Informed Comment

President Obama is pressing for new United Nations Security Council sanctions within weeks. Although Russia and China oppose ‘crippling’ sanctions such as cutting off Iran’s access to imported gasoline, they may agree to the watered-down US plan of imposing restrictions on companies owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (a major economic force in Iran). China is said by Reuters to be weakening in its opposition to new Iran sanctions, but perhaps this is only because it would not be affected by Western measures narrowly targeting the Revolutionary Guards.

On the other hand, the Reuters piece, which appears to be based on interviews with US officials, may be overly optimistic. Russian President Medvedev said just a few days ago that increased sanctions on Iran are “not optimal.” I.e. he does not rule them out but they aren’t his first choice. And China is even more opposed than Russia. Obama still has a hard path ahead.

Iran sanctions are in any case merely symbolic. The regime cannot be forced to change course in this way. Indeed, this regime likes being isolated.

This Reuters article also misinterprets the stance of the International Atomic Energy Agency of the UN, which continues to certify that none of Iran’s nuclear material, being enriched for civilian purposes, has been diverted to military uses. The IAEA has all along said it cannot give 100% assurance that Iran has no weapons program, because it is not being given complete access. But nagging doubt is not the same as an affirmation. We should learn a lesson from the Iraq debacle.

Meanwhile, ABC News’s Brian Ross got the scoop on the defection to the US of Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri. US intelligence continues to maintain that Iran has not committed to having a nuclear weapons program. Presumably this information came from Amiri and is fresh and solid, since he is a consummate insider.

Yet you get headlines like, “Iran moves closer to nukes.”

Somehow American hawks can’t seem to get their minds around the obvious conclusion from the CIA diction, which is that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program at the moment. It can’t move closer to nukes if it doesn’t have a weapons program! Moreover, that it does not have such a program is no longer a considered opinion or educated guess, but is based on the best kind of intelligence. It is the conclusion that the 16 US intelligence agencies came to in 2007, and there is apparently still no evidence that Iran has changed its mind about the undesirability and even evil of nuclear warheads (though there are no doubt hard liners who disagree with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwas against nukes as un-Islamic.)

As long as the US does not object to the actual nuclear weapons of Israel, India and Pakistan (none of which signed the NPT), its obsession with Iran’s civilian energy program will strike people in the region as unfair.

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Sam Singer writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment entitled: ‘A strange alliance at the Supreme Court: The pro-Israel lobby’s curious defense of an alleged Somali war criminal: A Shared Interest in Sovereign Immunity’ :

Mohammed Ali Samantar is the only living vestige of the Barre regime, the last government in two decades to exercise central control over Somalia and, not coincidentally, the last that was impudent enough to try. When Siad Barre was finally overthrown in 1991, Samantar, who had served as defense minister and prime minister, fled, in a storm of bullets, to Italy. He eventually made his way to Fairfax, Virginia, where he lived in suburban obscurity until a group of Somali nationals discovered him, hired a lawyer, and sued for damages. According to his accusers, the Barre regime committed unforgivable acts of violence against them and their families, offenses spanning a range of brutality from arbitrary detention, to torture, rape and extrajudicial killing. Samantar was allegedly aware of the crimes being perpetrated against civilians and yet failed to stop them. The suit was dismissed by a federal district court and then reinstated by the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. It is now pending before the Supreme Court, where a peculiar coalition of defenders is urging reversal. Among them, to the confusion of some observers, are five prominent pro-Israel organizations, each with a professed interest in keeping Samantar out of court. In joint amicus briefs, the groups insist that as a former government official, Samantar should be immune from suit. To hold otherwise, they warn, would violate international law and set an inviting precedent for Israel’s enemies and their supporters in the human rights community.

The arrival of the Israel lobby adds geopolitical intrigue to a case that already read like a Ludlum thriller. And because it speaks to real and immediate consequences, it lends concreteness to a discussion that would have otherwise carried on in the abstract. It is one thing for a lawyer to appeal to legal authority for the proposition that the courts of one nation ought not sit in judgment of the acts of another; it is quite another for five groups purporting to represent the interests of the Israeli government to advise that doing so in this case would be to declare open season on Israeli officials in US courts.

It is not without some irony that organizations claiming to represent Israel, a state conceived in the wake of unprecedented state-sponsored violence, find their wagon hitched to the cause of an alleged war criminal. Nor does the position square, at least not at first glance, with less expansive interpretations of sovereign immunity advanced by the lobby’s constituents in the past. Just this year, Israeli victims of rocket fire on the Lebanese border sued the Iranian government, by way of its central banks, on the theory that it provided material support to Hezbollah, the source of the rockets. Last December, a pro-Israel group in Europe sued leaders of Hamas in a Belgium court, invoking what it described as the court’s “universal” jurisdiction over cases arising from war crimes. In both cases, sovereign immunity was an obstacle standing between Israeli interests and a favorable judgment; here, in Samantar’s case, supporters of Israel invoke it as a shield.

In fact, Israel is far more likely to find itself on the receiving end of a human rights suit. According to one report, nearly 1,000 suits have been filed globally against Israeli officials and military personnel alleging war crimes and other abuses. The defense ministry expects some 1,500 more will follow, many stemming from military operations in the coastal territories, but also some taking aim at the less violent aspects of Israeli anti-terror strategy, including one suit describing the security fence as a “crime against humanity.” An Israeli newspaper published a “wanted” list of current and former officials who are among the common named defendants. The list, which was republished in briefs to the Court, reads like a who’s who in Israeli political and military history. The forums for these suits vary, but they commonly feature developed Western countries that have lowered the drawbridge for human rights litigants. Steering many of the cases are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), some based in the Middle East with ties to the Palestinian government, others based in the West and backed by the likes of the Center for Constitutional Rights and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

In these suits supporters of Israel see pretext. They describe a more sinister objective, a coordinated effort to bring Israeli officials into federal courtrooms. The idea is to delegitimize Israel, but not before dragging officials through an invasive and costly discovery process. Do it enough and Israeli officials will start thinking twice before traveling to the United States, or, worse yet, before assuming roles that could expose them to suit. Defense experts believe the strategy fits the definition of “lawfare,” think-tank speak for the use of legal methods to achieve military goals.

In the immediate term, the briefs warn, relations between the US and Israel will suffer. Like any partnership, the US/Israeli alliance benefits from a rich and ongoing exchange of people and ideas. For the exchange to thrive, current and former Israeli officials must be able to travel to and within the United States without fear of being served with a lawsuit. By way of illustration, the American Jewish Congress recounts the story of Moshe Ya’alon, a retired Israeli general who was recently summoned to court upon arriving in Washington, D.C. for a think tank forum. The complaint, which sought damages for civilian deaths resulting from a battle on the Lebanese border between Israel and Hezbollah, was perfunctory. With respect to Ya’alon, it alleged only that he served in the army chain-of-command during the relevant period. The district court dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds and the D.C. Circuit affirmed, concluding that the immunity of a foreign state extends to its former officials. Ya’alon never had to step foot in a courtroom. Now suppose that instead of Washington, he had been served with the suit 15 minutes away, in Arlington, Virginia. In that event the dismissal of his suit would have been appealed to the Fourth Circuit, which, as we learned in Samantar’s case, does not share the D.C. Circuit’s view on official immunity. In other words, had Ya’alon booked a hotel across the river, he might well still be there today.

A Statutory Nightmare

Naturally, US-Israeli relations didn’t figure into the Supreme Court’s questioning at oral arguments. The justices had assembled to resolve a disagreement among the federal circuit courts over whether sovereign immunity extends to officials. Accordingly, they trained their focus on Samantar and his theory of the case, which rests on the off-stated maxim that one equal has no dominion over another equal. That this saying, which encapsulates the principle of sovereign immunity, is most commonly recited in Latin suggests something about its vintage. It is as close to a truism as a proposition can come in a foggy discipline like international law, and it is an animating principle of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA). That law changed the way US courts process suits against foreign governments. Before 1976, a court needed the go-ahead from the State Department before docketing such cases. When this approach proved unwieldy, Congress vested gate-keeping authority in the federal courts and then cabined it by stripping them of jurisdiction over suits against foreign states that don’t fit within a narrow set of exceptions.

Until recently it was generally accepted that these same protections applied to foreign officials. After all, a suit against a foreign official acting on behalf of a state is effectively a suit against the state. True, the caption may list the Minister of Defense rather than the Ministry of Defense, and the plaintiff may have his sights set on a personal bank account rather than the national treasury, but in either case the court is sitting in judgment of the state’s actions. It has intuitive appeal, this idea. It also has the support of the majority of the federal circuits.

But as the Fourth Circuit pointed out below, the argument is without support in the one place it needs it most–the text of the FSIA. FSIA extends sovereign immunity to “foreign states” as well as their “agencies and instrumentalities”, but it remains conspicuously silent on the matter of foreign officials. For supporters of broad immunity, this omission is proof that the identity of interests between a foreign sovereign and its officials is self-evident. Congress, they argue, had no reason to split hairs, to try to distinguish the indistinguishable. Opponents, who harbor a less attenuated view, insist that if Congress wanted to extend immunity to foreign officials, it would have said so.

The theory that foreign officials are immune from suit encounters an more mystifying problem in the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), a federal law that permits victims of state-sponsored torture to bring suit in the United States against culpable foreign officials. The TVPA is one of the statutes supplying the cause of action in the suit against Samantar, but that’s not why it’s important. Rather, as Justice Kennedy pointed out during oral arguments, the text of the TVPA appears to make a mockery of the proposition that foreign officials are never amenable to suit in U.S courts. To read the law any other way would be to watch it evaporate, an entire congressional enactment rendered useless, leaving torture victims a right without a remedy. The Court, Justice Kennedy reminds, is not in the business of reading entire statutes out of existence.

Supporters of immunity for foreign officials counter that allowing the case to proceed against Samantar would be just as devastating for FSIA. As a preoccupation of Justice Breyer’s, this argument soaked up a fair amount of the Court’s time. The consensus is that opening officials to suit would allow litigants to undermine the intent of the FSIA without actually violating it. In Ya’alon’s case, instead of suing the Ministry of Defense, a lawyer with his wits about him would simply name Ya’alon, the former head of army intelligence, and the suit would survive. “What you are saying,” Breyer concluded, “is that FSIA is only good against a bad lawyer.”

Hedging, counsel for the plaintiffs reminded the Court that jurisdiction is not the only hurdle between a foreign official and liability. Once a plaintiff establishes jurisdiction, there are other age-old immunity doctrines that shield foreign officials from suit. There is the head of state doctrine, for instance, which protects current and former leaders from prosecution and civil liability, or the doctrine of diplomatic immunity, a similar, if more controversial, safeguard for diplomats and their staff. But there is no small difference between immunity from suit and immunity from liability. To have the former without the latter is to have comfort without convenience; it is, so to speak, the difference between putting up and showing up.

The Supreme Court is thus left to choose between two seemingly impossible outcomes. Extend sovereign immunity to foreign officials and the Torture Victim Protection Act is gutted, along with U.S. credibility in the human rights community. Expose them to suit and make hash of one of the core objectives of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act—saving key allies the expense and embarrassment of defending national security decisions in US courts. To the extent possible, courts generally try to read conflicting statutes in a way that gives effect to both. But even with so much hanging in the balance, coexistence between the TVPA and the FSIA appears impossible. Unimpressed and evidently undecided, the justices took the case under advisement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sam Singer is a 2009 graduate of Emory Law School and a Staff Law Clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. His commentaries on law and politics have appeared in various publications, including The Beachwood Reporter and Culturekiosque.com. He has also reported and written articles for The Chicago Tribune and Market News International.

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The Justice and Accountability Commission (formerly the Debaathification Commission), headed by Ahmad Chalabi, is moving to disqualify 6 elected candidates in the March 7 election for their ties to the banned Baath Party of Saddam Hussein. Three of those to be banned are from the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi, which would reduce his seat total from 91 to 88, making his list second in number of seats after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition, which has 89 seats. The move, by commission head Ahmad Chalabi (himself an elected MP on the fundamentalist Shiite list, the Iraqi National Alliance), will cause a lot of anger among Sunni Arabs, the main backers of Allawi’s list, along with secular middle class urban Shiites.

Were the Iraqiya list to be altogether excluded from the government as a result of this move, I would worry about a resort to violence on the part of the list’s voters, even though I do not think a revival of a full-scale Sunni-Shiite civil war is very likely.

This further wrinkle in the Iraqi election outcome underlines how unwise is the rush among American pundits, mainly on the political Right, to declare the election a vindication of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Hey, warmongers: get it through your heads. You went to war on the grounds that Iraq was a grave danger to the US and might even nuke us. That was untrue and ridiculous. You don’t get any mulligans in the invasion game. Nothing would vindicate Bush save proof that Saddam Hussein’s regime was really dangerous to the US. It wasn’t. It had bupkes in the way of WMD. Iraqis will eventually live normal lives and get rich. That won’t vindicate Bush either. He lied to us repeatedly and illegally invaded another country, contravening the UN charter and a whole slew of international and even domestic US laws. There is no vindication. But the unseemly backstabbing and maneuvering of fundamentalists, ex-Baathists, Iranian double agents and CIA assets in Iraq now is certainly not it.

Al-Hayat writing in Arabic reports that commission official Ali al-Lami let it slip that one of those to be disqualified is Hamdi Najm, leader of the National Dialogue Front in Diyala Province, who is currently in prison on terrorism charges. His party forms part of the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi. The disqualifications will be taken to court. But the courts sided with the Justice and Accountability Commission when it excluded candidates on these grounds in the lead-up to the election, so that avenue does not appear very promising.

But the move is not decisive in deciding the next prime minister, because who can form a government depends not on who has a plurality but on who can put together a governing coalition. It is true that the constitution requires the president to ask the leader of the single largest bloc to form a government. But if that person cannot, then another party leader would get the chance. The best analogy for Iraqi politics at the moment is Israel or Lebanon. In the 2009 parliamentary elections in Israel, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima gained 28 seats and Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud only got 27. But you will note that Netanyahu is prime minister, because Shas, Yisrael Beitenu and others preferred to ally with him rather than with Ms. Livni. (There is no accounting for tastes.)

I admit to a good deal of frustration with the corporate media in the United States that keeps talking about Iyad Allawi having “won” the Iraqi parliamentary elections. It just is not true. Apparently even some well informed and intelligent Americans can’t understand the difference between achieving a slight plurality and winning a parliamentary election. And, it is dangerous to say these things because the US press is read in Iraq and expectations are being created among Iraqis that are likely to be disappointed.

You need 163 seats to have a majority in the 325-member Iraqi parliament, so neither 91 nor 89 is a “win.” Rather, 163 is a win. Allawi did not win and has not won and probably won’t win.

The reason is that it is difficult to see how he gets to 163. He needs 72 more seats (or maybe 75 if the disqualifications go through). It is easier for al-Maliki’s list, if not al-Maliki himself, to get to 163 seats than it is for Allawi, since the fundamentalist Shiites have 70 seats and they under normal circumstances will find it easier to ally with Maliki’s Islamic Mission Party (Da’wa) than with the secular Arab nationalists and Sunnis that back Allawi.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that ‘informed sources’ told its reporters that Ali al-Adib, a leader of al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition, recently met Muqtada al-Sadr in Qom, Iran, though they have not yet closed a deal. Al-Sadr has 38 seats in parliament and his bloc is the largest single group of seats in the Shiite fundamentalist Iraqi National Alliance, which has 70 seats. Then, al-Maliki is said to have returned to Baghdad from Tehran, accompanied by al-Adib and Abdul Hamid al-Zuhairi (both from the State of Law list) and Jalal al-Din al-Saghir and Hadi al-Amiri of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Al-Maliki is said to have been among a big party of Iraqi officials in Tehran the day before yesterday. They went there, al-Hayat said, because there was too much danger of being listened in on in Iraq. Presumably what is actually being asserted here is that the US has sophisticated signals intelligence and has widely tapped phones, so that in Baghdad any attempt at coalition-formation would be immediately picked up by US intelligence. Since the US is widely thought to be backing Allawi’s secular Iraqiya list, it would be undesirable from al-Maliki’s point of view for them to overhear his negotiations with other lists. Thus, they went off to Iran.

Al-Hayat’s source says that Muqtada al-Sadr demonstrated flexibility, and demanded in return for dropping his objection to al-Maliki the release of all prisoners from his movement, and undertakings that al-Maliki would not attempt to rule single-handedly. He also wanted an agreement that al-Maliki would be fired if he attempted to overstep the decided-upon course of action of the party. A Sadrist leader, Qusay Suhail, refused to comment on the Iran story, but did allow as how the Sadrists had met with representatives of al-Maliki’s State of Law. The source said that so far in the negotiations the Kurdistan Alliance and the Sadr Movement have declined to put forward an alternative candidate for prime minister. So far al-Maliki is the only candidate from the Shiite parties, “and we did not sense any opposition to him.” In contrast, cleric Jalal al-Din Saghir of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq insisted that ISCI would definitely put forward a prime ministerial candidate. (ISCI is actually too small to follow through on Saghir’s bluster.)

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, is expressing anxiety and concern over the meetings in Tehran, denouncing them as naked interference by a neighbor in Iraq’s internal affairs. He is also arguing that the next president of Iraq should be an Arab and not a Kurd. Al-Hashimi is a member of Allawi’s Iraqiya list, and his denunciation of the Shiites as cat’s paws of Iran and his urging that the Kurds be marginalized will have the unintended effect of making it much more difficult for Allawi to form a government, since he would need pro-Iran Shiites as well as Kurds to do so.

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FBI raids on the Hutaree Christian militia brought to light this formerly little-known group based in Adrian, Michigan.

Unlike the generally secular white supremacist organizations, Hutaree are explicitly Christians. Many seem to be millenarians, expecting the end of time to come soon. Like the so-called Patriot Movement, they are gun nuts. They are said to be organized to kill the Antichrist, and some reports say that they planned violence against American Muslims.

Polling shows that about 1/4 of members of the Republican Party believe that President Obama is the Antichrist, and one fears that Hutaree may agree.

Irregular times has a good overview of their beliefs, which include secession from the US and return to colonial times, perhaps in preparation for another revolution. (Will they have to register in South Carolina?). Some are antinomians, rejecting US laws. They fear a liberal ‘new world order.’

Fox Cable News and Rupert Murdoch bear some responsibility for such groups. When Glenn Beck tosses around a charge like ‘anti-Christ’ at a prominent liberal, he knows that term is an incitement for militant Christians. And the years of rabid Fox promotion of hatred of US Muslims is bound to get someone among them killed– and is therefore murder by television.

I am struck that Hutaree has a great deal in common with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq. The Hutaree militia seems to recruit from the poor or lower middle class. Michigan’s real unemployment rate is said to be 17%, and for many Michigan workers there have been years of hopelessness and joblessness, inducing despair and anger. The Mahdi Army likewise drew on Iraqi unemployed and angry youth. Many Sadrists believe that the Mahdi or Muslim messiah will soon come, perhaps accompanied by the return of Christ. The Mahdi Army has sometimes targeted Christian video or liquor shops, as a symbol of the oppressive other (yes, that is unfair to Iraqi Christians but they had the misfortune to be W.’s co-religionists.). The Hutaree, a mirror image, target Muslims. The Mahdi Army considered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the Dajjal or anti-Christ. Both have an unhealthy interest in firearms for political intimidation of others. The Hutaree fear the United Nations, as the Mahdi Army fears the US occupation. (Muslim radical groups often also hate the UN.)

Both groups are victims of a neoliberal world order that uses and discards working people, while protecting and cushioning the super-wealthy. Instead of a rational analysis of exploitatation, however, they are responding with emotion and symbol, projecting their economic and political alienation on other religious or ethnic groups (the Mahdi Army ethnically cleansed tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims from Baghdad in the name of anti-imperialism. They resort to irrational conspiracy theories, to religion and guns. Admitedly, the Mahdi Army is somewhat more rational, since they really do face foreign occupation, though their targeting of Sunnis instead of forming a nationalist front was highly dysfunctional.

The US press is saying the Hutaree people are a Christian “militia” but is avoiding calling them ‘alleged Christian terrorists.” Apparently only organized Muslim radicals can now be called terrorists.

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Christopher Anzalone writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment entitled, “The Islamic State of Iraq’s Positions on Iraqi National Elections: The Continuing Decline of a Self-styled Jihadi State:”

On February 12, the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) released an audio message from its shadowy amir (leader), Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi, lambasting the country’s then yet-to-be-held national elections. Al-Baghdadi, who has never appeared on film, has released numerous audio messages via the ISI’s media outlet, the Al-Furqan Media Foundation. The ISI is an umbrella organization for several of the most violent jihadi-takfiri insurgent groups operating in the country, the largest of them being Al-Qa ‘ida in the Land of the Two Rivers/Iraq (AQI), which was founded by the late Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi. Founded in October 2006 as the successor to the Mujahideen Shura Council, the ISI has seen its fortunes decline since late 2007, following the United States military’s “surge” and the emergence of the so-called “Awakening Councils” from among many of Iraq’s Sunni Arab tribes. The ISI’s response to the recently-held Iraqi national elections is a further sign of its decline since the “golden age” of the Iraqi insurgency from 2003 to 2007.

In his audio message, “The Political and Religious Crime of ‘Elections’ and Our Duty Towards It,” al-Baghdadi alleges that because they are predicated on the sovereignty of the people, elections are in contradiction to Islamic law (Shari‘a). He says, “The ideology of democratic elections cannot be separated from the idea that sovereignty is for the people, while the fundamental principle of our creed and religion is that supremacy is for Islam. The sovereignty of the people in the parliamentary electorate system means that the people, each in their own respective region, are given authority every four years to delegate or choose a person who then becomes a member of the parliament…he legislates laws which pleases the people, even if they oppose Allah’s ruling in the matter.”

The ISI amir also repeats his usual litany of polemics against Shi‘i Muslims, which is characteristic of many of his messages. Al-Baghdadi says that the Iraqi national elections are only a ploy by “Crusaders” (primarily the U.S.) to empower Iraqi Shi‘is, whom he refers to as “Rafida” (Rejectionists), a popular derogatory term used by some Sunni Muslims, particularly Salafis, for Shi‘is, who they claim have rejected “true Islam.” His main target, however, are Iraqi Sunni political parties and politicians, whom he accuses of treachery because of their participation in the national government: “As for the traitors of Muslim Brotherhood, they are still as we know them. Their religion is a mix of self-benefit, lying and forgery. Here we see their leaders and figures, Tariq Al-Hashimi, Rafi Al-Isawi, Dhahir Al-Aani, Abdul-Kareem Al-Samarra’i, Salam Al-Zawbai, their tribes far distant from them!”…” The strange thing is that they all humiliatingly submitted themselves, and joined alliances led by the Rafidites! How strange that they claim to want to defend the Sunnis and their rights!”

Al-Baghdadi’s criticisms of Iraq’s elections are two-fold. First, as mentioned earlier, elections contradict Shari‘a, at least as the ISI interprets it. Second, he says that since Iraq’s Sunnis cannot possibly benefit from the elections, there is no point in participating in them. Despite the seeming absoluteness of the first, the ISI amir felt the need to also mention the more practical reason for non-participation, perhaps because he knew that a blanket rejection had less chance of succeeding.

The ISI, perhaps worrying that al-Baghdadi’s dire warning against participation was not enough to keep Iraqi Sunnis from voting, released a “very important statement” on March 5, the Friday before the March 7 elections. In it, the ISI’s “ministry of information” announced the imposition of a “curfew over all Sunni provinces” during election day, March 7, warning that those who did not abide by the curfew would bear the consequences. True to its word, the ISI carried out sporadic attacks on March 7, many of them targeting Iraqi Sunnis.

Although it remains a dangerous force, as evidenced by multiple massive attacks on government ministries and other buildings in Baghdad, the ISI is no longer able to carry out widespread insurgency. Between 2004 and the first half of 2007, AQI and its allies were able to carry out numerous attacks on a daily basis, from relatively small-scale ambushes and sniper attacks to massive car bombings and other kamikaze operations. Today, the ISI is no longer capable of carrying out attacks nearly as frequently as it could two and three years ago. Instead, it has forgone frequency for potency, focusing its efforts on planning large-scale attacks such as the ones in Baghdad during the past eight months, which the ISI has dubbed the “Expedition/Raid of the Prisoner.”

Al-Baghdadi also repeats his call for all Sunni insurgent groups to unite under the ISI’s banner. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the chief ideologue and deputy leader of Al-Qa‘ida Central (AQC) has made similar calls, including one in a 2007 video interview, produced by AQC’s media outlet, the Al-Sahab (The Clouds) Media Foundation, to Ansar al-Islam, one of the country’s largest and most potent insurgent groups. Both al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri have been ignored by the majority of Iraq’s insurgent groups, including Ansar al-Islam, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, and the religious-nationalist Islamic Army in Iraq. Al-Baghdadi continues to be the “commander of the believers”, the caliph, for only a very small group of insurgents, despite the ISI’s illusions of grandeur.

Despite its rhetoric, the ISI’s handling of Iraq’s national elections is yet another sign of the group’s decreased power. Al-Baghdadi’s call for Sunnis to boycott was largely ignored. Decreased voter turnout during the March 7 elections was noticeable across central and southern Iraq, not only in Sunni Arab-majority provinces. Similarly, the ISI’s “curfew” was also largely ignored and the group carried out attacks on its own supposed support base. This clearly shows that the “golden age” of the self-styled “Islamic State” of Iraq has passed and, although it remains capable of carrying out lethal attacks, that it no longer poses a mortal threat to the Iraqi central government.

Christopher Anzalone
Graduate Program
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN

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