynab, the Diwaniya spokesman, that after everything Iraq has been through, the threat of mere civil disobedience is perhaps not very daunting.

Paul Bremer, the former US viceroy of Iraq, shot back Tuesday when Bush alleged that he had not known that he intended to disband the Iraqi army. Bremer shared a letter he sent to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announcing his intention to disband the army, along with Bush's reply praising his leadership. Bush's reply, however, does not prove that he read Bremer's letter, only that Rumsfeld passed it on to him. You have a sense that Bush gets a lot of memos he doesn't read, in response to which he pats people on the head and names them Turtle Poo. The real question, on which Bremer has never come clean, is who ordered him to disband the Iraqi army. It wasn't Bush. Was it Cheney? I guess they don't bother to tell George everything.

The LAT reports on the reconvening of the Iraqi parliament with only 151 MPs in attendance. They don't appear ready to do any real business. Some Sadrists called for an investigation of the attack they alleged was launched on the Mahdi Army at Karbala last week. (In all likelihood, it was the other way around). They said Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki himself should be investigated.

The LAT says that leader of the Islamic Call (Da'wa) Party - Iraq Organization, Abdul Karim al-`Anizi-- an ally of al-Maliki's Islamic Call Party-- expressed his disgust at Bush's visit to an army base on Monday, by-passing the politicians in Baghdad:

' I want to mention my reservation and abhorrence as the meeting was held in an American base in a country having sovereignty . . ."

The Islamic Call Party - Iraq Organization stayed in Iraq during the Saddam years, unlike the Tehran, London and Damascus branches, which have generally dominated politics on their return after 2003.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Sattar Abu Rishah, the chairman of the Council for the Salvation of al-Anbar, said that Bush promised to release innocent Sunni Arab detainees and to provide compensation for damages caused by military operations. He called Abu Rishah a "hero" and urged him to spread the tribal council model to other provinces (i.e. to fight Sunni radicals with tribal militias).

Al-Hayat says that the US military is arming tribal militias in the 'triangle of death' south of Baghdad, with the cooperation of Sunni guerrilla groups such as the Army of Islam, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, and the Army of Holy Warriors (i.e. the very guerrilla groups that had earlier fought the US and Iraqi troops).

The al-Maliki government takes a dim view of the new US policy of promoting Sunni Arab militias, for fear that eventually they will turn on the Baghdad government. Among Abu Rishah's demands, which Bush said he would study, were complaints about Shiite militias and about Iranian interference in Iraq. Al-Maliki depends on both things.

David Walker of the Government Accountability Office is a clear-sighted and brave man. His congressional testimony, that Iraqi security forces are unlikely to be able to hold the neighborhoods being cleared of guerrillas by US troops, has drawn howls of outrage from US officers in Iraq. The GAO sees little progress toward the accomplishment of Congressional benchmarks, including ridding government security forces of militiamen.

Among GAO findings was that the troop escalation the Bushies call 'the surge' has not cut down on Iraqi civilian deaths this year.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iran, Victory Culture: Wednesday Reading

Tom Engelhardt's essay, "The Empire of Stupidity," discusses Iraq, Vietnam and 'victory culture.' Engelhardt is author of the recently reissued The End of Victory Culture", with a new preface and conclusion. It is in some ways an answer to Frederick Jackson Turner's conundrum-- if the Frontier had been so central to American identity, what would happen now that (in the 1890s) the frontier was closing up? Engelhardt's work has two implications. First, the frontier has just been projected abroad, and other 'native' peoples substituted for the 'Injuns.' And, second, that frontier gets old fast, too. (Cole: There is a reason we don't watch shows like Gunsmoke in prime time any more, folks). So, the American Right takes refuge in myths like 'we could have won in Vietnam' and remembers its boyhood games when heroes and villains were so easy to tell apart. Engelhardt's book is a must read.

At the Global Affairs blog, a rich cornucopia of postings on Iran.

Farideh Farhi gives us A Change of Guard in Tehran on important alterations in the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards.

And she also weighs in on Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's election to head the Council of Guardians, which acts as Iran's senate and will select the successor to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei.

(For background on this contest, see this earlier posting on the struggle for this position between mere conservatives and the radicals.)

Barney Rubin kindly shares a translated article on the release or prospective release of two other Iranian-American intellectuals imprisoned since last spring.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

On How al-Anbar isn't that Safe and on How its "Calm" is Artificially Produced

Bush made a surprise visit to Al-Anbar Province on Monday, as part of his propaganda drive to get Americans to think we should stay in Iraq because "progress" is being made.

The debate over al-Anbar province is driven by the Bushies' desire to find any 'good news' to grasp at. Indeed, from 2003 forward, their criterion for objective reporting on Iraq was that it gave the 'good news.' When there obviously wasn't any good news, they started ignoring Iraq, as at Fox [Republican TV] Cable News.

Now the 'good news' appears (I swear to God) to be that you can "walk" in Iraq. That's the good news. The 7 billion people in the world walk every day, in most of the world's locales. Now it is an achievement to walk. That's good news of the highest order. Only, if you are American in Fallujah you might need a company of Marines with you so that you can . . . walk. (See below).

Is al-Anbar Province really paradise, as Bush suggested?

Al-Anbar residents killed 20 US troops in July. The total US fatalities in July were 79 according to icasualties.org, and some of those were presumably from accidents, etc. So al-Anbar, despite being reduced to the stone age, managed to kill a fourth or more of all US troops killed in combat in July. Al-Anbar is roughly 1/24 of Iraq by population. So it killed six times more US troops than we would have expected based on its proportion of the Iraqi population.

That's what the Bushies are celebrating, that the deadly al-Anbar has been wrestled down to only killing a fourth of the US troops killed in a month. It used to be more.

In mid-July, There were about 100 violent attacks in a single week in al-Anbar. That's a bright spot. That's progress. Since the year before, there were 400 violent attacks in that same period.

Well, yes, that's a relative improvement. But a hundred violent attacks in a week? That's being touted as good news to be ecstatic over? There were probably on the order of 1100 attacks that week in all of Iraq. So al-Anbar generated nearly one-tenth of all attacks. But it is only 1/24 of Iraq by population, so it is more than twice as dangerous with regard to the number of attacks than you would expect from its small population.

Fallujah, of course, was a trouble spot for the US military. I entertain dark suspicions that Bush had it destroyed for reasons of revenge. The November 2004 US assault damaged 2/3s of the buildings. Tens of thousands of former residents are still refugees.

One of the ways "calm" has been produced in the city is to simply forbid vehicular traffic. Since May, if you wanted to get somewhere in Fallujah, you have had to walk. So when the National Review tells us things are suddenly miraculously "calm" in al-Anbar, this is being produced artificially. Things would be calm in most hot spots if you could ban all forms of locomotion save walking.

The problem with producing calm by banning traffic is that it leaves you with a Somalia level of economic activity. IPS notes,

' Residents say unemployment is above 80 percent. Most of the rest who have some work are government employees. The huge industrial area has been closed by U.S. and Iraqi Army units '

80 percent unemployment? Now that is calm.

"Calm" has also been produced by death squad activity. IPS notes,

' Hundreds of suspected resistance fighters are now held at the Fallujah police station. Many have been killed on the streets; the police speak of finding "unidentified bodies". Several of those found dead had been arrested earlier, eyewitnesses and families of several of the men killed have said.'

So obviously if you round up a lot of young men and hold them without charge, and if you wipe out some others, "calm" is produced.

Another way of producing "calm" is to silence local journalists. Some have been arbitrarily arrested and then let go, with instructions to report the news as the Iraqi police tell them to. So we don't really know much about what is actually happening in Fallujah.

IPS quotes a local Sunni cleric:

' "To say Fallujah is quiet is true, and you can see it in the city streets," said Shiek Salim from the Fallujah Scholars' Council. "The city is practically dead, and the dead are quiet.'

So, all these measures-- banning traffic, rounding up young men, silencing the journalists, etc.-- have at least ended the attacks on US troops, right? Wrong.

It was only last week; I mean, August 28 was not that long ago, but this one is already forgotten:

"BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber detonated a vest packed with explosives in a Sunni Arab mosque in Fallujah yesterday, killing 10 worshipers, including the imam, and shattering what had been a period of relative calm for a region once the most volatile hotbed of Iraq's insurgency."

Now, if ten worshippers were killed in a church just last week in a small US city of 200,000, would Congressmen be flocking there to proclaim how wonderful the security situation was?

Just a month before, a bomber killed two policemen in Fallujah and wounded 11 others.

On July 23, a female suicide bomber killed 7 policemen at a checkpoint in downtown Ramadi.

On July 8, a truck bomb killed 23 persons at a police recruiting center in Haswa, al-Anbar province.

On Monday there was this in Ramadi:

' A suicide car bomb attacked an Iraqi security checkpoint on highway near the city of Ramadi in the western province of Anbar on Monday, killing two security members and wounding three others, a provincial police source said. '

Think Progress noticed this exchange between CNN's Wolf Blitzer and starry-eyed returnee from Fallujah, Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA).

"BOUSTANY: We’re clearly seeing some major improvements. Clearly in the Anbar Province, we’ve seen significant improvement. We were able to walk the streets of Fallujah. Sectarian deaths are down.

[…]

BLITZER: And Congressman Boustany, you say that the number of casualties is going down. But we took a closer look — and The Los Angeles Times did as well — citing Iraqi Health Ministry numbers. In June, it was 1,227 civilian deaths in Iraq. In July, it went up to 1,753 civilian deaths in Iraq. And in August, the month that just ended, 1,773 civilian deaths in Iraq. Those numbers are going in the wrong direction.

BOUSTANY: Well, I think what I mentioned earlier, Wolf, was the number of attacks. And, clearly, we have to look at all the metrics very carefully.

BLITZER: But statistics — you can play a lot of room with statistics. In terms of dead people, civilians, Iraqi dead people, those numbers are high and they’re getting worse, despite the increased military troop levels of the United States, the so-called surge having been in effect over the past couple of months.

BOUSTANY: Well, Wolf, I want to point out that just two or three months ago, I would have never thought that four members of Congress would be able to walk through the streets of Fallujah. That’s a major…

BLITZER: But you had a lot of security with you. You had a lot of U.S. military protection.

BOUSTANY: We had a platoon of Marines.

BLITZER: Yes, well, a platoon of Marines is a lot of Marines to walk through Fallujah. . .

Good for Wolf!

As for Bush,he knows that good news would be the Sunni Arabs in al-Anbar gladly signing on to the al-Maliki government.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.