*The British are announcing that they have taken an important suburb of Basra, al-Qassib, after a fierce firefight with Iraqi military forces. This is said to have been the biggest battle of the war so far for the British troops. They have been infiltrating commandoes into the city for days to establish forward posts from which they can direct air strikes on the Republican Guards and Fedayeen Saddam. A couple of nights ago a team destroyed two statues of Saddam Hussein. Although the signs of progress at Basra are heartening for our side, one has to remember that two weeks ago the Pentagon was hoping to have the city in three days so that cheering crowds of liberated Shiites could be shown on television.

*What about hearts and minds? Andrew Buncombe is reporting in The Independent on interviews with Basrans at British checkpoints and he finds enormous anger against the British for besieging and bombing the city. One man said that it was "an occupation" and if Saddam's forces would give the citizenry weapons they would rise up to fight the invaders. One cannot know if this is a minority or majority view, of course. Another report suggests that the British are penetrating farther into Basra with the help of local civilians, though. And there was after all a neighborhood uprising against the Baath in one Basra neighborhood last week. But every indication is that a fair proportion of the populace is greeting this invasion rather sullenly. I have to say I am a little surprised that the Shiite South feels this way, if it does. They have been brutalized by the Baath. But Shiite Iraqis were always the most devoted to specifically Iraqi nationalism, and an imperialist invasion may be a hard thing for them to swallow, even if it does remove their tormentor.

*A further irony: Muslims in the Indian city of Lucknow demonstrated yesterday against the war, and the press interviews they gave show that some at least are Shiites. In the 1980s the Lucknow Sunnis and Shiites used to fight among themselves because the Sunnis were supporting Saddam and the Shiites were supporting Iran. Bush has managed to promote pan-Islamic sentiments of solidarity even in Lucknow!

*On the other hand, I have for a long time tried to warn that the Sunni Arabs, including the Republican Guard, would make a strong stand against the invaders. They are like the white farmers of Rhodesia--if the system falls, they are likely to lose everything to the majority Shiites and the newly autonomous Kurds, and they know it very well. The idea the Pentagon apparently had that a few bombs would make them hand over Saddam and give in was always unlikely.

*Iraq says 4000 Arab volunteers have arrived, planning to carry out suicide and other operations against the US. This number seems plausible to me. There have been reports of Saudi young men slipping across the border to help Iraq against the Americans, and the Pakistani fundamentalists have called for volunteers to go, as well. Some 500 fighters are alleged to have gone to Iraq from Lebanon's Baalbak region (which has a big Shiite/ Hizbullah population). The borders are porous, and the road from Amman to Baghdad is apparently still open, if awfully dangerous. Such volunteers do not pose a serious threat to Bradley tanks, but as Beirut demonstrated, they are a threat to sleeping Marines in their barracks. And, the psychological impact of such tactics can be profound. A recent poll finds that a majority of Americans oppose the war if US war dead reaches 5,000, and the same is true if 5,000 Iraqi civilians are killed. The lowness of the numbers at which Americans flip over to opposing the war suggests that the Pentagon would be well advised to spend some time figuring out how to prevent any more suicide bombings of our troops. (As for the number of Iraqi civilian deaths, it is likely to be rather more than 5000 if the Republican Guards withdraw into the residential neighborhoods; they are said to have watched the film Blackhawk Down a lot as their training manual.)

*It is not good news for the US that the Saudis have closed their airspace to US Tomahawk cruise missiles. These had been being fired at Iraq from US subs in the Red Sea. It is desirable for the US to be able to fire on targets from a variety of directions--too narrow an approach corridor for the missiles makes them less effective.

*Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi says Iran will not accept a US-installed government in Iraq. He also said that fears of Kurdish autonomy were shared by Iran, Turkey and Syria. There have been small government-backed demonstrations against the war in Tehran. President Khatami has criticized the US for acting like a big brother to the rest of the world.






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The US forces have recently begun bombing the Republican Guards near Baghdad, which some think is a sign that Iraq's air defenses have now been substantially degraded. Apache helicopters fly low, and are vulnerable to enemy anti-aircraft fire. The Iraqi regime had put in a sophisticated fiber optic system to link its anti-aircraft equipment, and one presumes that the bunker busting bombs recently dropped on strategic buildings in Baghdad aimed at disabling it. Unlike in Basra, the Republican Guards' tank corps have been drawn up outside the city, presumably because they felt they were under the umbrella of the anti-aircraft defenses. If it is true that the latter are largely disabled, one may see the tanks withdrawn into residential neighborhoods, and/or positioned near hospitals, schools and mosques, as happened at Basra and Nasiriya.

*A big meeting of 300 Iraqi dissidents (Independent Iraqis for Democracy) in London Saturday cheered wildly when Iraqi elder statesman Adnan Pachachi proclaimed that a US military administration of Iraq was "in no way acceptable." This meeting was an alternative to the Iraqi National Congress identified with Ahmad Chalabi. The Independent Iraqis for Democracy mainly consists of liberals, but the meeting included two prominent Shiite clergymen, Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum and Husayn al-Sadr. The problem for the US is that the military campaign was planned far more meticulously than the aftermath. The Bush administration seems to be afraid that if it turns Iraq over quickly to a provisional government, one would see a situation similar to Afghanistan, plagued by warlords and lacking central authority. But I think it will find that the proposed alternative, of an American military and then civilian government of the country, is even more problematic--and that it will be targeted by Iraqi suicide bombers and prove extremely unpopular with nationalist Iraqis, even those opposed to Saddam.

*The suicide bombing that killed four US troops near Najaf Saturday is a very bad sign. The US is planning to have a very large footprint in Iraq for many years to come, and so may face such bombings as a constant threat. Worse, civilians here in the homeland may end up being targeted, as threatened by Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan: "I am sure that the day will come when a single martyrdom operation will kill 5,000 enemies. The Iraqi people have a legal right to deal with the enemy with any means." Actually, such warnings from the Iraqi Baath party are probably empty, since it is about to cease to exist. The real danger remains al-Qaeda and similar radical Islamist organizations. One worries that Iraqi Sunnis, having been disappointed by the failure of nationalist secularism, may turn to radical Islamism as an alternative. That is what happened to some Egyptians after Abdel Nasser was defeated in 1967. In a sense there is a straight line from 1967 to September 11, 2001. Likewise, there is a menace from jihadi volunteers flocking to Iraq to attack the Americans there. Ramadan said, "Thousands of volunteers and fedayeen (martyrdom fighters) are coming into Iraq and major contingents of these volunteers will be seen in the coming days."

*The Guardian reports that Jay Garner, who is to administer Iraqi reconstruction on behalf of the US, "is president of Virginia-based SY Coleman, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications, which provides technical services and advice on the Patriot missile system being used in Iraq. Patriot was made famous in the 1991 Gulf war when it was used to protect Israeli and Saudi targets from attack by Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles. Garner was involved in the system's deployment in Israel." This background is raising alarums at the UN and elsewhere about his suitability for the high profile post of US Proconsul of Iraq (can the Iraqis really warm to someone who was so closely involved in developing the weapons that have killed so many of them?) I mentioned other reasons for which Garner's appointment would be a disaster a couple of days ago (scroll down)

*The Islamic Action Council, the ruling party in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, is going ahead with plans to implement a Taliban-style form of Muslim law as the law of the land in that province. Since its members trained the Taliban, this development is not surprising. One wonders, though, whether the NWFP voters really had this in mind when they voted against the traditionally dominant parties in last October's election. Personally, I think the Federal government should step in to stop the implementation of a medieval interpretation of shariah (Islamic law) in one province. This must be unconstitutional in some way. It is ironic that the main US response to September 11 has been a) to put the fundamentalist Jami`at-i Islami in charge of Afghanistan; b) to preside over the rise to dominance in NWFP and Baluchistan of the teachers of the Taliban; and c) to destroy one of the few secularist regimes in the region, Baathism in Iraq.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The British forces ringing Basra have called on civilians to leave the city. Many are walking to Basra, 12 miles away, in search of water. The British would ideally like to empty the city of 1.2 million so as to have a clear shot at the Baathist forces that remain behind. The water situation is apparently become unbearable in the city. It seems to me a little unlikely that over a million civilians can be evacuated under these conditions, and it also seems increasingly likely that a British assault on Basra will be forced to target Baath troops who have nestled in residential areas. This could get very ugly, and the scenarios the Pentago hoped for of joyous Basrans dancing in the streets to be relieved of Saddam are unlikely ever to be realized. Washington though Iraq would be like Afghanistan. The two are not comparable. Iraq is a modern industrialized country, if beaten down by the sanctions, and the Baath is a sophisticated political party, quite unlike the Taliban. One is always fighting the last war, and always making mistakes because of that.

*According to the wire services, the Shiite uprising in Basra was very limited and was quickly repressed by Baath forces. An spokesman for Iraqi Shiites said that "there had been up a civilian uprising in the main southern city of Basra, but said it affected only one working class neighborhood. “The uprising, which was limited to this neighborhood, took place after coalition forces bombed government positions,” Akram Hakim, an official of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), told Al-Jazeera. He said the situation remained “explosive” yesterday morning in Basra. " When Shiites in Basra rose up against Saddam in spring of 1991 after the first Gulf War, the US stood by while the Baath brutally repressed them, so they have reason to hold back this time.

*The heavy fighting by US forces and the Republican Guard near Najaf has all knowledgeable observers worried that the US may accidentally inflict damage on this holy Shiite city, home of the shrine to Imam `Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. Such incidents could ultimately affect the attitude toward the US war in Iraq of the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran, not to mention the Shiites of Bahrain (who form a majority of the population there; it is home to the US naval fleet in the Gulf) and Lebanon. Even the Hazara Shiites of Afghanistan, so far allies of the US, could be alienated if things go wrong in Najaf.

*Speaking of Shiites, the 15,000 trained fighters of the anti-Saddam al-Badr Brigade have so far not shown up as a factor in the war. A report out of Pakistan recently suggested that the Iranians, who are the hosts of the Badr Brigade, have thrown up barriers to the infiltration of these troops into Iraq. There had earlier been reports of Brigade fighters slipping into Kurdistan in the north. The Iranians, whose Revolutionary Guards held a rally on the Iran-Iraq border yesterday, so far appear to want to be perceived as neutral. They hate Saddam, who attacked Iran in 1980 and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iranian war dead. But they also deeply distrust the US and are afraid they are being surrounded with a view to the eventual overthrow by the US of the current Iranian government. The political wing of the Badr Brigades, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has had an up and down relationship with the US war effort. They seemed to be supporting it last summer and fall. But when National Security Council point man on Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad began talking about a US military and then civilian administration of Iraq after the war, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, a SCIRI leader, called him a bully. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI has recently as much as said that SCIRI would use military force to oppose any long-term US presence in Iraq. I think the Arabic word for quagmire is probably al-mustanqa`. Washington will probably have to learn to pronounce it.

*Mark Sedra in Foreign Policy in Focus is arguing that the lessons of Afghanistan for Iraq policy are depressing. There have been 400 attacks on US and Afghan security in the past year, and most of the country is ruled by warlords. [Reporters without Borders is issuing a report critical of the harsh crackdown on the press in Ismail Khan's Herat.] The donor aid promised at Tokyo has often not actually been forthcoming, and was in any case an vast underestimate of the actual need. It looks increasingly as though Iraq's infrastructure is going to be severely damaged by the US war. I can only think that the US did not initially use air power to inflict heavy attrition on Iraqi conventional forces outside Baghdad because they hoped against hope that they could decapitate the regime and retain an Iraqi military for the future. Since, however, the Baath and the Republican Guards are standing firm, it seems less and less likely that there will be much salvageable from the bureaucracy and military for reconstruction purposes after the war. So, restoring and maintaining security, and rebuilding the bureaucracy and the country are going to be slow and very expensive.

*



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The British are asserting that there has been a popular revolt in Basra against the Republican Guards and other forces loyal to Saddam. The Iraqi government has denied the report. The British also say that the Iraqi military is firing mortars on the rebels. Since the British can pinpoint the origin of mortar fire, they have been using this activity to target the Republican Guards mortar positions, so as to help the rebellion. I wonder myself if the "rebellion" isn't being in part led by Special Forces agents infiltrated into the city. It is also possible that elements of SCIRI (the Shiite "Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) from the Badr Brigade have slipped into the city from Iran. A Basra rebellion would not be impossible. It happened on a large scale in 1991, and there were also disturbances later in the 1990s, especially when Grand Ayatollah Sadr was assassinated by Saddam. But Basrans would also remember that the US hung them out to dry in 1991 and let Saddam crush them. They will be wary, and their friendliness to the British cannot be assumed.

*My analysis of the Iraqi strategy is that it is similar to what Sadat did in 1973. Ariel Sharon left lots of Egyptian forces in his rear as he raced to encircle Cairo. That is similar to what the US forces are doing. But Sadat won the peace by getting the UN security council (especially the Soviet Union, which reportedly threatened to intervene) to insist on a cease-fire. Saddam has already gotten a condemnation of the war from the Arab League and is seeking one from the Security Council. The difference is that this time the Russian successors to the Soviet Union are weak and economically dependent on the US, and won't go to the mat for Saddam. So, the strategy will almost certainly fail, but the parallel seems to me striking.

From a discussion on a list about how the war in Iraq is going:

Military analysts have for some time been nervous about the Rumsfeld plan to start the war before all units were in place. A lot of analysts, including Wesley Clark, cannot understand why the equipment for the Fourth Army Infantry was left in ships off Turkey long after it seemed obvious that they were not going to be allowed to be positioned on Turkish soil. These are now being moved to Kuwait. They worried that things could go badly wrong in the meantime. They have. It may be that some units are being held in reserve for the north, but if so that still means they cannot be used in the south, which continues as far as I can see to be in a condition of chaos.

Speaking of the Suez Canal, one remarkable development is the widespread
calls among Egyptians, especially leftists and Islamists, for Egypt to deny
use of the Canal to the U.S. Since Camp David in 1978, I have never seen
this degree of rage and anti-US feeling in Egypt, and one worries that the
Canal can probably be stopped up with a well-executed terrorist attack on
an oil tanker.

The good news for the Anglo-American forces that they have completely
secured Umm Qasr, as the British spokesman claims, is surely offset by the
fact that Umm Qasr is a dinky little port town near Kuwait that a massive
invading force should not have had any trouble securing immediately in the
first place. What I read in the press was that the British were being
pinned down by as few as 100 Iraqi soldiers. This is very bad news for the
Anglo-American side, since Iraq has lots of bunches of 100 soldiers.
Likewise, al-Nasiriya has been the site of numerous anti-Saddam uprisings,
and should not have been so hard to take.

This is not to mention the very bad news indeed that Republican Guards
units have positioned their artillery and tanks in civilian neighborhoods
of Basra and have forced the British to withdraw from the city. Despite
earlier Pentagon promises, Basra's electricity and water purification have
been knocked out, and civilians are getting shelled. Presumably some of
the food shipments coming in to Umm Qasr would be for Basra, which the
British do not hold.

And, what is to stop the same thing from happening in Baghdad? If it does,
what will that do to world public opinion? So far the US and British look
like British redcoats, marching in straight lines and annoyed that the
colonists are not playing fair. If substantial numbers of the 300,000
Iraqi troops turn guerrilla fighters and stand their ground against the
invaders, this could be a disaster.

My analysis is not meant to support an anti-war or pro-war position. Like
most people, I have mixed feelings about all this (I despise the Baath
Party).


Replying to someone who asserted that Iraqi Shiites remained loyal to their clergymen in the 1980s, not to their nation:

The notion that most Iraqi Shiites have the sort of relationship to their "source for emulation" that is common in Iran is erroneous. Rural Iraqi Shiites in the South for the most part have a fairly recent (18th-19th centuries) past as pastoralists and the Iranian type of Shiism that foregrounded trained clerics and jurisprudents was important only in a few urban settings (the Shrine Cities of Najaf and Karbala e.g.) which incidentally had large Iranian heritage populations (most of whom were deported by Saddam).

Iraqi Shiites most certainly did stay loyal to the Iraqi nation during the Iran-Iraq war. They were throughout the 20th century among the main proponents of an *Iraqi* nationalism as distinct from pan-Arabism (in which they would have been swamped in a sea of Sunnis). I suspect that a lot of the Marsh Arabs (500,000 of the Shiites until the ethnic cleansing and swamp-draining of the 90s) couldn't have told you which jurisprudent they emulated, and if they named one it would have been pro forma--they wouldn't actually know his rulings.

The late Hanna Batatu actually figured out the ratio per person of mullas in Iran and Iraq, and found it vanishingly small in Iraq.



from a discussion on a list about the origins of radical Islamism:

The strain of thought we are considering is properly thought of as
neo-Kharijism. The Kharijite sect in early Islam was trigger-happy about
declaring people who did not agree with their ways of doing things to be
non-Muslims. A Kharijite declared Ali, the first Imam of the Shiites and
the Fourth Caliph of the Sunnis, to be a non-Muslim and assassinated him
as such. In contrast, the Sunni tradition frowned on kicking anyone out of
the Muslim community for any but the most egregious crimes or heresies.
If one acknowledges the 4 Orthodox Caliphs and a few other simple principle,
you can be an ex-con and still be a Sunni Muslim. The Kharijites tolerated
no slight deviance from their orthodoxies and ideas of morality.

The temptation to revive a Kharijite mindset (I am not arguing for actual
historical influence) was particularly strong in British India, where many
Muslims were converts from Hinduism and/or retained Hindu usages, and
where many Muslims learned English and/or worked for British firms or the
British government. In addition, 18th and 19th century South Asian Islam
was highly influenced by Shiism via the impact of Safavid and Qajar Iran.
Those hardline Sunni Muslims threatened by what they saw as departures
from pristine Islam were thus tempted to declare the hinduized or iranized
or britishized Muslims to be actually non-Muslims altogether. Among the
major such streams in North Indian Islam with this attitude was that of
Sayyid Ahmad Rai-Barelvi in the 1820s and 1830s, whose movement the
British dubbed "wahhabism" by analogy. This British confusion has
confused generations of researchers; the two are not related and are very
dissimilar in many ways.

Maududi in my view simply gave a modernist cast to Sayyid Ahmad
Rai-Barelvi's approach. Sayyid Qutb imported many of Maududi's ideas into
Arabic. So there is a complex international Islamist web of neo-Kharijism
going back to the 19th century, which is highly intertwined with the
history of Western colonialism in the Muslim world.

The connection between Sayyid Qutb and Saudi Arabia goes right back to the
1960s. The Saudis clandestinely gave aid to the Muslim Brotherhood,
including its Qutbist wing, as a way of undermining their enemy, the
secular nationalist & socialist Abdel Nasser. Abdel Nasser succeeded in
cracking back down on the revival of the Brotherhood in the early to
mid-1960s, which had militant overtones and openly discussed assassinating
him. In 1965-66 the plot was busted up, with hundreds (some say
thousands) of arrests, and that was the occasion of Sayyid Qutb's
execution. There is every reason to think that the would-be assassins of
Abdel Nasser were at the least inspired by his work, and the connection
could have been even tighter.

Some of the survivors of the 1965-66 crackdown among the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt managed to escape to Saudi Arabia--which had been
their patron--where they became prime conduits for the spread of Qutbist
ideology. As Dick Norton notes, Sayyid Qutb's brother was among these.
Thus, the mere conservative Machiavellianism of the Saudi leadership in
using the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical wings against Abdel
Nasser blew back on them insofar as those chickens came home to roost.

Nowadays Saudi ministers and princes (well, I've been redundant) routinely
denounce the Muslim Brotherhood as political in a way the Wahhabis never
were.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*I saw an interview by a journalist with some Kurds in the North of Iraq who were complaining about the US invasion of Iraq and bombardment of Baghdad. They said Bush had not gotten UN backing for the war, and so it was illegitimate. They also said they did not like seeing Muslims die at the hands of foreigners. Now, these Kurds were the victims of a virtual genocide in the late 1980s and again in 1991 by Saddam. They only have what freedom and prosperity they have because of the US no-fly zone. Yet, even they are finding this war hard to stomach. Their mention of the UN is remarkable. President Bush and his coterie, who despise the United Nations, have no idea what political legitimacy consists of, and are unable to imagine how much they lost in not working harder at diplomacy with the Security Council members.

*It is amazing how little of the war one can see on the US networks and cable news. The US public is being carefully sheltered from the more gruesome scenes of civilian dead that are splashed all over the Arab media. While I don't urge it for its own sake, an adult acknowledgment that these bombs are killing someone and blowing the tops of heads off would just be fair journalism. I watch a lot of the cable news, and it is antiseptic. This outcome is ironic because Fox Cable News in particular is always huffing and puffing and warmongering, but when it comes to actually covering war they give us safe retired colonels pointing at maps. The difference in the images being shown the audiences is widening the gap in perceptions of the war. The US audience thinks it is pretty fireworks on Saddam's palaces. The Arabs think it is about little boys lacking the back of their heads.

*Reuters says that as of early morning 3/25 the port of Umm Qasr is still not secure. There are lots of Iraqi soldiers running about in guerrilla fashion shooting at the British troops there. One report I saw seemed to say that only 100 Iraqi troops were holding down the British force allotted to Umm Qasr. This ratio does not sound promising to me, since Iraq still probably has 3000 such groups of 100. The way in which Iraqi forces are employing guerrilla tactics is unexpected, at least to me--one always thought of them as a Russian-style tank army with little battlefield flexibility. I have to say that I am a little surprised that no Shiite units have come over to the US side to fight the Republican Guard. Apparently the Shiite conscripts are just going home and changing into civilian clothes, in some numbers.

*The water situation in Basra is becoming dire. Shelling has knocked out its electricity and thus its water treatment plants. (The Pentagon said they were going to avoid doing this to the urban population this time.) We could see outbreaks of cholera there if the people don't get access to clean water soon. British troops are said to have withdrawn from Basra altogether, "to regroup." They had at one point surrounded the city, but were pushed away by mortar fire and fire from soldiers in civilian dress. The Iraqi soldiers have moved their artillery batteries and tanks into residential districts, using innocent Iraqi civilians as shields. The British have been astonished at the fight the people of Basra have put up against them. To be fair, it is not clear that it is the people of Basra who are fighting so much as the Republican Guards stationed there. People in Safwan near the Kuwaiti border are saying that the British decision not to enter the town has left them at risk for reprisals from Saddam's agents inside it. At Zubayr, as well, there was rocket fire. And al-Nasiriya has not been cleared of snipers. Some reports coming from the ranks suggest that British and American casualties at al-Nasiriya are higher than the 10 admitted.

*What is to stop the Republican Guard at Baghdad from using the same tactics that have proved so successful in Basra? If they did that, the US would face the choice of inflicting very heavy civilian casualties or of backing off.








For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*As usual in war reporting, I already have to take back some of what I said yesterday. It seems increasingly clear that the Bush administration rushed into war with Iraq before its military was really ready. All the forces have been thrown against Baghdad, to which they have raced, leaving the Shiite south insecure. Rear-guard battles have had to be fought at Umm Qasr, Basra and al-Nasiriya even after those cities were thought to have been neutralized. Looting and internal fighting between Saddam loyalists and locals appear to have become endemic in these cities. US forces had to fight two "sharp" battles at al-Nasiriya, a city they have now decided to skirt. We lost nine of our boys there, probably to Republican Guard units positioned to keep the Shiites down. The British are still only at the southern outskirts of Basra. The Rumsfeld plan of "rolling' deployment, such that further reinforcements are on their way to Kuwait even after the war began, seems to have gone badly astray, denying the US anything like effective control of the South.

Quite apart from the deleterious military implications of this vacuum, it has potentially severe humanitarian implications. The Fourth Geneva Convention requires the US to provide security to areas under its military occupation, which is obviously cannot do at the moment. And, Iraqi food stocks are reportedly down to only 6 weeks worth. Unless Umm Qasr can be quickly secured and the roads be made safe, so that food aid can be shipped in, one could see hunger develop in some parts of Iraq. The war is already interfering with the harvesting of winter crops and the planting of spring ones. Some 60% of Iraqis are dependent on outside food aid because of the "food for oil" program under UN sanctions against Saddam.

*An estimated 70,000 marched against the US war in Lahore, Pakistan (vastly exaggerated numbers ten times that were floated by the organizers, though AP said it was 200,000. Crowds are easy to over-estimate). The fundamentalist religious leaders denounced the Iraq war as a crime against humanity and a plot against Islam. The Iraq war is universally unpopular in Pakistan, as in most of the Muslim world. The difference is that with the return to quasi-parliamentary government, Pakistan has not attempted to prevent these demonstrations, which so far have been peaceful. If 200,000 Egyptians or Jordanians could come out for rallies, they certainly would. There are two big dangers here. One is that the fundamentalists will parlay their leadership of the protests into genuine national political standing and ultimately manage to come to power. (These people are unrepentent supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda). The other is that anti-Americanism will become so widespread and vehement that the Pakistani government will find it difficult to continue cooperating in the war on terror. The Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes think you can have your cake and eat it, too. I am not so sure.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Basra fell early Sunday morning EST, Sunday afternoon Baghdad time. Actually what appears to have happened was that the largely British force surrounding the city negotiated its surrender with the Iraqi army officials. The bulk of the British forces, supported by US Marines, has now headed north for Baghdad. Had the Baathist military put up a fight, it could have tied the British down and made them shell the city even more extensively than they did, maybe even entice them into deadly house to house fighting. By surrendering they gave a huge lift to the Anglo-British war effort. We all expected that the Shiite South would not be so hard to take, but the speed with which it has fallen, and the relative lack of fight it has put up, exceeds expectations. There have been a few "decent" firefights, at Umm Qasr, Nasiriya, and around Basra. But all three urban areas have fallen, despite pockets of resistance. Indeed, the victory has been so fast and so extensive that some worry it will leave chaos in its wake. Apparently there has already been a good deal of looting and disorder inside Basra, and this disorder could spread as the bulk of the US and British forces head to Baghdad. According to the Washington Post, however, some in the administration welcome the civil turmoil, hoping it will initiate an era of de-Baathification. I just hope we don't have another Panama on our hands, when the mission to capture Manuel Noriega was so badly thought out that it plunged the city into a paroxysm of looting. In contrast to the occasional fighting in the South where the British are, the fighter jets bombing Saddam's palaces and other targets have reportedly been astonished at how little resistance they have encountered.

*From a message I sent to a list that was discussing the charge that
the Iraq war is a "Jewish" war.

I agree that it is wrong to profile an entire ethnic group with regard to
a particular political issue. Only a small group of US Jews identifies
with the policies of the Likud Party in Israel or votes Republican in US
elections (nor do all the voters for the Republicans idolize Ariel
Sharon).

Even some Bush appointees like Marc Grossman, Undersecretary of State for
Political Affairs, are career USG employees who are far more liberal than
the Perle group. And, if the neoconservatives in the Bush administration
had been the only ones advocating a war on Iraq, while it was opposed by
Cheney, Bush, Rice and other key players, then it would not have happened.

It is overly "neat" and therefore sloppy thinking to put the entire onus
on one group (which are a small minority even within their over-all
[constructed] ethnicity). That the neocons are a significant part of the
mix is not in dispute, but it is not as if Bush is their ventriloquist's
dummy. And, the neocons derive their power in part from a conviction on
the part of people like Karl Rove that they can articulate ideas appealing
to the core cosntituencies of the Republican Right, including the
Christian Coalition. I think it is indisputable that the ideas of Perle,
Wolfowitz and Feith have far more resonance with rightwing Christians than
with other Jews. So why not blame the second Gulf War on Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson, i.e. on fundamentalist Christians? . . .

Unfortunately, the unwise Bush administration decision to appoint Jay
Garner as the pro-consul of a defeated Iraq will probably fan the flames
of this sort of prejudice. Garner has for a long time been close to the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a far rightwing outfit
that is part of the Perle and Pipes network, and he was among signatories
to a statement praising the Israeli army for its "restraint" in the
Occupied Territories during the second intifada.

I don't personally think the idea of a US pro-consul is a good one to
begin with. If there has to be one, it should not be someone like Garner,
whose views are extreme and whose appointment will appear to confirm the
worst conspiracy theories circulating in the Middle East . . .

*Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister of Germany, warned against the possibility that the Bush administration intends to pursue a whole series of wars after Iraq, aimed at disarming one country after another. He said a way had to be found between complacency toward the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the impulse to go to war to stop such proliferation.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Well, we found out why the ground troops moved in without a preceding air campaign. The air campaign had been planned for Friday, and was not moved up because the US was waiting for assessment from its attempt to kill Saddam by Tomahawk Cruise missiles. Apparently he was wounded but is not dead, though his younger son Qusay may be dead. I watched the bombs raining down on key Baath ministry buildings and Saddam palaces in Baghdad with a mixture of horror, unease, and yet hope for the future. I hope relatively few people died. It was night, and the ministry buildings would not have had a lot of ordinary employees. If the strikes were precise enough, they damage should not have spilled over much from the buildings, which anyway were not near a major residential district. But the hope for the future bit is also important. Those ministries were like vampire nests, sucking the blood of ordinary Iraqis. They were the places where the chemical attacks on Kurdish civilians were planned out. I still remember seeing pictures of dead Kurdish children with their lunch pails in the aftermath of Halabja. They were the places where the deaths of 60,000 protesters against the regime in spring of 1991 were planned out. The draining of the marsh Arabs' swamps and the forcing of them into Basra slums were planned out in those buildings. A great center of iniquity has ceased to exist. War is a terrible thing, and since I lived through the first years of the Lebanese civil war, when I was near shelling, I know the fear and bewilderment and damage it does. But it is not a bad thing that those ministries of evil have been reduced to rubble.

*So far 6 Americans have died, 2 in combat, along with British troops killed in a helicopter. My heart goes out to their loved ones, and to the loved ones of the innocent Iraqis so far killed in the bombing. Human life is precious. We have a heavy burden to redeem it by working for a more peaceful and more democratic world in the aftermath of this war.

*There are varying interpretations of the war as it unfolded Friday and Saturday. The 3rd Infantry Division columns heading north for Baghdad ran into no significant opposition, apparently because there are few Iraqi troops left in the south. On the other hand, the Marines who approached the port of Umm Qasr were pinned down just inside the Iraqi border by unexpectedly heavy resistance when Iraqi troops fired sagger anti-tank missiles at them. They had to call for British artillery support. After two hours of bombardment, the Iraqi positions fell quiet. About 15,000 British-led forces then took Umm Qasr, where 30 Iraqi troops surrendered to them. It is hard to know whether the saggers were being fired by a large Iraqi force or a small but determined one. The US Marines in the force over-zealously raised US and Marine flags for a little bit, but were told to run the Iraqi one back up the flagpole by their superiors. The Bush administration wants to retain the symbology of national liberation, not foreign occupation. They also started tearing down all those kitschy huge portraits of Saddam that bedeck the billboards of Iraq like a bad advertising campaign.

Al-Hayat newspaper suggests that Umm Qasr is important because the US can unload there the substantial military equipment it still has in the Persian Gulf. I doubt this is true. Kuwait City is perfectly good for that purpose, and Umm Qasr is from all accounts a dinky little place. Basra would be more important, but both lack deepwater docks. I suspect Kuwait city will continue to be important as the US port of entry. The resistance the US and British got at Umm Qasr may have slowed the largely British advance on Basra, on which they are advancing as I write. They are now on the outskirts of the city and probing its defenses, saying they are in no hurry. They will want to be sure not to run into a lot of unexpected sagger strikes there. Having the British take Basra is eery to a historian, given their invasion of Iraq twice during WW I. And there British forces are around Basra again, almost a century later.
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*Iraq's 51st mechanized division, which guarded the approaches to Basra, surrendered or went home (although a US Division is 15,000 - 20,000 strong, the 51st was just 8000 men and 200 tanks). Obviously, this is the sort of scenario the US was hoping for, but it had not happened on a large scale on Friday. Hundreds of Iraqi troops did surrender, some to traffic control MPs. Others tried to flag down a journalist to surrender to him. US forces approaching al-Nasiriya took some fire and had to halt. From all accounts, not much of the Iraqi army was left in the south, with most good fighting forces drawn up around the capital. Even if those wanted to surrender, they would have to wait until the US forces get near Baghdad. And, there may be some fight in some of them yet. For their sakes, given how badly they are outgunned, one hopes they will have the sense to throw down their weapons, change into civvies, and go home.

*There were rallies against the Iraq war throughout the world on Friday. In Pakistan, most cities saw at least small gatherings, with the largest in Peshawar. The fundamentalist religious parties called for Muslim countries to sever their diplomatic ties with Washington. But, my impression is that the demonstrations were rather small. They could not really target the elected government of PM Jamali, since he also has condemned the war. The demonstrations in the Arab world were also smaller than I would have expected, though maybe they will grow (though the war seems likely to be too short for much momentum to be achieved by its opponents). The ominous thing was that the children of the Egyptian elite at my alma mater, the American University in Cairo, demonstrated against the war in Liberation Square. This development could be ominous for US diplomatic relations with the Arab world, since those relations have for a very long time been only with elites and not with publics.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The US 3rd Infantry Division has entered southern Iraq virtually without opposition. The insertion of some 16,000 or 17,000 men into enemy territory before the air campaign has all us observers baffled. Is it because they are assured that the Iraqi command structure has disintegrated and there is no need to soften the Iraqi armor up? The Washington Post reports that many US intelligence officials think Saddam is dead or badly wounded from the Tomahawk strike on his bunker. You may know the answer by the time you read this, but right now the whole thing is a bit mysterious.

*Kurdish groups tell Asharq al-Awsat that the night before yesterday some Iraqi soldiers between Kirkuk and Kurdish-held Irbil surrendered to them. But they say that the death squad enforcers sprinkled by Saddam among the various units make it impossible for most soldiers to defect without risking being shot in the back.

*US forces face a 350,000 man Iraqi army, but most are conscripts who serve for a year and a half to two years (and most are Shiites). The 3rd Infantry Division already passed a camp of 200 soldiers who had put white sheets over their tents to show that they had surrendered, and left them alone. There will be more of that, especially in the south. Iraq has "three armored divisions, three mechanized divisions and at least 15 infantry divisions." But the tank corps and artillery corps lack spare parts. The Republican Guard, the unit most likely to fight, consists of 26,000 men with attached armor, artillery and air defense units. The 2600 tanks are Soviet T-72s The US tanks typically have greater range and so can kill the Iraqi tanks without exposing themselves to much danger (9 were destroyed Thursday afternoon EST when they attempted to block the US advance from Kuwait). They also have the ZSU-23-4 23mm self-propelled antiaircraft gun and SA-7 hand-held surface to air missiles (similar to stingers). They also have French Milan anti-tank missiles. They also have about 2200 artillery pieces and a similar number of armored vehicles. But it is still possible that the Iraqi high command will collapse and none of this equipment, some of which is deadly and should not be underestimated, may be committed.

*I double-checked and I misspoke when I said the State Department counted Pakistan as a supporter of the war. Karzai in Afghanistan did lend it his reluctant support. But Pakistan declined, and Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarallah Jamali yesterday denounced the war and expressed his hope it would be over quickly. The Islamist opposition parties have called for massive anti-war rallies after Friday prayers today, and may be able to produce impressive crowds. Since Jamali came out against the war, however, these demonstrations may be difficult to turn to the purpose of denouncing the Pakistani government. This conundrum shows the contradiction in the Bush administration's policies, of pushing democracy in Asia and of unilateral US use of force to attain its goals. The new Asian democrats are objecting to the second goal.

*A group of Israeli rabbis has issued a call for the Sharon government to cease its policy of cavalierly allowing the killing innocent civilians in the Occupied Territories in the course of its military operations against radical groups. They say such actions are inconsistent with the essence of the Jewish religion. Too right! Judaism has given us so much that is noble in ethical religion, and what the Likud is doing is an insult to that long and glorious tradition. Likud's real roots lie not in the Bible but in Zionist Revisionism of the Jabotinsky sort, which is frankly a kind of fascism.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Asharq al-Awsat reports that hundreds of "Afghan Arabs" (volunteers, mainly from the Arab world, who had fought the Soviets or with the Taliban in Afghanistan) have gathered in Iraq to carry out suicide missions against US troops there. Sources close to the fundamentalists maintain that other volunteers have come from Lebanon and that remnants of the al-Qaeda leadership have come to Iraq via Iran. They say that the secular Baath party has a 'gentleman's agreement' with them that they can operate against the invading Americans, but not under the banner of the Baath party. I suspect this report is exaggerated, and I would also be very surprised if these groups, assuming they exist, could successfully carry out a terrorist operation against the advancing US forces. Otherwise why not pull it off in Afghanistan itself, where al-Qaeda was well entrenched and knew the terrain? As I mentioned yesterday, similar volunteers who went to fight the Americans in Afghanistan were never heard from again. It is one thing to blow up unsuspecting civilians. It is another to take on fully mobilized Marines. Semper Fie, guys.

*Thousands of Iraqi Kurds have fled cities and villages to the mountains, fearful of a Baath chemical attack like the ones in 1988. Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani issued a statement trying to calm the populace, saying that they faced no real danger from Baghdad.

*The Washington Post reports American intelligence analysis suggesting a very strong possibility that the Iraqi military will collapse after the first big American assaults. Let's hope they got this one right.

*Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak probably spoke for most Arab leaders when he blamed the Iraq war squarely on Saddam Hussein. But he expressed his hope, implicitly, that the US would be sensitive to the destabilizing potential of this war and its aftermath in the region. On the other hand, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, the more adventurous Arab intellectuals hope this war can break the logjam of Arab political stagnation. Many had expected that the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of Eastern Europe would lead to democratization in the region, but it has not happened. Yet. The Sun Times says, "Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egypt's best-known liberal critic, said in an interview the simple fact is "that wars, bad as they are, they break empires, they break dictators, they leave the ground clear for new systems to be created. "They create havoc, they create disorder. But they also create opportunity." " The article notes on the other hand that 75% of Jordanians say they are afraid to criticize their government. That is the more common sentiment in the region, which won't go away, I'm afraid, just because Saddam falls.

*500 Moroccans protested in front of the Moroccan parliament in Rabat against the criminal trial of young goth afficionados of heavy metal in Casablanca on charges of satan worship. They spoke against the interference of the state in Moroccans' private lives. The whole affair is ridiculous, and my guess is that the government is throwing these 14 young people to the lions to curry favor with the Islamists, who did well in the recent elections and who denounced the Casablanca Goth movement. Not everyone likes Siouxsie, Bauhaus or Marilyn Manson. And very few Goths worship Satan. I mean, the whole thing is so 80s and retro, and one could imagine putting it down; but jail time? As if Morocco doesn't have more pressing problems.







For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*My mind and heart are, like those of so many Americans, focused on the Gulf and Iraq tonight. I am thinking about all those brave young men and women in the US and British armed forces whose lives are on the line, and send them my warm support. And I am thinking about all the innocent Iraqis in the line of fire, who fear what awaits them. I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides. The rest of us have a responsibility to work to see that the lives lost are redeemed by the building of a genuinely democratic and independent Iraq in the coming years.

*Although Pakistan was on the list provided today by the US State Department of countries supporting the US war on Iraq, Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarallah Khan Jamali said that Pakistan was against the war. The elected parliament wished to discuss the matter, but found the government leaders vague. Apparently the military dictator Pervez Musharraf can tell Colin Powell he supports the war even as the elected PM denies that Pakistan does so. A similar dichotomy is visible in Turkey, where the elected parliament narrowly refused to allow US troops to be stationed on Turkish soil for the invasion of Iraq, but where the Turkish military is eager to cooperate with the US. The Americans are in a difficult position if they represent themselves as trying to spread democracy, but if their methods are repugnant to the few elected governments in the region. Do they have to subvert democracy to save it?

*A house exploded in the Saudi capital of Riyad. Details were scarce but it sounds like a terror cell accidentally blew itself up. Rumors are flying that radical Saudi young men are slipping over the border into Iraq to fight the Americans. This sort of thing happened in the Afghanistan war, when 5000 Pakistanis went to help the Taliban from the tribal areas in the north. Very few appear to have come back alive, having been made short work of by the AC-130s. The phenomenon of such volunteers going off to Iraq to fight the US could be a long-term terrorist problem for the post-Saddam US administration there, though.

*Egyptian human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been found innocent by an Egyptian court of the trumped up charges against him. To his credit, George W. Bush had taken up Saad's case, and the European Union pressured Hosni Mubarak via its loan programs. It is a great day for Egypt, which has taken a small step toward being a more just and open society, one wherein advocating human rights and urging peasants to vote intelligently does not land one in jail! Saad Eddin is a great man and assured of his place in Egyptian history.

*`Abd al-Majid al-Khu'i, head of the Khu'i foundation in London, who is from the most prominent Shiite clerical family of Iraq, has denied that the US has appointed him to administer the Shiites of southern Iraq. (Too bad, in my view, since this would be a smart move.) He said it was a false rumor planted by Iranians to discredit him by associating him with the US. He pointed out in an interview with Asharq al-Awsat that all Iraqi dissident groups have been in contact with Washington about the aftermath of the war, including the pro-Tehran Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has attended US-sponsored meetings in D.C.

He expressed concern about the damage to Iraq and to innocent life likely to be inflicted by the looming war, and called for the organization of expatriate committees dedicated to carrying out charitable and relief works to help the innocent victims of the war. He felt this would be a way of contributing to the building of a free and independent Iraq after the regime change. To have such an important Shiite cleric look forward to a free (hurr) Iraq is an encouraging sign, though his insistence on it being independent is probably a complaint about current US plans to administer it directly for a year or two.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

http://hnn.us/articles/1322.html

History News Network

3-17-03: News Abroad

Why You Should Pray that We Don't Bomb the Sites Sacred to Shiites

By Juan Cole

Most Iraqi Shiites would be overjoyed to see the United States come in and effect regime change. But will the Shiites, brutalized by Saddam's tyranny, remain happy with the United States in the aftermath of the war? The US is about to take control through conquest of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam. The sensibilities of Shiites throughout the world could easily be injured if they are damaged in war or later seen to be administered unjustly.

U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was recently quoted as saying of Iraqis, "They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory." He could not be more wrong. Shiites from all over the world revere the tombs of Shiite holy figures Ali and Husain in the cities of Najaf and Karbala, and many come there on pilgrimage. If a US bomb goes astray and hits either shrine, Shiites from Lebanon to Afghanistan could become enraged at the US.

It is true that some Iraqi Shiites are secular Arab nationalists. Still, large numbers of them are pious believers. Their alliance with the US is a matter of convenience. Saddam killed thousands of ordinary Shiites during the abortive 1991 uprisings after the Gulf War. Even pro-Iranian groups such as the fundamentalist Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) in Iraq have been willing to ally themselves with the Bush administration. SCIRI has some 15,000 men under arms in exile in Iran, the Badr Brigade, which could play a supporting military role in the US march to Baghdad. They are already establishing beachheads in northern Iraq.

In the 1980s, in the wake of Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Shiite Iran, the Shiite branch of Islam threw up many of the more pressing challenges to the United States in the Middle East. That era of hostage-taking and terrorism largely passed after Khomeini's death in summer, 1989, as more moderate voices came to the fore. Now the major challenge comes from the Sunni radicals of al-Qaeda. Sunnis and Shiites are as different from one another as Protestants and Catholics, and al-Qaeda despises Shiites.

As the US forces leapfrog toward Baghdad from the south, they may try to take control of Najaf and Karbala. They should be careful not to damage the shrines. The US intends to impose a military government and then a US-led civilian administration on Iraq. SCIRI leader Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim has denounced the prospect of even temporary US rule over Iraq: "If the Americans do this, they will discover it is a mistake." He hinted that the Badr Brigade could turn on its US allies. Should Shiites in Najaf and Karbala become discontented with US policies and riot, and should US soldiers quell them with violence, that also could turn the world's approximately hundred million Shiites against America.

The British conquered Iraq during World War I, wresting it from the Ottoman Sunnis. But when they gave affront to the feelings of Shiites in the shrine cities, and then imposed a Mandate on the country instead of letting it become independent, they faced a major rebellion. The Shiite clerics of Najaf and Karbala were among the leaders of that failed uprising.

In 661, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, having become the leader or Imam of the early Muslim state, was assassinated. His gilded, revered tomb in Najaf, 160 km. south of Baghdad, forms a major site for pilgrims from the Shiite branch of Islam all over west and south Asia. In 681, Ali's son Husain and many family members and followers were killed when they staged an uprising against the then king of the Islamic realm. Husain's shrine is at Karbala, 100 km. southwest of Baghdad. Shiites put revering him as a martyr at the center of their spirituality, especially on 10 Muharram, which fell on March 14 this year. In 1998 a US air strike killed 17 civilians in Najaf, handing the Sunni-dominated Baath regime a propaganda tool against the US with the Shiites.

The leader of the Lebanese Hizbullah militia, Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah (who studied in Najaf), told a gathering of 150,000 Shiites honoring the Imam Husayn last Thursday that "Regarding the US war, events and all the US lying and hypocritical slogans about salvaging peoples, establishing democracy and human rights, we here declare our denunciation and rejection of this evil, arrogant and Zionist administration. We tell them, do not expect that the people of this region will receive you with flowers, rice and rose water. The region's people will receive you with rifles, blood, weapons, martyrdom and martyrdom operations."

The looming US war on Iraq may or may not go well militarily, but the US does have the advantage of overwhelming military superiority. The real question is whether it can successfully wage a war of public opinion during and after the military conflict. Iraq is a minefield of religious sensitivities because of the Shiite shrines. Unless the Bush administration is very careful, the 1920 great rebellion could be repeated, this time against an American Mandate. Worse, we could return to the bad old times of the 1980s when it was Shiite radicals who attacked Marines, blew up our embassy in Beirut, and took US hostages. We should be careful not to create allies for al-Qaeda from among its natural enemies.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

It appears to be the case that Iraq simply has no nuclear weapons program.
Al-Baradei of the IAEC has swept the country with geiger counters and
cannot find evidence of such a thing. The program once employed 12,000
scientists, so it could not easily be hidden if it existed.

The evidence given last summer and fall by US officials, including
President Bush, included:

1) satellite photos showing expansion of buildings at a site once used for
the program

2) documents showing Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger

3) Iraqi purchase of aluminum tubing that might be used in centrifuges for
the enrichment of uranium.

Al-Baradei visited the buildings and found that they were now devoted to
some other use and their expansion had nothing to do with nukes.

The Niger documents were closely examined and found to be forgeries.

The aluminum tubing has the wrong specifications for use in a centrifuge
and was purchased for making conventional missiles.

The case for an Iraqi WMD program in the nuclear area has thus now
completely collapsed. Since it was the nukes that were truly scary
(rightwing commentators kept saying Saddam might give a suitcase bomb to
al-Qaeda, never a likely scenario), not botulism or mustard gas, one
wonders if the Congress would have authorized the President to go to war if
it had known there were no nukes.

The Niger documents turn out to be clumsy forgeries, raising questions about whether Bush, Cheney and others who depended on them were attempting to deceive US public opinion and that of the world.

*An Israeli soldier deliberately ran a bulldozer over an American peace activist attempting to stop the illegal demolition of a Palestinian home. Rachel Corey, 23, died of skull and chest fractures when she was run over and then the driver backed up over her.

*The Muslim Brotherhood representatives in the Egyptian parliament have demanded that Egypt forbid the US to transport war ships to the Gulf via the Suez Canal. They also want the Mubarak regime to refuse to accept the $2 bn. in aid received from the US every year (most of it anyway goes to US firms who supply goods and weapons to Egypt). Next the chickenhawks will be saying we need to occupy the Suez Canal zone. Anthony Eden has been reincarnated as Richard Perle and is taking revenge on the US for his humiliation by maneuvering it into an even greater one.

*Ariel Sharon has again rejected the Bush "road map" for peace, insisting he will not accept an independent, viable Palestinian state. It was not reported if he was brandishing a toy bulldozer during this rant. Seriously, couldn't he shut his enormous pie hole until the Iraq war is over? The US doesn't need more Arabs angry at it right about now. Apparently we should pay him $14 bn. for the privilege of being backstabbed this way.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Pakistani authorities have arrested Yasser al-Jaziri, a North African al-Qaeda leader, in the posh Gulburg district of Lahore. They met no resistance after acting on a tip. The report identified him as a Moroccan or Moroccan-Algerian dual national responsible for al-Qaeda business interests. He was apparently arrested based on information brought in by the apprehension earlier this month of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, al-Qaeda's no. 3. The Pakistani family with whom he was staying was not taken into custody. He was one of those whom Pakistani physician Ahmad Javed Khwaja had been accused of being in touch with. The arrest follows the apprehension of 5 al-Qaeda men in Peshawar on Mar. 11.

*Asharq al-Awsat says that Islamist circles in London fear that if Bin Laden is killed or captured, it will deal a death blow to al-Qaeda and its generation of jihadis or radical militants. They say Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man, lacks Bin Laden's charisma and his long months on the run have left him with no control over the network; and Saad Bin Laden is only in his 20s and cannot actually take over his father's organization. (Saad is thought to be in southwestern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border). On the other hand, they are confident that a new generation of jihadis is now growing up, and that Bin Laden has succeeded in convincing them that their primary target should be the United States.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Saudi-based reporter John R. Bradley says in the Sidney Morning Herald that the Saudi Defense Minister, Sultan b. Abdul Aziz, has confirmed that "that United States troops have arrived in the northern garrison town of Tabuk." He says other credible reports indicate a US presence there and at Arar airport not far from the Saudi-Iraqi border. He adds, "From Arar the Americans could pour into Iraq's western desert or go directly by road towards Baghdad, forcing the Iraqis to face an attack from the west as well as the expected southern assault from Kuwait and a second front in the north." He points out that this is strong evidence that the Saudi princes have thrown in with the US attack on Iraq, despite public opposition to the war.

*A secret State Department report throws cold water over the idea that a democratic Iraq will help spread democracy in the Middle East in the aftermath of a US attack and occupation. In typical State Department fashion, the report also wonders whether "procedural democracy", i.e. elections without a strong liberal democratic culture, would even be a good idea in the region. Proto-fascist "Islamists" might well come to power that way. While I agree that the Iraqi experiment is highly unlikely to result in democratization of the region, I am not sure that continued dictatorships are all that much better for US interests, much less local people, than would be democratic governments with substantial participation by Islamists. It is a tough call.

*The Israeli military chief of staff says that getting rid of Arafat is an urgent priority for him; an extreme rightwing member of the Israeli Knesset urges that Abu Mazen, the new prime minister praised by President Bush, be arrested if he comes to Israel; the Labor Party continues to collapse and split; Israeli policies of shooting first and asking questions later in the West Bank and Gaza finally backfired on them when soldiers shot two Israeli military men in plain clothes by accident. The policy has resulted in large numbers of innocent Palestinian civilians, including children, being killed or wounded.

*In Egypt 5,000 demonstrators protested the looming Iraq war and the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli forces at the al-Azhar seminary, calling for jihad against US soldiers if they attack Iraq. This event follows the recent call for jihad against a US Iraq war issued by the usually staid and sober al-Azhar a couple of days ago. It seems to me a little unlikely that any volunteers who go to Iraq will pose much of a challenge to US AC-130s, who made short work of similar volunteers who went to Afghanistan from Pakistan last winter. But the increased threat of terrorism and asymmetrical attacks should be obvious.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Today is Ashura', the holiest day of the Shiite Muslim calendar, consecrated to mourning the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson Husayn. It is a time of religious excitement, and young men often beat their chests and backs, sometimes with chains. In Lebanon yesterday, the head of the Shiite militia Hizbullah, Shaikh Hasan Nasrallah, warned the US against invading Iraq. He was responding to pronouncements in Washington that Iraqis would welcome a US invastion. According to Reuters, he said, "Don't expect the people of this region to receive you with flowers and perfume. The people of this region will receive you with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom and martyrdom operations." He said that "Death to America" was his movement's cry. About 60-65% of Iraqis are Shiites, but they have been brutalized by the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein and have a very different outlook from that of the Lebanese, who were invaded by Ariel Sharon in 1982. It is not impossible, though, that the presence for 2 or 3 years of US troops in Iraq might radicalize the Iraqi Shiites and bring them closer to Hizbullah's mindset.

*The files found on Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's computer mentioned six specific sites along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that Bin Laden is known to use as hide-outs. This information was the basis for the new optimism that Bin Laden might be captured soon. It seems to me, though, that he must have immediately known he would have to avoid past safe houses as soon as he heard of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's arrest.

*Units of the Shiite al-Badr Brigade are being positioned south of Sulyamaniyyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, having come over from Iran. The good thing about them is that they hate Saddam and will help the US get rid of him. The bad news is that they are religious hardliners a la Khomeini, which is not a direction any of us would like to see Iraq go after the war.

*A bomb blast on a Bombay commuter train killed 11 and injured 75 yesterday. The populace is jittery and today the trains were half empty. Everyone is afraid that the bomb was related to religious violence (it is after all `Ashura'). An attack on a train by Muslim radicals ignited anti-Muslim riots in Gujerat last year.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Midnight's Other Children: Reading Rushdie in the Middle East

Talk Delivered at a Panel in Honor of the Premiere of Midnight's Children The Play in Ann Arbor
Wednesday, March 12, 2003

-Juan Cole

When I refer to reading Rushdie in the Middle East in my title, I do not, of course, mean to suggest that his novels are actually much read there. Ironically, the early 1980s translations of Midnight’s Children and Shame into Persian caused Rushdie to be admired in Iran for his anti-imperialism. After the infamous fatwa, the further translations in Persian showed on their title pages as place of publication exotic Estockaholm in the fabled land of Swed. A few Arabic translations in small print runs are rumored. Almost no one in the Middle East has actually read the novel, The Satanic Verses, and most of those who condemn it would be surprised to know that it does not call the wives of the Prophet Muhammad prostitutes, and does not suggest that the Koran was inspired by Satan. What I mean by “reading Rushdie” in the area is rather akin to the psychiatric idea of projection, defined as “a defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else.”

I do not come to this subject as a cold stranger, but by way of autobiography. Midnight’s Children informs us that people seep into one another. Of no people is this more true than of us area specialists, into whom seep whole civilizations. Some of the Prophet Muhammad seeped into me when I studied Islam in Cairo, and I came to admire him. Then when I was researching Indian history in Lucknow in 1982 I read Midnight’s Children, and Rushdie began seeping into me, and I came to admire him. If I sometimes seem grouchy or disoriented, remember that like Walt Whitman I contain multitudes. Only some of my multitudes do not get on very well.

Like the impressive nose of Aadam Aziz, which contained dynasties, Rushdie’s Himalayan anathema contained clones. “The Rushdie of” this nation or that has virtually become a dead metaphor, like riverbed, so tired that one forgets it is figure of speech. Hamid Nasr Abu Zaid is the Rushdie of Egypt and historian Hashem Aghajari is the Rushdie of Iran (which has more Rushdies than most countries, having itself invented the idea of a Rushdie). This rushdification of religious dissent or free thought has elicited protests from the original Rushdie, who minds being “sloganized;” and from some of the Rushdies themselves or their supporters. When Aghajari called for independent religious thinking in Iran last summer, a provincial court summarily sentenced him to death. When he was arrested, Ayatollah Nuri-Hamedani thundered, “I believe that the remarks . . . are worse than Salman Rushdie's words. This is because Salman Rushdie only insulted one of the Islamic principles. However, he, Aghajari has insulted all religions and world Muslims.”

A stalwart defender of Aghajari from among the hardliners, Muhammad Javad Akbarayn, replied with alarm, “A comparison between Hashem Aghajari [and] Salman Rushdie most regrettably gives credibility to Salman Rushdie, as well as false impressions to a younger generation unfamiliar with The Satanic Verses. They might overlook the fact that the author of the book "A critique of Satanic Verses Plot" . . . reprinted several times to meet the demand for it -- is an academic who resigned from his post in protest at the Aghajari sentence.” The hardest of hardliners seemed to be saying that that Rushdie fellow wasn’t so bad after all, now that we have Iranian thinkers calling for freedom of religious thought among the masses. In the prevailing school of Shiite Islam in Iran, the laity is required blindly to obey the rulings of clerics on Islamic law. Aghajari called instead for each Muslim to be his own interpreter of the law.

Ironically, Akbarayn is clearly distressed by the possibility that the many ardent defenders of Aghajari among Iran’s youth will hear that he is a Rusdhie and will transfer their affections to the Bombay-born heresiarch himself. In short, the danger for his opponents in the area is that Rushdie will become an Aghajari, a symbol of the young reformers’ impatience with heresy trials of any sort.

This odd sort of reading, which the cynical might even call simply using Rushdie’s name to advance one’s own agenda, has killed people, and has produced the new phenomenon in history of the “Rushdie riot.” The old leftist warhorse of Turkey, Aziz Nesin, expropriated some passages from The Satanic Verses for his newspaper, under the sympathetic title: “Salman Rushdie: Thinker or Charlatan?” Although international copyright laws are generally respected in Turkey, Nesin declined to seek either Rushdie’s or his publisher’s permission. He simply wanted to bait the Islamists. Nesin very nearly paid for his piracy with his life. In July of 1993, a convention was held in Sivas of the esoteric Shiite Alawite sect in honor of one of their poets, to which Nesin was invited. Local Sunni activists have long persecuted and sometimes killed Alawites. Further inflamed by news of Nesin’s appearance on the roster, they formed rampaging mobs and set fire to the convention hotel and killed nearly 40 persons. Although Rushdie’s name was invoked in the incident, in fact, Sunni-Alawite riots have been common in modern Turkish history, as has a tendency for Alawites to align with or produce leftist intellectuals that enrage the Sunni fundamentalists. Once again, primordial rivalries and the nagging questions of secularism and Islamism in Turkey were projected onto Salman Rushdie’s balding pate.

The Egyptian short story writer and novelist Soleiman Fayyad, author of Voices, spoke for many Middle Eastern intellectuals when he wrote, “We Arab and Muslim writers are surely overwhelmingly with Salman Rushdie in spirit, then, even if we are not necessarily in favor of his novel, which the majority of us have probably not read . . . Nevertheless, there does exist among us an almost unanimous attitude of solidarity with Salman Rushdie as well as one of support for freedom of thought, whether religious or profane, and of artistic creation.” Fayyad’s comments point once more to projection as the main theme evoked by Rushdie in the Middle East. Even Fayyad has a reproach for Rushdie, however, of cosmopolitanism. He should have stayed in India and published the book in Urdu, which would have gained him even greater and more enthusiastic backing from writers “in this part of the world.” And, publishing in the West opened his work to exploitation by anti-Muslim Westerners, “an important supplementary grief this author did not need to be saddled with.” Fayyad is suggesting that his use of English and the publication of his book in the West allowed his Middle Eastern enemies to accuse him of seeking literary success among foreigners by putting down his own people. He thinks the positive impact of the Rushdie affair was unfortunately muted because it could be portrayed in the Middle Eastern press as yet another instance of neo-colonial hegemony. The courage of Fayyad’s statement should not be underestimated. In speaking out, he put his own life in danger. But his binary Arab nationalism makes him regret that Rushdie could not be claimed and defended unambiguously as one of “us.”

Just as Fayyad feared, Rushdie’s name has been exploited by Islamophobes. September 11 accelerated this process. Journalist Les Kinsolving is clearly annoyed that President Bush has defended Islam as a religion of peace. He pressed Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer at a press conference last year asking, “Are you and is the president prepared to contend that in the Koran, there are no passages calling for death to infidels such as Christians and Jews and no jihads (sic) as well for people like Salman Rushdie?” Kinsolving is apparently unaware that the Koran praises Jews and Christians and Judaism and Christianity, and only urges fighting against those who allied with the Meccans to attack Muslims. And there is not a single verse requiring novelists to be executed, even ones named Salman. Recently Jerry Falwell denounced Muhammad a terrorist, and other televangelists have monstrously called him a pedophile. Momentarily mishearing a few verses looks increasingly like a rather mild charge against him.

This use of Rushdie as a bat with which to beat all Muslims and Islam predates September 11, of course. One of the first books about the Khomeini fatwa was written by far rightwing commentator and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, who is linked to the most militant sections of the Likud Party and to the pro-settler Gamla group. Pipes clearly had to hold his nose in defending Rushdie, a leftist anti-imperialist who thought well of the Sandinistas’ social programs for the poor in Nicaragua. Yet, he found the opportunity to lambaste Muslims too good to pass up.

Pipes’s book is shot through with essentialism and questionable generalizations. “Not only,” he solemnly tells us, “ are Muslims very touchy about perceived disparagements of their religion, but they tend to look at fictional works in a singularly literal way.” (107). Really? Muslims alone among human beings are touchy about their sacred cows, so to speak? Over a billion persons, crippled with a fiction deficit disorder that would stump even Oliver Sacks? But then, pray tell, how did such a community produce a Rushdie in the first place? Not to mention A Thousand and One Nights or Nobel prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz?
But Pipes has not finished characterizing the Muslims. He had already begun worrying about the immigration of these congenital, unrelenting realists to Europe and the United States. He complained (and remember he does so ostensibly in defense of Rushdie): “Unfortunately, the presence of Muslims in the West encourages the worst in each camp: ugly nativistic reactions from those who resent the growing numbers of dark-skinned, poor foreigners with strange eating habits and less-developed notions of hygiene; and arrogant fundamentalist Islamic ambitions among emigrants culturally unprepared for immersion in an alien civilization and therefore prone to insist on the most dogmatic version of their faith.” (245). Even if we allow that Pipes was in these characterizations adopting the “voice” of each of the two rival bands of extremists, his diction can only be seen as racist in its effect. All the blame for ugly nativism is put on the presumptuous presence of Muslims in the West. His diction is a recipe for the expulsion from the West of anyone who makes white racists upset. And, one would never know from such a passage that South Asian Muslim immigrants to the US are among the wealthiest and best educated groups in the country; or that pious Muslims wash five times a day and if anything are too worried about hygiene; or that large numbers of urban Britishers would starve to death were all those Indian restaurants serving what he calls “strange” food suddenly to close their doors.

Pipes’s are thus precisely the sort of anti-Muslim sentiments that The Satanic Verses was written to protest. In the subsequent decade he began taking an anti-immigration line redolent of French racist Jean Marie Le Pen. Not only should they be carefully caged in Africa and Asia, but, Pipes has now told the Jerusalem Post, Muslims must be kept under constant surveillance when not in their natural habitat. He writes, “There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children… “ (JP 1/22/03). From defending Rushdie’s right to freedom of speech, Pipes has gone to implicitly calling for him, like others of Muslim background, to be watched by the FBI for signs he might be a terrorist.

I should declare my interest and reveal that Pipes, in a bizarre twist, has even issued a fatwa of his own against me, calling for Juan Cole to be placed under constant surveillance by the people of Ann Arbor, who should report to him on me so that he can keep a file. (I hope you are all taking good notes). This tactic recalls Khomeini’s boast that he had 37 million spies in Iran. Apparently even studying Muslims can give you the new disease of surveillance-itis. I told you it was autobiographical. Way too much seeping.

Many have drawn the lesson from September 11 that Rushdie was a canary in a mine, that his ordeal presaged that of all who stood against a new wave of religious fanaticism. But there is an additional lesson, which is that whenever you give governments or other organizations the right to tell people what they can say, they will use it. When Disney’s ABC network fired comedian Bill Maher from Politically Incorrect for mouthing off about US military tactics, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer announced, “These are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say and what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.” Khomeini would have said the same thing about The Satanic Verses. Having now been guilty of it myself, let me end by sympathizing with Salman Rushdie about the ways he has been used so extensively to further the agendas of others, and to congratulate him on having become such a powerful symbol of liberty to so many in the Middle East and elsewhere, whether he likes it or not, and even whether they like it or not.




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*A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has remanded `Aqil Ahmad Abdul Quddus, the harborer of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, to jail. A warrant is out for his father, Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, who had been at a wedding in Lahore and appears to have gone into hiding. Pakistani intellectuals like Najam Sethi have been demanding that the fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami clarify why the al-Qaeda leader was in one of their safe houses, but so far no answers are forthcoming. The Jamaat appears to be sidestepping such questions by focusing on protests of the looming Iraq war. In the meantime, plans for imposing shariah or a medieval interpretation of Islamic law on the Northwest Frontier Province are proceeding apace. The provincial government, in the hands of Islamists, has relatively little power over such matters, but the MMA intends to push as far as it can.

*An Asharq al-Awsat reporter based in Dubai is reporting that al-Qaeda plans to unleash female terrorists against the US. Usama Bin Laden's mother is quoted as saying that it is permitted to women to fight alongside men in jihad if the number of men is too few to win otherwise. Since current FBI profiling is based on a conviction that the main terrorist threat comes from young men, this new tactic could be effective.

*Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the rector of Cairo's al-Azhar Seminary (the most important center of religious learning in the Sunni world) has said he agrees that if the US attacks Iraq, it would be legitimate for Muslims to declare jihad against the US troops doing the invading. This view was issued by an al-Azhar research center two days ago. Its report suggested that Iraq was only the first of a number of Arab centers to be targetted by the US. Al-Azhar is usually pretty timid about politics, and its scholars condemned al-Qaeda for 9/11. If its clerics are out front on this issue of using jihad to fight US troops in Iraq, it shows that they are confident everyone already agrees with them. Likewise, they wouldn't be saying these things unless Hosni Mubarak's police state was permitting them to. Mubarak has refused to have anything to do with a Western invasion of a brother Arab country, and has been sullen about the powerlessness of Arab countries to stop it. Permitting the normally staid al-Azhar to engage in wild talk must be his minor revenge on W.

*A truly horrifying report of Israeli atrocities around Hebron has just come out. See: http://www.palestinemonitor.org/updates/update_cover.htm. It says in part: "Abdel Hadi Hantash, an expert in settler activities in Hebron and a member
of the Committee for Land Defense said, “These activities – performed in the
name of ‘security’ -- are part of an Israeli plan to evacuate the area of
Palestinians, pushing them into isolated cantons, so that they can gain full
control of the area. The problem is that the world is not paying sufficient
attention to what is happening here.” “People keep warning of the ‘threat’ of transfer –
especially in the context of a possible war against Iraq,” said Renad Qubaj, Coordinator
of PNGO (Palestinian Network of NGOs). “But transfer is not a threat; it is a
reality – and currently taking place in pockets all over the West Bank.” "

Let's leave aside human rights violations and war crimes contravening the Geneva Accords for a moment. What I'd like to know is whether Israeli targetted assassinations and other Draconian measures couldn't wait until after the Iraq war? Wouldn't you expect an ally of the US that gets billions of dollars a year from you and me to respect our needs just a little bit and cool it so as to avoid unnecessarily inflaming Arab public opinion at a tense time for us? As far as I am concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is among the biggest dangers to US foreign policy goals in the Middle East. And people say France is ungrateful to the US.



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*The Pakistani parliament has been sent home by Gen. Pervez Musharraf after having been paralyzed for several days by the chanting and filibustering of opposition politicians. They object to the sweeping powers he has arrogated to himself, including the "Legal Framework Order" of 19 unilateral amendments to the 1973 Constitution inserted by the general last summer. The Prime Minister, Zafarullah Jamali, presides over a small and shakey coalition majority. He managed to make a speech pledging his government to stay uninvolved with any attack on Iraq. This promise was aimed at defusing the sharp criticisms made of his government as a lackey of America, and the large rallies successfully organized by the United Action Council of fundamentalist parties. The pledge failed to accomplish its goal, however, and the parliamentarians decamped. It is still not clear how Pakistan will vote on the UN Security Council with regard to the Anglo-American resolution now on the table. One would have thought that Jamali's speech foreclosed a "yes" vote, but some observers remain convinced that Pakistan will back the US when push comes to shove. A Pakistani cabinet meeting on the Iraq issue was reported to favor an abstention at the UNSC vote, and to hope that France or Russia would make the vote moot by exercising its veto. It is interesting that democratic sentiments have proved at least something of a road block for US policy with regard to both Turkey and Pakistan. This result brings into question the apparent conviction of the Bush administration hawks that a democratic Iraq will support the US, either.

*Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov insists that Russia will vote against the current UNSC Anglo-American resolution authorizing war against Iraq, saying he has seen no convincing justfication for such a move. He is reported to be saying that Russia will exercise its veto on the Security Council.

*Kurdish Peshmerga forces say they have fanned out along the Iraqi border with Turkey and are prepared to repel by force any Turkish incursion into Iraqi territory in conjunction with a US war on Iraq.


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*An al-Qaeda leader reports on a militant web site that there were only 1900 "Arab Afghan" fighters in Afghanistan during the US war against the Taliban, and that 350 were killed. This is a lower number than most estimates I've seen.

*A major rally of tens of thousands of protesters took place Sunday in Rawalpindi (near Islamabad), denouncing the US war on Iraq. They accused Pervez Musharraf of turning Pakistan into an American colony and urged Pakistan not to vote for the American resolution at the UN security council (where Pakistan is one of ten elected members currently). The rally was organized by a newly powerful coalition of fundamentalist religious parties.

*Between 100,000 and 500,000 Muslims also rallied in East Java, Indonesia, against an Iraq war, calling for a non-violent solution and questioning whether Bush's path to power really made him the legitimate president of the US.

*Thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians went first to the presidential palace in Baabda and then to that of in Damascus, supporting Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, giving them support in their stance against an Iraq war. Lahoud warned against divisions in Arab ranks.

*A representative of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq will attend a meeting of Iraqi dissidents on Tuesday or Wednesday in free Iraqi Kurdistan, after consultations with Ahmad Chalabi in Tehran recently. SCIRI has been unhappy with announced plans for a period of US occupation of Iraq after the war, and has even spoken of shooting at occupation troops. But the crisis seems to have died down a bit, since a member of the Hakim family is willing to attend the Kurdistan conference.



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*Dawn is reporting that the computer files and CDs confiscated from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on his arrest in Rawalpindi demonstrate the breadth of his networking in the Philippines, Europe and the US. (He had lived in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and plotted terrorism there against US targets like airliners. Like many al-Qaida goons, he led a dissolute lifestyle, hanging out in strip clubs and living large. His photograph shows that he still carries the weight and the alcohol damage. The al-Qaida terrorists believe it is all right to live immorally if your life is dedicated to destroying the enemies of Islam).

The materials confiscated also show recent contacts with Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of them now apparently in northern Pakistan. Attempts are being made to track them down. The whereabouts of Bin Laden's four wives and his children in Iran is also now apparently known. We may be near an endgame against the top al-Qaida leadership, which will make us all much safer (as long as the Bush administration does not provoke so much new anger that a new generation of expert engineer/terrorists arise).

*The war in Iraq is scary for many reasons, not least my concerns about a US mandate trying to administer a contemporary Arab society. But what is really scary is that many of the hawks in the Bush administration say, "after Baghdad, Beijing." Iraq is a small country with a much degraded army and even its weapons of mass destruction have been 95% wiped out. The war may or may not be harder fought than the Pentagon expects, but it is a task that the US can almost certainly accomplish. Besieging communist China and trying to overthrow the government there, however, is a fool's errand and a recipe for world war. See Jonathan Freedland's insightful article in the Guardian:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,903076,00.html

*About 500,000 demonstrators marched in Cairo Wednesday, in a rally authorized by the National Democratic Party. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is well aware of the need to allow an enraged population to blow off steam. In fact, however, the event was a staged affair with few grass roots supporters. It was the sort of thing you would go to if you were an NDP supporter; and, Egyptian governments have been known to spread some money around to produce a crowd. The demonstration last week this time, which was 100,000-strong, was more of a grass roots affair and probably more important, though smaller in size.

*The horrific attack on a bus in Haifa, apparently an operation of the fundamentalist Hamas party, was denounced by the mainstream PLO because they said it would obscure the wrongs that have been being done to innocent Palestinians by the Israeli army of occupation.

I read the reports out of the West Bank and Gaza every day, and it seems to me that almost every day the Israeli army kills innocent civilians--babies, kids, grandmothers, what have you. Here is how the Christian Science Monitor reported Monday's operation:

"On a raid Monday to arrest Hamas political leader Sheikh Mohammed Taha, Israeli troops killed eight people, including Noha Maqadme, a pregnant mother of 11. Hours after that raid in the densely packed Bureij refugee camp, shock fused with calls for revenge in an example of the way IDF incursions into Gaza may be hardening resistance instead of undermining it.In the crumbling streets, endurance seemed to be the order of the day as youths hoisted mattresses on their shoulders for those made homeless by the damaging or complete destruction of 14 houses. Four of those structures housed families of Palestinians involved in attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers, the army says. Though human rights groups condemn the practice as collective punishment and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the army says the demolitions deter others considering violence against Israeli targets. Neighboring houses were blown apart by the force of the blasts, which toppled the wall of a room where the Maqadme family took shelter after soldiers announced a curfew. Jamil Maqadme, his face bruised and sweater torn in the explosion, remembers his mother leaving to make tea for his brother - and then an explosion. "Everyone was under the ruins," he says. "It was deep darkness. I heard my mother scream 'help.' "Something was on my chest, and it was difficult to breathe," he says. His father and a neighbor extricated him, but four of his siblings were injured, and his mother, Noha, was dead."

A man named Mohammad Hasan Ali Issa of Nablus was apparently shot to death by Israeli soldiers after he was already in captivity and in handcuffs. The Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza are either extremely unprofessional and incompetent, or they have secret orders to carry out their operations against terrorists regardless of the loss of innocent Palestinian life. Since this latter would be a war crime, it is of course denied, but that is certainly what it looks like to me.

The Hamas fanatics and the Likud fanatics feed off one another and each gains internal power from the brutality and murders committed by the other. The Haifa bombing killed 15 people and wounded 40, many of them college students (one was an American). It was not only vicious but stupid. It just provides further pretext to the Likud to press for the liquidation of any Palestinian state and some form of ethnic cleansing against the population of the Occupied Territories. Most Americans just shrug and say it is the problem of the people who live over there.

But 9/11 should have been a wake up call. Its real lesson was not that the US needs to go around fighting perpetual war. The lesson was that it is extremely dangerous to let hate fester. And yet, the Bush administration has done nothing to lessen hate. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli PM, even embarrassed Bush by rejecting any Palestinian state in the future. That will really improve things--just announce to the Arabs that they will be screwed over yet again in Palestine just as the US is going to war against Iraq. Ariel Sharon should be ashamed of himself for taking American money hand over fist and then pissing all over US policy needs in the region.



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Although the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, an al-Qaeda mastermind, has raised hopes that the war on terror is bearing fruit, the question of his patron inside Pakistan remains murky and troubling. He was arrested in a house owned by a Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, a 78-year-old microbiologist characterized in Pakistani news reports as a leader of the Jamaat-i Islami, a fundamentalist group in Pakistan. The doctor's son, Ahmad Abdul Quddus, 41, was taken into custody. He is also said to be a member of the Jamaat-i Islami, . His sister, Qudsia Bibi, argued that her brother was "slow" (i.e. of very low intelligence) and was not Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's host. (But then why was the latter in the house with Ahmad?) Pakistani police have now questioned the elder Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, who lived in the Sudan and may have a connection to Usama Bin Laden dating from the latter's own Sudan period (early to mid 1990s). Now it turns out that another member of the family is a Pakistani officer, Major Adil Quddus, who is being questioned by Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, in Kohat, near Peshawar. An officer of the Signal Corps, he is brother of Dr. Abdul Quddus and uncle of the man who was arrested. An al-Qaeda-linked major in the Pakistani army in that region might be an extremely important asset to the organization, since some of those who escaped from Afghanistan are probably there. Does his being in the Signal Corps help him in this regard?

So here are the questions: Is Ahmad Abdul Quddus actually a person of low intelligence? Was his father the real host of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad? Is his father actually a leader of, the Jamaat-i Islami? (This question is important because the Jamaat is part of the United Action Council, the coalition of fundamentalist religious groups that controls the provincial government of the Northwest Frontier Province and about 20% of the seats in the Federal parliament. The Jamaat has repeatedly called for an end to the manhunt for al-Qaeda and the expulsion of US personnel from Pakistan. Do they take this stance because of the danger that further arrests may demonstrate the complicity of some members of the Jamaat and of the Jami`at Ulama-i Islam in the sheltering of al-Qaeda?) Is Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, the father, involved in al-Qaeda as a result of his Sudan experience? Was his expertise in microbiology of interest to al-Qaeda terrorist planners? Is Major Adil Quddus involved with al-Qaida? Are there al-Qaeda cells *within* the Jamaat-i Islami, perhaps unknown to the organization's leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmad? Or is there an even more central and sinister link? Are there in turn radical Jamaat cells inside the Pakistani officer corps?



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