*The US Army has launched Operation Sidewinder, storming 20 towns in the Sunni Arab center of Iraq and making dozens of arrests, in a quest to stop sabotage and attacks on US troops. The problem with this sort of operation is that it assumes that resistance to occupation is a zero sum game. There is a pie; it is a particular size; there is only one pie. So if you cut the pie in two and eat half of it, there will be half as much pie. But resistance is not a zero sum game, as Gaza and the West Bank show. Given Sharon's brutal tactics (which have included deliberately firing rockets into civilian apartment buildings), the pie of resistance should be completely gone by now. But some attempts to stamp out resistance can increase it, by enlarging the recruitment pool of resisters. The Sunni Arabs north, east and west of Baghdad from all accounts hate the US and hate US troops being there. This hatred is the key recruiting tool for the resistance, and it is not lessened by US troops storming towns. I wish Operation Sidewinder well; maybe it will work, militarily. Politically, I don't think it addresses the real problems, of winning hearts and minds.

*The Najaf religious authority, headed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has condemned body searches of Iraqi women carried out by male Coalition troops. The fatwa says that this frisking of women does "not respect the Sharia (Islamic religious law) nor Iraqi traditions and social values." Such sentiments in part lay behind the conflict in Majar al-Kabir last week between outraged townspeople and British troops, leading to the deaths of six British soldier and at least three of the town's young men.

*The Sadr Movement continues to be a real contender for political and religious authority among pious Shiites in Iraq, and is getting monetary contributions in large numbers, according to Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post. He discusses in some detail its organization in populous East Baghdad. Shadid is among the best of the Western reporters now in Iraq, in part because he is an Arabist. This simple fact brings into stark question the American journalistic conviction that good reporters should be ignorant of local culture lest they become biased. Of course, this principle applies only to the global South. No major American newspaper would employ a reporter in Paris who did not know French.

*Sometimes you see a news report and it just looks odd, tipping you that something important is going on. Asharq al-Awsat has an item today that Paul Bremer, US Proconsul of Iraq, has dissolved the Pharmacists' Union and the Veterinarians' Union, writing letters to their presidents telling them they have no further authority because their organizations are no longer needed. The deputy head of the Arab Pharmacists' Union, Tahir al-Shakhshir, rejected the decree and said the American civil administration of Iraq had no authority to issue it because the union is an Arab League institution. The deputy head of the Arab Veterinarians' Union, As'ad Abu Raghib, expressed similar sentiments and said that the union might pick up and move to Amman, Jordan, to continue its work among Iraqi veterinarians. What is going on here? Is the notoriously anti-union philosophy of the US Republican party being imposed on Iraq? Or is this an assault on pan-Arabist, Arab League institutions, aimed at removing any possible source of opposition to the Americanization of Iraq? Or is this move part of de-Baathification? (If the latter, why not just remove the high officers of the unions? Or just make union membership voluntary?)

Note that the organizations may be correct that the US administration has no right to issue such decrees. The Fourth Geneva Convention governing the actions of occupation authorities in militarily occupied territories generally discourages any actions that alter the character or legal status of the occupied territories. International lawyers should be asked to comment on the import of these dissolutions for an article like Section III, Art. 53: "Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations." Would dissolving a union fall under this rubric? Tony Blair's counsel is said to have expressed worries to him back last March that a bilateral Anglo-American administration of Iraq with no UN sanction would necessarily entail violations of the Fourth Geneva convention. I don't personally have any answers here. I'm raising the questions. The news item struck me as odd.



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*The civil administration of Iraq under Paul Bremer plans to create a ministry of religious affairs that would promote dialogue among Iraq's religious leaders, according to az-Zaman. It would also attempt to ensure that any legislation passed does not withdraw from them their religious rights.

*Large fires burned at three Baghdad sites on Saturday, at a money-printing factory, at a schoolbook repository, and at a warehouse of the electricity service. A conflagration also continued at a sulphur plant near Mosul. Sabotage is suspected. Duh. Baathist remnants (a.k.a. Iraqi nationalists) appear to have planned for guerrilla war and sabotage as a way to getting the US back out of Iraq, and continue to network successfully to carry it out. The kidnapping and brutal execution of Sgt. 1st Class Gladimir Philippe, 37, of Roselle, N.J., and Pfc. Kevin Ott, 27, of Columbus, Ohio, who were taken from their checkpoint at Balad by persons unknown, brings the death toll of US soldiers to over 200 since the war began. Post-April 9 casualties continue to mount for the Anglo-American troops, with many killed in the past week. I don't think this kind of sabotage and occasional killing of troops can force the coalition out of Iraq, though. What will eventually do that, if it happens at all, will be massive crowd actions. Militaries can put down large numbers of civilian protesters, as Syria did at Hamas in 1982 and as China did at Tiananmen in 1989, but only if the government directing the troops is a dictatorship that does not care about bad PR. If the British and Americans overstay their welcome, the Iraqi populace will be able to force them out, giving them a choice between that and being portrayed back home as soulless monsters. The Jallianwalla Bagh sort of incident was the downfall of many an empire in a modern communications context.




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*Jews who buy land in Iraq should be killed, according to a fatwa or legal ruling issued by Sayyid Kadhim al-Haeri ( -Reuters). Al-Haeri is still in Qom, Iran, but he is said to be contemplating a return home to Najaf, in Iraq. He has been adopted as the elder statesman of the al-Sadr Movement, since that movement's leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, is not yet a jurisprudent in his own right. Al-Haeri also forbade Muslims to sell land to Jews, saying he had gotten numerous inquiries from followers about how licit it would be, after they were contacted by Jewish businessmen. A lot of countries do have certain restrictions on ownership of national assets by foreigners, and Iraq is vulnerable in this regard right now because there is no Iraqi government that would implement the will of the people. Still, al-Haeri's sentiments are obviously extremely ugly. To any extent that he is given a platform in the Sadr Movement, it is guaranteed to go in a radical rightwing direction that will contribut to a failure of democracy.

*In his Friday Prayer sermon in Najaf, Muhammad Baqir al- Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, condemned attacks on Coaltion forces in Iraq. He said that violence should be a last resort, and that for now Shiites should employ peaceful means to protest the American occupation. This was a a less hotheaded sermon than lastweek's, in which he called the Americans the great Satan. It still should not give any of us much comfort, since he still seems to be thinking in terms of a popular movement that would kick the Americans out of Iraq.

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*Someone sent me a link to a fascinating piece on battle fatigue among US soldiers by journalist Bob Graham that appeared back last June 19 in the Evening Standard. I thought I'd share it here. It is very chilling, does not bode well for US peace keeping efforts in Iraq.
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*Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, the leader of the popular Sadr Movement in Iraqi Shiism, gave an interview today to al-Hayat's Hazim al-Amin in Najaf. He said that in the religious establishment of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Sayyid Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, Shaykh Bashir al-Najafi, and Shaykh Muhammad al-Fayyad all supported one another and recognized that each was a legitimate object of emulation (marja` al-taqlid) for lay Shiites. He said they were all determined to stay out of secular politics, and that since all were ultimately of Iranian extraction, they had little reason to be concerned with broader Iraqi society. Muqtada insists that the leadership of the Iraqi Shiites should be invested in native Iraqis, not in Iranians living in Najaf.

In contrast to Najaf quietism, it was supporters of Muqtada who organized the protest in Baghdad last Tuesday that demanded clerical oversight over any new Iraqi government. Muqtada said he believed in the general guardianship of the cleric, but said that the supreme jurisprudent would be different in Iraq than in Iran. (That is, he is saying that he accepts Khomeini's theory of the guardianship of the jurisprudent or theocracy, but does not accept the authority in Iraq of Iranian supreme jurisprudent Ali Khamenei). Muqtada also rejected the idea of cooperating with the Americans in establishing a new government, saying he and the Sadr Movement would have nothing to do with such a process until the Americans left the country. On the other hand, he denounced attacks on American troops as the work of Baathists and as a form of sabotage of the country, and said no permission had been given to engage in them by the [Shiite] religious authority.

Al-Sadr's spokesman, Adnan al-Shahmani, was even more open and vehement about the need for an Iraqi object of emulation. He said there has been rapid turnover in the Najaf leadership in the recent period, and most objects of emulation have been Iranians. Iraqis, he said, need a leadership attuned to their specific circumstances. He also admitted that the Sadr Movement in Baghdad and elsewhere had been involved in forcibly shutting down video stores, liquor stores and other establishments (which offended the puritan moralism of the movement). But he said that such actions had been spontaneous and local, and were not being directed from the Sadr office in Najaf.

The Sadr Movement is by far the most widespread and popular among religious Iraqi Shiites. The reporter, al-Amin, contends that Sistani and Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), have moved closer to one another. Both are Iranians, and both wish to oppose the Sadr Tendency in Iraq. Al-Amin's analysis seems to me to take ethnicity too seriously and at too much of a face value. Lots of Iraqi Shiites have deep respect for Sistani and al-Hakim. Sistani and al-Hakim don't appear to me to agree on much, given that Sistani is a political quietist and al-Hakim is a political activist. It may be that they have talked about how to rein in the Sadr Movement, which limits the power of both.

*The NYT is alleging that the militia in Majar al-Kabir is made up of Badr Corps (the paramilitary of SCIRI). I am not entirely convinced that this is the case. The main pieces of evidence instanced were that they were trained by Revolutionary Guards and that they said they acted under orders from the religious establishment in Najaf. But Iraqi Hizbullah of the Marsh Arabs were also often trained in Iran, and all Iraqi Shiites would at least claim to be under the authority of Najaf. If the Badr Corps really do have this kind of position in Majar, then they are very likely to have been involved in the rpg attacks on British paratroopers on this past Tuesday.



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*Reporters on the ground in Majar al-Kabir, southern Iraq, have begun to piece together what may have happened there Tuesday when 6 British troops were killed and several more wounded in two distinct attacks. The story as I see it goes this way: Paul Bremer set a deadline of June 16 for Iraqi militiamen to turn over their machine guns and other heavy weapons. (Ordinary Iraqis are allowed to keep a pistol or a rifle at home, but not to carry it on the street). When Tony Blair was in Basra, Paul Bremer told him that the British in the south were being too permissive and that the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was taking advantage of the British to establish its hegemony in the Shiite south ( - The Scotsman, 26 June). The current American administration in Iraq sees SCIRI as linked heavily to the hardliners in Iran and as a Trojan Horse for Iranian influence in Iraq. As a result of the American pressure, The same policy of confiscating weapons was adopted in the South by British Maj. General Wall, with a June 16 deadline.

Majar al-Kabir is a sort of frontier town bristling with weapons. It is one of the places that the Marsh Arabs settled when Saddam's forces drained their swamps and reduced them to poverty. The Marsh Arabs were organized politically and paramilitarily by the Iraqi Hizbullah Party. A Marsh Arab sheikh rules nearby Amara. Because of the Bremer/Wall policy of disarming Iraqis, British troops were committed to Majar al-Kabir to do house to house searches. As you all know, Middle Eastern men are very touchy about their women and about incursions into private, domestic space. The British troops in Majar appear occasionally to have been harsh in these incursions. Besides, the heavily persecuted Marsh Arab men would not want foreigners coming and taking their weapons away from them. They have learned that they need to protect themselves. One rumor circulated that a British soldier clowned around with a woman's underwear during one of the searches.

So, by Monday afternoon the townspeople were fed up, and a crowd gathered to demonstrate. It got out of hand. The British troops, who were accompanied by some Iraqi police that they were training, initially fired rubber bullets. The Iraqis thought they were being shot at for real, and returned fire. They killed two British soldiers. The other four retreated to the police station, where one was killed in a hallway. At some point they became so threatened that they switched to live ammunition. The townspeople insist that the British shot down four young men of Majar. The crowd then closed on the ramaining three British troops and killed them. They may have captured them first and then executed them. (- Peter Almond, UPI). This was a classic anticolonial crowd action, deriving from the occupiers' attempt to disarm the population.

But then there was a separate attack on a British paratroopers convoy in the same area, using rocket propelled grenades. That attack wounded one British soldier and destroyed two vehicles. This attack may be related to the town riot, but it wasn't the same kind of phenomenon. Townspeople do not have and know how to use rocket propelled grenades. This was done by a trained paramilitary or military force. It might have been Iraqi Hizbullah Marsh Arabs from Majar, who had at some point received arms and training from Iran to fight Saddam. It might have been Badr Corps, working for SCIRI. Or it might even have been a surviving Baathist unit trying to foment trouble between the Coalition and the Shiites of the south.

By the way, I gave an interview to AP's Borzou Daragahi in which I said about searching females and domestic space: "Rather than preventing violence, the practice could spark more clashes, said Juan Cole, a history professor and Mideast specialist at the University of Michigan. "Many riots have been set off in colonial history by heavy-handed Western interventions in private life," said Cole." Check out Mr. Daragahi's web site at http://www.borzou.com/. In response to my remarks, posted at Fox News, I received several angry emails from readers insisting that coalition troops were not being heavy handed and that crowd control is not a problem. The bad news is that this incident could be only the beginning.

*US-trained Yemeni special forces attacked the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army in the mountains of Hadhramawt on Wednesday, killing 6 of the militants. The Islamic Army has been linked to al-Qaeda. They had assaulted a medical convoy on Saturday. In 1998 they took tourists hostage.

*Three members of the terrorist Khalidi Faction were arrested in Mecca by Saudi authorities. Apparently the faction was behind the Riyadh bombings, for which 12 other arrests have already been made. The bomb maker himself has eluded capture.

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*The ambush of British troops near Amara that killed six of them on Tuesday was probably the work of bandits, according to Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn of The Independent. The south of Iraq has been plagued by banditry for years. Under Saddam, some of it may have been social banditry, in which Shiite tribesmen or desperadoes defied the Baath regime with their robberies and were hidden by peasants or Marsh Arabs. Organized crime, a sort of Iraqi Mafia, seems clearly responsible for the theft of cable, which is stripped to the copper wiring and melted into blocks for sale in Iran. The lost cable makes it difficult for the US and Britain to restore electricity, which no doubt pleases the mafias. After all, crime is best carried out in the dark, and chaos and public discontent can abet it. The neocon hawks in Washington thought that in taking over Iraq they were getting a sort of Arab Germany, brutal but disciplined. In fact, the brutality of Baath rule came from the country's near ungovernability, not from success in imposing order. It will be no easy matter to impose order on Iraq. The British and Americans had been talking about a quick reduction in force of their militaries in Iraq, but now such measures are on hold. Indeed, more troops may have to be sent.

*An eyewitness account appears in az-Zaman today of a running street battle in Baghdad between the US army and an armed group of bandits. So much for things returning to "normal."

*Journalists continue to bring into question the American assertions that things are returning to normal in Iraq. AFP reported that Baghdad was without electricity for a full 24 hours a couple of days ago. According to Charles Clover of the Financial Times for 25 June: "Life in Baghdad often seems at variance with the optimistic pronouncements coming out of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) . . . Police have returned to work but are seldom seen on Baghdad's streets, where cars are stolen in broad daylight and traffic jams are constant. Heaps of rubbish lie in the street - closing even the entrance to the central bank - yet sporadic clean-up campaigns seem designed more for publicity than for effect. Power seems to be off far more than the average of four hours a day that the CPA says is the case." A similar article for the Independent notes that a shopkeeper laughed when he hear Paul Bremer's assertion that things were returning to normal. He said he doesn't open his shops because the banks are closed and he has no place to put the money-- if he kept it in the shop or at home it would just be stolen. Clover worries that if things go on like this for a few more months, public disenchantment with the CPA will grow to dangerous dimensions.

*Hundreds of Iranian students have been arrested for the recent protests, not only in Tehran but also in Mashhad, Yazd and elsewhere. The Iranian government has banned any further demonstrations off university campuses, but says it will not interfere with gatherings at universities. Some clerics have called for harsh penalties to be imposed on student leaders of the demonstrations. According to AFP via Asharq al-Awsat, Iranian officials are claiming that a large proportion of those arrested were actually high school students.
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*From the BBC: "Text of report by Iraqi Shi'i group's Iran-based radio station Voice of the Mujahidin on 21 June: "His Eminence Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq SCIRI , said in the Friday prayers sermon in Al-Najaf al-Ashraf city that the United States has proved that it is the great Satan. He added that the United States neither protects Iraq from disorder and chaos, nor allows the holding of elections so that the Iraqi people can express themselves." Al-Hakim has been bitterly disappointed that Paul Bremer cancelled municipal elections in Najaf. The al-Da`wa web page has a an item posted Monday 6/23 on the continuing US crackdown on SCIRI, saying that its office in the town of Wasit has been closed and that Dr. Ahmad al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader there, has been arrested. Likewise, US Marines took over the SCIRI office in Kut. On Saturday, the SCIRI office in al-Jadiriya in Baghdad was closed and three arrests were made by the US Army. The source given is the Arabic service of the BBC. Apparently relations between the US and SCIRI are souring fast, and the US is moving against the organization because it more or less declined to disarm its Badr Corps fighters (Badr only offered to give up heavy weaponry). This story strikes me as a big one, but I haven't seen it covered in the Western press.

*Sayyid Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum gave a talk in Baghdad calling for a pluralistic democracy, according to az-Zaman. He said that only through the ballot box could a democratic Iraq be achieved, in which all sectarian and ethnic groups, and women, would have a place. He urged reason, and warned against adopting approaches that were doomed to fail. (I read this as a warning against trying to throw the Americans out this minute or trying to impose a pure Shiite state on Iraq's Sunnis). He said Iraqis should be patient, and should use this time to give thought to how to build a pluralistic, democratic state. A Shiite cleric from a very prominent family, Bahr al-Ulum was a spokesman for the Khoei Foundation in London and was associated with the Free Iraqi Council, an expatriate group planning for a post-Saddam Iraq. He probably does not have that much standing among Shiite clerics or the public in Iraq, where the religious Shiites tend to follow Muqtada al-Sadr, who is far more radical. But he may be able to reach out to the so far voiceless secular Shiite middle and working classes and find a power base. On the other hand, Muqtada is just back from Iran, where he apparently won pledges from Hashemi Rafsanjani and other of Iranian aid for his Sadr Movement.

*The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva warned that Iraqi hospitals lack natural gas, oxygen, and electricity, and that there are no signs of any improvement in the situation in the near future. It also complained that the armed religious militias that often provide security for these hospitals interfere with their administration. (The reference is probably to the Sadr Movement militias at hospitals in East Baghdad).




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*US civil administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer said Sunday that he may distribute profit dividends from the Iraqi petroleum industry directly to Iraqi citizens, along the model used by Alaska ( - Roula Khalaf, Financial Times). It is really good news that he is thinking along these lines, since one feared that the rightwing Bush administration would be unlikely to set up an Iraq where resources were shared. But note that Bremer brought up this possibility as a way of offsetting the pain and discontent likely to be caused by a program of determined privatization of Iraq's extensive public sector. He also may be overestimating how much money Iraq has to play with in the short term, given the instability and the blowing up of a pipeline yesterday. Too extreme a privatization in Iraq might well produce the kind of robber baron capitalism we've seen in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. In any case, the Alaska model would be a potentially revolutionary one for the Middle East, and that bit of Bremer's policy would much add to his stature and local popularity if implemented.

*Bremer also announced that a recruitment drive for soldiers for the new Iraqi army will begin within two weeks. He said that he will establish an appointed government council of 30 Iraqis in July, as well. While at the World Economic Forum in Jordan, Bremer was pressed to allow Arab League member nation troops to help reestablish order in Iraq, and to accelerate the timetable for Iraqi elections. He seems highly unlikely to do either. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged at the same venue that the US would leave Iraq as soon as an Iraqi government was formed. The problem with this pledge is that it is vague. Will the US maintain military bases in Iraq after it "leaves"? Will the US embassy continue to pull strings behind the scenes? The British "left" Iraq in 1932, but continued to intervene forcefully in its affairs until the revolution in 1958. Indeed, continued imperial hegemony was one reason the revolution succeeded. The US must be careful not to set up a similar dynamic.

*Major General Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry, announced that his troops had intercepted Iranian attempts to infiltrate Iraq, according to az-Zaman. He also spoke about US army efforts to stop Arab volunteers from coming into Iraq from Syria to fight the US and conduct sabotage operations.

*Iranian students demonstrated Sunday evening in front of the parliament building against the arrest of dozens of the leaders of the student protests that began June 10. Meanwhile, some hard line clerics have called for the execution of those arrested. (The hard liners see the students as US mercenaries).



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*Radical Shiite clerics in East Baghdad tried to get up a big demonstration against the American occupation on Saturday (they began organizing it after Friday prayers on Friday). But they were only able to get about 2000 demonstrators out in front of the US HQ in downtown Baghdad. They tried to organize a similar protest a couple of weeks ago, and only produced 10,000 demonstrators. But this particular demonstration was not called for by the more important Shiite leaders in Iraq--it seems to have been a local thing, out of one or two of the East Baghdad mosques. They were demanding that the Shiite clerics have the power of judicial review over any decisions or laws decided on by Iraq's civil government. This is not the same as the sytem in Iran, exactly, though it parallels a clause in the 1907 Iranian constitution. If this is the best they can do in getting out a crowd, the American administration may decide they can safely ignore the clericalist Shiites in Iraq. A recent poll found that only about a quarter of Iraqis want a religious state.

*The head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mamoun al-Hudaybi, has reaffirmed his organization's commitment to jihad or holy war, as the only way to attain basic goals. He seemed to be referring to the question of whether Hamas (the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood) should stop its attacks on Israelis. He referred to the evil attacks by Islam's enemies (America in Iraq, Israel in the Occupied Territories?) The leaders of the more radical splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood, the al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, has renounced violence from prison. Al-Hudaybi may be attempting to position his organization as at the forefront of direct action against non-Muslim powers.

*Dozens of students involved in the recent democracy demonstrations in Iran have been arrested, according to Reuters and the LA Times. The regime appears to be going after those they consider ringleaders. Since the student movement is relatively isolated, there is no countervailing force in Iran to protect them in any practical manner. It is difficult to see how the Bush administration rhetoric in support of the students does those in jail much good.


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*Richard Perle, member of the Pentagon Advisory Board and unnoficial adviser to the Bush administration, has admitted that the regime of Saddam Hussein posed no direct threat to the US, according to al-Hayat. I was not able to verify the report at Lexis Nexis. Al-Hayat says that Perle, who is speaking in Europe these days, also admitted that weapons of mass destruction was not the issue that mainly drove the US war on Iraq. He said he thought US troops would be in the country for an unlimited period of time. Some in the Bush administration are arguing that the Iraq war will make North Korea and Iran more cautious. But I can't personally see that it has had any such impact on other countries on the neocon hit list.

*Lebanese Shiite Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah deplored the pressure he said was being applied to the Palestinians at the international level. He also expressed his astonishment that the US should be pressing Iran so hard over what were in actuality peaceful nuclear reactors, while, he said, ignoring the massive Israeli nuclear weapons program. - asharq al-awsat
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*The attacks on US troops in Iraq continue. On Thursday there were three such incidents. In Samawah, a largely Shiite town with some Sunni presence, a rocket propelled grenade hit a military ambulance and killed a US soldier. In the Shiite holy city of Samarra north of Baghdad, a mortar was fired at a US-run humanitarian aid center, killing one Iraqi and wounding 12 others. An rpg was also fired at an American tank, but the crew was unharmed (that's my definition of a good tank). My guess is that Baath remnants were behind these attacks. It is suspicious to me that they mounted them in Shiite towns, and I suspect they are trying to find ways to stir the Shiites up against the US. So far the US military has been very canny about not playing into the Baathists' hands on that score, and I hope they keep it up.

*Hundreds of Iraqis gathered in front of the Public Security (Secret Police) building in downtown Baghdad to protest its reopening. They want the ministry to be abolished. Saddam at some points employed more domestic spies through such ministries than the country had factory workers. It was responsible for tailing potential dissidents and having them picked up and tortured. The US would do well to listen to their concerns, if it is serious about democratization in the Arab world. The secret police are ubiquitous there, and they do not coexist with democracy.

*The student demonstrations continued for an eighth night in Tehran, though only 200 or so appear to have come out, along with the usual compliment of automobile drivers from North Tehran, driving around and honking in support. Yesterday there were incidents in Mashhad and other provincial cities. The movement may pick back up, but for now it seems to be fading a bit, at least in Tehran. The big demonstrations may be on the 4-year anniversary of the last really huge student demonstrations (though the ones last November against the death sentence against Aghajari are said to have brought 5000 into the streets). A lot of informed observers believe that, whatever its importance for intellectual and student life, this movement is a little unlikely to shake the foundations of the regime in Iran.

*When asked recently about the possibility of Pakistan's recognizing Israel, President General Pervez Musharraf did not rule it out. There are rumors that the US is attempting to tie forgiveness of $1.8 bn in loans to such a step (as though Pakistan's capture of 500 of the most dangerous al-Qaeda operatives were not already worth that). In response, the United Action Council (MMA), a coalition of religious parties, has threatened to hold rallies and demonstrations throughout Pakistan and to attempt to unseat the government if it recognizes Israel. The MMA sees such a step as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and an acceptance of Israeli annexation of much of the West Bank and Gaza. The Jamaat-i Islami leader Qazi Husain Ahmad also said he would oppose any effort to freeze the Pakistani nuclear program. Pakistan's parliament, elected last October after years of martial law, continues to be paralyzed by disputes over Musharraf's martial law amendments to the constitution and his insistence on remaining military chief of staff even while sitting as a civilian president. The paralysis has been worsened by Center-Province feuding over the Northwest Frontier Province Assembly's passage of a bill implementing a strict version of Islamic law as the provincial law. The Federal government sees this move as unconstitutional and as a dangerous talibanization of a key Pakistani province, but has undertaken not to simply dissolve the NWFP assembly.

*The US Justice Department seems to have finally apprehended a bona fide American al-Qaeda member, after hundreds of false arrests that sometimes ruined lives. Iyman Faris, an Indian-born naturalized US citizen originally from Kashmir, planned to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge among other things. He had spent time with Usama Bin Laden in the Afghanistan camps. It is not irrelevant that Faris is from Kashmir, where Indian troops have killed thousands in an attempt to repress popular yearnings for sovereignty as a Muslim state. Faris and his associates (of unknown number) are dangerous, but what is striking is how few of such persons there are among the three million American Muslims. So far I think the FBI has found about 10 such radicals for sure, and I suspect that the active ones don't come to more than 100 or so. There are almost certainly not 5000 al-Qaeda supporters in the US, as the FBI once maintained. There are problems in the American Muslim community, but the Steve Emerson/Daniel Pipes line about terrorists among us is way overblown. And the successful arrests of the few such terrorists that are among us came about because of good police work focusing on leads and networks, not from massive fishing expeditions or racial profiling (how many *Indians* was the FBI even looking at?)

*US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested Thursday that Baghdad was no more unsafe than Washington DC, which had 262 murders last year. Many have already pointed out that the US soldiers in Iraq are more like the police than civilians, and 42 policemen have not been killed in DC in the past 2 months. But Rumsfeld's statement is suggestive in many other ways. Does he expect the US to lose over 200 troops a year in Iraq for the next few years, and is he preparing the US public to accept that loss rate? Another way to come at the statement is through the politics of race and colonialism. Washington, DC, is a largely African-American southern city, with a small bastion of white power in DC Northwest. Anacostia and other areas are desperately poor and lack real security for the residents. Astonishingly, the Federal government has never undertaken any significant economic development efforts in its own capital, allowing the city's slums to fester. Many of the whites are politicos from elsewhere in the country, and they often feel under siege from the poverty-induced crime that spreads into Northwest from elsewhere. Is Rumsfeld making an analogy from the white power elite in its marble bunkers in Washington DC to the US occupation authority in Baghdad? Is he saying, "We elite persons manage to live in DC with all this crime and poverty, and it is not so different for us to insert ourselves into power in a poverty-stricken and violent Iraq" ? Race analogies would make sense of the often very patronizing language used by the Americans of Iraqis. And, I am afraid that if the powerful in Washington are thinking of treating Iraq the way they treat Washington, DC, then this is about the worst news the Iraqis have had since the Persians marched on Babylonia.



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*According to Islam Online, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a religious ruling or fatwa calling upon Iraqis to wage "civil" (i.e. nonviolent) "jihad" on the US occupation, by simply continually asking rather pointedly when the Americans are planning to leave. Sistani's secretary and spokesman compared this period of psychological preparation for resistance to the year the Hizbullah in Lebanon took to prepare the Lebanese for resistance against Israeli occupation beginning in 1984. That analogy is not a good sign, especially coming from someone in the circle of Sistani, who has been a relative quietist. I'd say that if the US is still in Iraq in force next year this time, they may start to see trouble from the Shiites, not just the Sunnis as at present.

*Local US military officials had prepared to hold municipal elections in Najaf, but the polls were canceled by Paul Bremer, according to the NYT as reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. When disgruntled Iraqi politicians said in their newspapers that they supported the attacks on the Americans, they were arrested and jailed for four days for "incitement." They complained that no such thing would happen in American to Americans (I am not so sure, actually. Incitement to violence is a crime here, and the only question is whether it presents a clear and present danger; one could argue that it might, in contemporary Iraq). Bremer's team says that early elections in Bosnia allowed nationalists to get in, who proved obstructionist for years. Local US officials say they think Najaf was ready for elections and that the theocrats would have done poorly. A lot of Iraqis want early elections. In an 11 June interview with al-Manar Television, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said, "We believe that general elections can be held in Iraq. The Iraqi people are prepared for them and nothing prevents holding elections. Elections were held in some parts of Iraq without any problems. The Security Council resolution stresses the need to expedite the formation of an elected government."

*Shiite songs mourning the martyrdom of their holy figures, the equivalent of US Gospel music about Christ dying on the cross, have experienced a sudden revival in Iraq. CDs by Hussein al-Karbala'i are flying out of the stalls selling cd's and audio cassettes. according to Lamia Radi in Baghdad.

*The interesting Weblog Letters from London by an Iranian physician named Mojtaba links today to Iranian sites written by Iranian young women.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq does not support violence against occupying US troops, says Abdul Aziz al-Hakim in al-Hayat. The leader of the Badr Corps denounced the remnants of the followers of Saddam who have been striking at US troops as saboteurs. But he insisted that no Iraqi can accept a Western occupation, and said it would be resisted, though peacefully. He added that he thought the Americans themselves were intending to leave Iraq soon, since they know that in international law resistance to occupation is permissible. Regarding Lebanese Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah's call for jihad against the Americans, al-Hakim said that he was welcome to his views, but that Iraqis did not necessarily agree with them. Al-Hakim said he had been consulting with Lebanese and Bahraini Shiites.

*Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator of Iraq, has established a criminal court in Baghdad. It will use the statutes of 1969 and 1971, which broadly accord with international norms. Many Iraqi political forces have been calling for Islamic law as the law of the land, and they will resist using these secular statutes (enacted early in the Baath era). - az-Zaman

*Shaikh Ahmad Kubaisi, the Sunni fundamentalist leader of the Iraqi National Movement, has also denounced the attacks on the US soldiers. Ominously, however, his critique was that they are premature. He said the US administration had pledged to leave within 2 years. If the Americans are still there after that time, he said, a resistance could legitimately be mounted against them. The current individual attacks, he said, do not constitute a resistance. He said the Sunnis in Iraq had been marginalized because the US saw them as hostile, and admitted that the Shiites had won out for the moment. He said it was natural for them to be happy about their victory. Even the call to prayer on US-run Iraqi television is chanted according to the Shiite formula, not the Sunni. - AFP

*The French government staged a massive raid on the Peoples' Mujahidin terrorist organization in France. They said it was about the commission of terrorist acts on French soil. This group has been trying to overthrow the Khomeinists in Iran, in hopes of instituting a form of Islamic Marxism instead. It had been given bases by Saddam Hussein to harass the Iranian state. The group has recently been defended by Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, which is the think tank supported by the America Israel Political Affairs Committee. Why are hardline Zionists in cahoots with a leftist/Islamist terrorist group that was among those who took US embassy personnel hostage in 1979-80? Apparently they hope the People's Mujahidin can be useful in destabilizing Iran, and are not choosy with whom they get into bed (politically at least).

*Hundreds of demonstrators came out on the 8th night of student protests in Tehran, though the crowd was smaller than in the past. The protests also, however, spread to Isfahan, Mashhad, Kerman, Hamadan, and Tabriz for the first time. The students and their supporters want more individual liberty. The protesters in the provinces also objected to the attacks on the Tehran students last Friday and Saturday by the thugs of the Ansar Hezbollah.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The student protests in Tehran seemed to die down on Tuesday evening, and were not nearly as big as before. Likewise, the evening was not characterized by clashes between students and the Islamist vigilantes, Ansar Hezbollah and the Basij. Still, the political impact of the demonstrations is visible in the letter signed by 250 academics and intellectuals calling for a less absolute exercise of power by the Shiite hierarchy.

*British Troops are likely to be in Iraq at least four years according to Major-General Freddy Viggers. He says the inability to find Saddam, and the continued Sunni Arab uprising, made it likely that the Anglo-American force would have to stay in the country for years. He worried that the troops were ensnared in a quagmire similar to that of Bosnia, where 16000 British troops are still serving (and have not been able to restore order to that country).

*Paramilitary fighters of the Badr Corps, representing the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, have turned their efforts to humanitarian work, according to Borzou Daragahi of AP. This move is in accord with the American insistence that all militias in Iraq lay down their arms. Daragahi reports the widespread suspicions that SCIRI fighters have just stockpiled their weapons rather than turning them in, and that there could be violence between them and other Shiite parties in the future.

*A high British official in Baghdad has lambasted the US administration of Iraq as "chaotic" in an interview in the Telegraph. He said the US administration of the country by Paul Bremer, with a staff of only 600, is chonically understaffed and lacks strategic direction.. He reveals that the US and Britain had planned to use the surviving Iraqi Baath ministries to solve administrative crises after the war, and were completely unprepared for the possibility that they might collapse altogether. Likewise, Baath bureacrats want authorization for every little thing, making them unsuitable to working under the Anglo-American Coalition Provisional Authority. He believes that serious unrest could grip Iraq if things aren't turned around in a few months. "This is the single most chaotic organisation I have ever worked for," he is reported to have said.






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The big student protests in Iran continued for a sixth night on Sunday. This, despite the attack on the students Saturday by armed thugs controlled by the hardline clerics, which injured 50 and killed one. Many protesters have also been arrested by the regime. But, some of the hardline Hezbollah or Party of God goons are being threatened with being put on trial, as well, which is unprecedented. President Bush expressed his hope that the protests were the beginning of Iranians speaking freely. This US support is a very mixed blessing for the students, who have been branded "foreign mercenaries" by Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. The students insist that they are an authentic Iranian political expression. It remains to be seen whether they can escape being seen as a fifth column for the US. Some of them have gone so far as to chant, "Death to Khamenei!" This is a first. Khamenei used to express hurt in the late 1990s that he was criticized by the students. His heart must really be broken. The hardliners have brought this unrest on themselves by doing everything they could to thwart to popular will and undo the last two national elections, by crude methods of repression. By all accounts, ordinary Iranians are fed up. But, it is highly desirable that the US stand back and let the Iranians take care of all this themselves.

*The reason there weren't any postings over the weekend is that I was in DC to attend The Iraq Forum of the "Education for Peace in Iraq Center" [EPIC]. It was an extremely informative event. I always learn from hearing Phebe Marr and Judith Yaphe on Iraq, and I had the opportunity for the first time to hear Nathaniel Hurd (a UN consultant) and Glen Rangwala (a lecturer in politics at Cambridge U., he broke the story of the plagiarism by the UK Ministry of Defense of a grad student thesis in its white paper against Saddam). The opportunity to hear Iraqi community activists such as Tanya Gilly, Nijyar Shimdin, Muhammad Sabir, Sam Kubba and others was also invaluable.

*A crowd of 10,000 angry Shiites led by Sheikh Khazraj Saadi in Basra demanded self-government and pelted British military vehicles with stones on Sunday, according to the Daily Telegraph. The British had appointed a tribal leader mayor at first, then removed him in favor of a council of appointed technocrats. The British authorities have promised to reply to the demands by Tuesday. Saadi says he will wait until then, but if he and his followers are not satisfied, they will launch further protests. Unfortunately, the report does not identify to which Shiite tendency Saadi and his followers belong. Are they members of the Sadr Movement? The Australian Broadcast Network Online reported that among the crowds' chants was "Down, down with Jews" and "Leave our land." The British and Americans are associated in popular Arab politics with knee-jerk support for Zionist expansionism in the region.

Az-Zaman, the liberal Iraqi newspaper, also reported this story, but its correspondent described the demonstration as "peaceful" and neglected to mention the rock-throwing. It specified that the crowd "of thousands" gathered in front of the British military HQ, a former palace of Saddam Hussein. The az-Zaman article attempts to emphasize that commerce has returned to normal in the center of the city, with the restoration of much of the electricity service, and that order was "relatively good." It also points to infrastructural improvements made by the British at the port of Umm Qasr and at other harbor facilities (Basra itself is an inland port on the Shatt al-Arab). It seems to me that az-Zaman attempted to play down the grievances of the demonstrators, which had to do with self-government, not with services. Their placards demanded a consultative council for the city, which implies that they want a popularly elected one, not a set of British appointees.

The Americans and the British have drawn the conclusion from Bosnia that early elections are a bad idea, since disreputable characters get entrenched (they are the ones with the clout and paramilitaries or other coercive instruments, which is what allows them to get elected). Once they are entrenched they are almost impossible to remove. This is a fair point. But this procedure is running up against very strong anti-colonial feelings not present in Bosnia. Iraqis had their politics dictated to them by foreign capitals much of the 20th century, and they are understandably touchy about now having Western military men appoint their city leaders.

The last big protest in Basra, on June 9, was organized by the Democratic Workers' Union and criticized the plan by US companies involved in reconstruction to bring in Asia guest workers instead of hiring local Iraqis. Iraqi unemployment is estimated at 30% to 50%.



*Here is my recent op-ed on the WMD fiasco:

The Daily Star (Beirut)
June 13, 2003

Why was Bush chasing phantoms in Baghdad?

Juan Cole

Saddam Hussein, it turns out, had no nuclear weapons program, and perhaps not much of a remaining biological or chemical one. Even Al-Qaeda refused to cooperate with him.

The Bush administration has been on the defensive during the past week over its case for war on Iraq. Its defenders are quick to point to the mass graves and other evidence of the genocidal nature of the Baath regime as justification for the war.

That misses the point. If the Bush administration rushed the American people and some US allies into war on the basis of faulty intelligence or one-sided analysis, then democracy was subverted. If the White House diverted enormous resources from the “war on terror” to a war on Iraq, it made Americans and Middle Easterners less secure in the end.

Would the bombings in Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh and Casablanca have succeeded had the US been focusing on Al-Qaeda instead of on phantoms in Baghdad? Would Afghanistan have real security if billions had been spent to stabilize and reconstruct that country instead of attacking an Iraq that had been contained?

The case for this war was based on a set of forged documents. Letters purporting to show officials from Niger acknowledging purchases in the late 1990s by Iraq of yellow-cake uranium for bomb-making were child-like and clumsy forgeries, and the officials allegedly involved have not been in office for a decade. The US also maintained that aluminum tubing was bought by Iraq for making centrifuges to enrich the uranium. In reality, the tubing was unsuitable for such a use.

George W. Bush held a news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sept. 7, 2002, in which the US president said: “When the inspectors first went into Iraq … a report came out of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) that they (Iraqis) were six months away from developing a weapon.”

The agency immediately responded that it had never, ever, issued such a report or made such a statement, and insisted that by 1998 “we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear weapons program.”

On Sept. 23, 2002, the Blair government issued a report alleging that “Iraq has chemical and biological weapons that can be deployed in minutes and it is working hard to acquire nuclear warheads.”

It also asserted that the Iraqi regime had tried to buy “significant quantities” of uranium from Africa. (This reference is almost certainly to the forged Niger documents).
A review of statements made by US senators and congressmen who voted Bush authorization for war shows that they consistently pointed to the alleged Iraqi nuclear program as decisive in their decisions.

Likewise, on Sept. 26, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared: “We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al-Qaeda leaders have sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire weapons of mass destruction capabilities.”

Yet interrogations of high-level Al-Qaeda operatives such as Abu Zubaida (captured in March, 2002), revealed that Osama bin Laden refused to allow cooperation between the radical Sunni group and the secular Baath regime. Rumsfeld was clearly discounting that reliable information in favor of shadowy speculation that supported his desire for war.

Most distressingly of all, the credibility of the US government has been badly damaged. When will the UN Security Council and US allies again be able to take seriously Bush administration warnings of an imminent security threat? Yet it is precisely such credibility that is key to combating terrorism.

The Bush administration must explain how the intelligence was so badly politicized, and it must take steps to restore confidence.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Little has been written by American observers about the ways in which the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has worsened women's lives. Not least, it has unleashed a wave of Shiite nativism and puritanism that is hyper-patriarchal. Thus, bravo to the Christian Science Monitor for covering some of the impact on women of the new situation. Even completely covered-up women have been turned away from shrines and mosques for not being even more covered up. The article does not mention earlier threats by The Sadr movement to assassinate women who associate with Americans. Likewise, today's Asharq al-Awsat carries a report based in part on a Reuters story about UN officials expressing concern about the continued chaos and lack of security in Iraq. An Iraqi UN worker in Baghdad and her daughters received threats that they would be killed unless they started veiling. If prestigious international bureaucrats are being treated this way, imagine the lives of ordinary women.

*Hundreds of Baathist fighters have been captured and dozens killed in the latest US military operation in the Sunni part of Iraq. In order to understand all this, one has to remember that the Sunni Arabs in Iraq were sort of like the white South Africans in the 1950s. They were a minority that usurped most of the wealth and power in a wealthy country, by keeping everyone else down, often quite brutally. This is why it was unrealistic for all those commentators to proclaim that "the Iraqis" would "dance in the streets" if the US overthrew Saddam. Most Kurds and Shiites are pretty happy that he's gone, and so are a lot of Sunni Arabs. But not insignificant numbers of the latter are now afraid that they will lose everything in the new system. So, no, they are not all jumping up and down for joy. Some of them are still trying to kill us.


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*Several hundred Iranian students have demonstrated against the regime in Iran, and plan bigger protests on the anniversary of the 1999 demonstrations. The students are fed up with the repression of the hardliners and with the inability of the reformists such as President Khatami to get anything accomplished. The reformists have done well in elections but have been blocked at every turn.

*Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, has warned the Iranian regime against interfering in Iraq. This threat may be a way of referring to the current visit of Muqtada al-Sadr, a hardliner, to Qom, where he has met with prominent Iranian hardliners. Bremer has also established a set of region funds for reconstruction, totalling $60 mn. Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld continues to allege that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and is pushing for a Shiite theocracy in Iraq. Surprising, Rumsfeld's allegations on the nuclear side are given support by a report in a conservative Japanese newspaper about meetings between Iranian scientists and North Korean ones concerning possible transfer of nuclear weapons technology. The trouble is, I doubt you can trust the Japanese Right about these things any more than you can trust the American.

*A poll done in Iraq shows that about 60 percent of Iraqis favor a separation of religion and state, Only 23% want a state ruled by shariah or Islamic law. This according to a poll reported in the Iraqi al-Ahali newspaper. About 60 percent also favored a decentralized, loosely federal state to a strong central one (an understandable sentiment after the Baath). The problem is that the 23% who want Islamic law appear to be the ones who are highly organized and have AK-47s.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*In the brouhaha over the failure of the US to find much in the way of weapons of mass destruction programs or materials in Iraq, lots of things are being overlooked. The really scary weapon of mass destruction was nuclear weapons. The fact is that Iraq did not reconstitute its nuclear weapons program after 1998 in the way that the hawks so confidently alleged. Indeed, some of their evidence for such a reconstituted program was out and out fraudulent. Those books were cooked, and the only question is by whom. I wrote a long analysis for H-Mideast-Politics on the misuse of the nuclear issue in whipping up war fever last March. The other thing is that the very phrase "weapons of mass destruction" is misleading, and was probably intended to be when Wolfowitz and others began peddling it last summer. Chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They are battlefield weapons. As Aum Shinrikyo found out in Tokyo, they are difficult to deliver in a way that is massively destructive against civilian populations, though they can be very useful in warfare. It is nukes that were really scary, and they were a figment of the Right's fevered imagination.

*The religious establishment in Najaf, Iraq, issued a denial today that it had issued any fatwas or legal rulings requiring believers to force women to veil. The denial was faxed to the offices of az-Zaman newspaper, and signed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Grand Ayatollah Sa`id al-Hakim, as well as by Sheikhs Fayyad and Najafi. It criticized individuals who claimed to convey rulings from the religious establishment (al-Hawzah al-`Ilmiyyah). I take it what is really going on here is that the Sadr Movement is insisting that women veil, and perhaps the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is, as well (so reports Trudy Rubin from Baghdad). And, individuals from those more radical movements are claiming to represent the views of the Establishment. Sistani and his colleagues, on the other hand, are far more quietist and cautious. Forcing someone to be pious runs counter to the mainstream Shiite legal tradition. So, Sistani is attempting to distance himself from the excesses of the Sadrist and other radicals.

*Saad Eddin Ibrahim was consulted in Washington by Condaleeza Rice and others about democratization in the Middle East. He said it should not be imposed by the US government, but that rather civil society organizations in the US should reach out to their counterparts in the region. Saad Eddin always did give good advice on these matters. He is now starting back up the activities of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Human Rights in Egypt. It was outrageous that he was imprisoned the way he was. But perhaps his struggle was the beginning of a liberalization in Egypt. Surely the elite there does not think the military regime can just limp on this way forever. A recent study came out that nearly 6 percent of Egyptians live on a dollar a day. The country has great potential, but is being run into the ground by its current masters.

*Consultations have begun in Afghanistan toward producing a constitution for that country (- Reuters). A traditional assembly or Loya Jirga is planned for October to ratify the final result. Presidential, prime ministerial and monarchical forms of government are under consideration. It is being pointed out by critics that since the country has fallen into the hands of warlords, it is a little unlikely that processes of democratic consultation will result in a viable constitution. Anything that threatened the interests of the regional warlords would be vetoed. A very weak government will probably result, with ensuing years of chaos. The Loya Jirga as a institution, by the way, was never a "democratic" decision-making body in the way that Donald Rumsfeld portrays it. Kings usually called it to rubberstamp some already-made decision.

*Israeli businessmen have arrived in Baghdad and are opening offices in preparation for normalization, according to al-Hayat. At the same time, pamphlets have been circulating warning Iraqis not to do business with the Israelis. (Earlier, rumors were spread by Shiite clerics that the Israelis intended to buy up Iraqi land for Zionist purposes).






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*It is now being reported that interrogations of top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubayda reveal that the organization avoided entanglement with Saddam Hussein, on orders of Usama Bin Laden himself, because they didn't want to end up being manipulated by him. I have long held that there was no plausible linkage of the secular, Arab Baath party with the radical Sunni al-Qaeda. In fact, readers may be interested in my first and my second posting on the subject last summer at H-Diplo, a list for diplomatic history. Even just by following what had become available in open sources, and just by knowing the nature of the Baath and al-Qaeda organizations, I could tell that the two were highly unlikely to ever have been serious partners. On the other hand, if you go back through the cable news transcripts at Lexis Nexis, it is obvious that the inside-the-beltway talking heads were insistent on spinning Iraq as an al-Qaeda supporter. This spin became so pervasive that half the American public ended up buying it. The Right keeps saying that all this was all right, because after all it is a good thing that Saddam was overthrown. But it is never a good thing when demagoguery possesses a democratic people and a war fever is whipped up on the basis of false allegations. And, the real problem is that this performance could be repeated in the near future, with rather more catastrophic results.

*I talk about the Washington hawks' incipient targeting of Iran in my current piece in The Nation, now on newsstands. Unfortunately, there is not yet a digital version at the web site.

*An American soldier was killed at a checkpoint in the town of Qaim near Syria on Sunday night. Some US officials appear to think the Lebanese Hizbullah might have had a hand in the incident, but that is Sunni country and my guess is that it was the work either of Saddam loyalists or of Sunni radicals. Nicholas Blanford of the Daily Star (Beirut) has an interesting article on the Hizbullah factor. My guess is that in the near term, Hizbullah is irrelevant to Iraq. In the long term, it could help train Iraqi counterparts. The US wants Hizbullah to lay off firing at the occupied Shebaa Farms, on which Israeli troops are squatting. I'd say that is fine, if the US is also prepared to pressure Israel to withdraw from this sliver of land, which belongs to Syria. Israeli sticky fingers cause the US a lot of problems in the region.

*The Iraqi newspaper "al-Ahrar" (The Free) has begun publishing lists of thousands of persons executed or disappeared by the Saddam Hussein regime, pleading with anyone who has information about them to send it to bereaved family members. Mass graves are being discovered all over the country. That place under Saddam was one big morgue. And, it now appears that he was having his political opponents killed right up to a few days before his overthrow.

*Telephone service remains non-existent or spotty in Baghdad, and there is no way to call for an ambulance, according to Reuters. American bombing knocked out 11 of 17 telephone exchanges in the capital of 5 million persons. Telephones sometimes work in the other six, but often go dead even there. The exchanges also suffered from looting in the chaos after the fall of the Baath. US administrators promise that the situation will improve in the month of June.
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*"Operation Rockingham" was the name of a covert operation within the Defense Intelligence Staff of the UK's Ministry of Defense that aimed at skewing intelligence on Iraq so as to emphasize Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and to play down evidence to the contrary. So reports Neil McKay of the Sunday Herald. I have long suspected that some sort of cabal in the British military-industrial complex must have been promoting that war with some sort of covert operation. It was clear to me that someone had bamboozled Tony Blair into thinking Iraq was a mortal threat to Western Europe. This article doesn't mention it, but the bogus "intelligence" that Saddam had tried to buy yellow-cake uranium for enrichment from Niger--which was based on doctored 'documents'--was developed within MI6 and passed to the Americans from there. Blair and Bush kept obliquely referring to those documents in their rush to war in fall of 2002, and many US congressmen cited this concern of Iraqi nukes as their main reason for voting for the war. The question of where the forged Niger documents came from has never been settled. But I wouldn't be surprised if the origin lay in the sleazier sections of the Iraqi expatriate community that wanted to manipulate the US into a way against Saddam in hopes that they could them come in and take over the country. I suspect we may actually eventually find out the truth here.

*Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei called on hardline militias called the Basij to stay calm and to avoid giving the US any pretext for intervening in Iran. Khamenei, according to Agence France Presse, is convinced that there will be a US intervention in the country on the summertime anniversary of the 1999 student protests. Khamenei's warning comes in a context in which the Iranian "Hezbollah" or hardline vigilantes are threatening violence against Iran's reformers. Reformist members of parliament sent a letter to Khamenei recently complaining about repression and referring to the fates of the Taliban and of Saddam. Hardliners have attempted to prevent the letter from being referred to in parliamentary debates, on security grounds, according to az-Zaman.

*Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi has forcefully denied US charges that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. He say such weapons of mass destruction are forbidden (haram) in Islam. And, he warned that American pressure may push the Iranian public into the arms of the hardliners.

*The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has promised that its Badr Brigade troops (some 10,000 strong) will in fact be disarmed by the US-set deadline for disbanding such militias (the Kurds have been exempted). The US welcomed this pledge.

*The US press has not been reporting the crisis in Pakistan, where the United Action Council (Urdu acronym: MMA), has passed a "shariah bill" implementing its version of Islamic law in the Northwest Frontier Province, which it controls. In actuality, Islamic principles of jurisprudence allow Islamic law to be interpreted liberally and in a modern fashion. What the MMA really wants is a talibanization of the part of Pakistan under its control, with an implementation of hyper-patriarchy and harsh summary "justice." The law would end university coeducation for women,e .g.; since the NWFP is not going to build a law school just for women, and would not appoint women as district attorneys or judges anyway; the practical effect would be the exclusion of women from the legal profession and most other high-powered professions. Then there are the harsh misinterpretations of Islamic criminal law, etc., typical of Muslim fundamentalists. Many in Pakistan's Federal government feel that the bill is unconstitutional, and it is certainly dangerous for Pakistan to allow a descent of this key province into Islamist tyranny. There has been a lot of tension, with the Federal information minister branding the MMA government a bunch of "political illiterates." It is not clear exactly how the crisis will pass. The ruling party, the Muslim League-Q, needs MMA support to govern Baluchistan province, and the MMA has made it difficult for President/General Musharraf to move forward on any legislative agenda, since it constantly disrupts debates in parliament. (On the positive side, the MMA wants the more democratic 1973 constitution to operate at the Federal level, and objects to Musharraf remaining head of the military chiefs of staff while serving as a civlian president). It will be interesting to see how Musharraf, a relative secularist, handles the crisis. I hope he does so with constitutional tools rather than using heavy-handed martial law (which will backfire).






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Things are not going well again between the US and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim. Al-Hakim has said his organization refuses to participate in a leadership council appointed by the American civilian administrator Paul Bremer. Originally the plan was for the 7 parties appointed by Jay Garner to preside over a national convention in July, which would elect a transitional government. Bremer's team has canceled the convention and he says he will just appoint 30 Iraqis to a leadership council. Iraqis are nationalists, and would see such an American-appointed council as illegitimate, as a puppet of colonialism. So both al-Hakim and Ahmad Chalabi are withdrawing, as a way of putting pressure on Bremer to go back to the original plan. Although they are playing the imperialism card, they are not mentioning that they got where they are by the appointment of the Americans in the first place--they have little support inside Iraq. SCIRI is not as important inside Iraq as it gives out, but it has been among the few Shiite religious parties that would openly cooperate with the US. Its withdrawal from such cooperation could signal trouble. Probably the majority of the religious Shiites are Sadrists, following Muqtada al-Sadr rather than the al-Hakims. The Sadrists have already widely adopted a rejectionist attitude toward the US presence in Iraq.

Al-Hayat says that the US raided a SCIRI headquarters in Baghdad. The US also arrested 20 SCIRI members Saturday near the Iranian border, accusing them of having been involved in a bombing attack on US troops. SCIRI says not all those arrested are from its paramilitary wing, the Badr Brigade. The reports in both the Western and the Arabic press are confused about this arrest. We know some SCIRI members had been arrested in Baquba a couple of weeks ago on charges of firing on the Marines there. I am wondering whether the 20 now held include any of those already arrested earlier. SCIRI seems to say that some have been in custody from before Saturday.


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*Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, is in Iran for talks, according to az-Zaman. In the seminary city of Qom, he met with Ayatollah Kadhim al-Ha'iri, whose representative in Iraq he is held to be. He also met with other clerics. He had complained bitterly after the fall of Saddam about the stranglehold the Iranians had on religious offices in Shiite Islam, and had agitated for an Iraqi leadership in Iraq. The Iranians may have invited him on this trip, which coincides with the anniversary of the passing of Ayatollah Khomeini, in order to seek better relations. Some think the trip will increase Iranian hardliners' influence in Iraq. The az-Zaman headline implied that some of the discussions were about the possibility of al-Ha'iri coming back to Najaf (he is a native Iraqi). Al-Ha'iri is among the few major Iraqi clerics who accepts Khomeini's theory of the "rulership of the jurisprudent" or the notion of theocracy, in which the Shiite clerics take on the role of government.

*The civil administration of Iraq has created a women's leadership to participate in July's constitutional convention. This is a good thing that Paul Bremer has done, since women have been little represented in the expatriate political parties to whom the Department of Defense earlier tried to throw power.




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*Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani threw his weight behind the desirability of a near-term interim government in Iraq, during a meeting with Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani.
and calling for elections to a national assembly for Iraqis to produce a new constitution, according to Patrick Tyler of the New York Times.Sistani is deeply unhappy with current conditions in the country, saying, "The allied campaign to end the tyranny and oppression of Saddam Hussein "is like an occupation, not a liberation, as the people have been told." He and other Shiites also complained about the US appointing Sunni governors and administrators in the Shiite areas. (The American-appointed mayor of Najaf is an ex-army officer. Not a good idea.

*Some 60 newspapers are now being published in Iraq, carrying all sorts of views freely, after long years when Baathist censorship made such activity on this scale impossible. The number of newspapers is expected to grow to 100 soon, according to Asharq al-Awsat. The typical such newspaper has 8 pages or less, and Adnan Hussein says that they suffer from editorial and production problems. They are published by parties, factions, and individuals. There is now a shortage of trained journalists and editors.


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*"BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One U.S. soldier was killed and five were wounded when an assailant fired a rocket-propelled grenade at them in the restive Iraqi town of Falluja on Thursday, the U.S. military said. It said the wounded soldiers, from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, had been driven to a local military medical facility.". Falluja is a little town of 30,000 west of Baghdad, where the population is Sunni and had been either pro-Saddam or Sunni fundamentalist. The local Sunni Friday prayers leader routinely attacks the US. The LA Times also reports that nasty rumors about American plans for Iraq abound in places like Falluja. The US does a bit of broadcasting of real news, but most people still don't have electricity, or if they have it, it is only on for a couple of hours a day, so they can't receive the broadcasts! An extra 1500 US troops were deployed at Falluja and An Nahiya on Wednesday.

*Iraq is facing a mammoth public health crisis if the Ministry of Health is not quickly reconstitued, says CARE International. The main threat is that continued lack of access by most Iraqis to clean water (because the US knocked out a lot of the electricity used for water processing plants) will produce an epidemic of diarrhea. In a country like Iraq, diarrhea is deadly and kills lots of people, especially babies and children. (It produces dehydration, which is what really does the killing). CARE noted that 125,000 babies have been born in Iraq since the war began, and none of them got a tuberculosis shot, e.g.. The LA Times is also reporting that there are large numbers of street children in Iraq, many of them orphans whose parents were killed in or fled from the war. Many orphanages were looted and cannot care for the many new charges. The US is doing little for them, and they are often afraid of the troops. The Shiite religious leaders in places like East Baghdad are, however, taking care of them, and providing other social services. This "service gap" could become extremely important in subsequent Iraqi politics.

*The NYT is reporting that Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani will go to Najaf to consult with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim about ways of pressuring the US to transition quickly to an Iraqi interim government. A Shiite-Kurdish consensus on this issue would be important. If Sistani takes a stand, it will be the first substantive intervention by him in politics.



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*"Protests against U.S. actions in Iraq continued Tuesday in the streets of Baghdad with some 3,000 Muslim religious students demanding the release of a Shiite cleric rounded up by U.S. occupation forces last weekend."--UPI. Sheik Jassem al-Saedi was arrested by US troops on Sunday. The crowds also chanted against the US decision not to hold a leadership convention in July.
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*The stockpiling of arms in mosques has been denounced on Coalition radio in Iraq according to AFP/az-Zaman. The broadcast condemned the desecration of holy places in this way and pointed out that attacks on coalition forces with such heavy weapons typically injures innocent Iraqi civilians, as well. US troops in Falluja recently came under fire from a Sunni mosque there, e.g. There have also been reports of Shiite militias in East Baghdad stockpiling weapons in mosques. The US is attempting to impose heavy fines and imprisonment on any Iraqis who carry arms in the streets, but so far the collection of weapons program has not been a success.

*Shaikh Kadhim al-Ibadi of the Shiite al-Muhsin Mosque in Baghdad called again last Friday for Iraqi opposition to continued US occupation, and charged that Jews were coming to Iraq to buy up houses and property; he ordered Iraqis not to sell their property at this time. (There is no evidence for this odd charge.) But he also discouraged Shiites from assassinating former Baathists and simply taking their property. Similar calls for opposition to US presence were raised in Sunni mosques in Falluja.

*Predictably, the 'group of seven' largely expatriate parties that had originally expected to have Iraq turned over to them are loudly protesting Paul Bremer's decision instead to appoint an interim council of thirty. Bremer is right to sideline the corrupt Ahmad Chalabi, but his manner of proceeding is calculated to undermine the legitimacy of continued US control of Iraq.

*The American civilian administration has appointed the first Iraqi security chief since the fall of the Baath, according to Asharq al-Awsat. Subhi Faraj Ayish is the brother of a Baath leader killed by Saddam in his 1979 coup. He was soon thereafter transfered to Basra and then disappeared. You know, I have a bad feeling about former Baathists returning at the head of the Security Apparatus, no matter how much they now hate Saddam or how long they have been in the opposition. If I were a Shiite or a Kurd, I would be absolutely outraged by this appointment.
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*The formula for the transitional government in Iraq keeps changing an almost daily basis as Paul Bremer searches for a way out of the various dead ends that his predecessors had set up for him. Now he is talking, according to various reports including Az-Zaman and al-Hayat, about cancelling the Iraqi convention planned for July altogether. Instead, he will just appoint a large 30-member cabinet with representatives from various prominent existing parties, along with indepdents, prominent women, and minority Christian and Turkoman leaders. The Communist and al-Da`wa Parties would be included. The new cabinet will be appointed within 6 weeks, observers say. It is amazing to me that there is not more comment in the US press about this toing and frowing in Iraq on the part of the American team. The virtue of a convention that elected the transitional government was that it had some claim to representativeness and indigenousness (though I know there are problems with that image). But to just have a 30-member cabinet appointed by Bremer sends all the wrong signals. And, it is likely that the Shiites will, as usual, end up being shortchanged, since only two of their parties are being mentioned as contributing to the 30 seats.
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*There were demonstrations in Basra against the new British governor. Thousands of Shiite demonstrators insisted that Iraqis could rule themselves. Some of the discontent may have come from followers of the deposed governor Shaikh al-Tamimi, a Shiite tribal leader.

*The Bremer administration in Iraq has decided to widen the transitional leadership council of Iraqi organizations beyond the seven appointed by Jay Garner to include a wide range of Iraqi parties and independents from all over the country. Garner appeared to want to follow through on the Wolfowitz plan to turn Iraq over to corrupt expatriate self-proclaimed leader Ahmad Chalabi and his cronies. Bremer seems to want to avoid that outcome and is therefore diluting the leadership council by expanding it. It is expected to plan a congress for July that will elect an interim Iraqi government. - az-Zaman/AFP

*Reporters on the ground in Iraq, including AFP and Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer among others, are telling us that the security, electricity and water situation has not substantially improved. Many places have no electricity or only 2 hours a day. There appears to be a growing health crisis. Iraqis cannot receive much of the US programming intended to persuade them of US good intentions, and are drawn to alternative broadcasts from Iran and Lebanon. The Shiite militias still exercise local authority in neighborhoods, and are directed by clerics in Najaf. In Baghdad, a 500 seat theater is planning to close because a Shiite vigilante threw a grenade at it for showing movies with some cleavage in them. Liquor stores are also being driven out of business. This repression is the work of the Sadrist Militia, which is acting more and more like the arm of a warlord.

The collection centers set up by the US to buy back weapons or allow their surrender by Iraqis had no, repeat no, takers on Saturday. Bremer admits that the failure to capture Saddam has affected the psychology of the US Iraq operation (last week 9 US soldiers were killed by Baath remnants in the Sunni Arab north-central of the country). Rubin concludes from dozens of interviews that the US has squandered its honeymoon in Iraq and that most Shiites want the US out very quickly but in no more than a year. Many Iraqis are convinced the US came to the country to steal its oil and to weaken it so as to benefit Israel. The non-existence of a post 1998 nuclear weapons program and the failure to find any significant WMD programs at all have increased suspicions in the Middle East and Europe that Wolfowitz and company simply lied to us about the reasons for the war.

*Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has accused the US of acting like a 19th century colonialist power in Iraq and of imposing an American ruler on it. He urged the Muslim world to stand united against US imperialism, at a meeting of the Islamic Conference Organization (Prime ministers of the Muslim nations).


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