One US Soldier Killed, Nine Wounded

Iraqi guerrillas in two Sunni Arab towns west of Baghdad, Habaniya and Khalidiya, hit two separate US convoys on Monday with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. The attacks killed one US soldier and wounded three others. In response to the Khalidiya attack, which pinned US forces down for a while, attack helicopters and jets were called in. The battle lasted eight hours, and appears to have inflicted substantial harm on local residences, causing civilians to flee.

On Sunday, guerrillas had wounded six soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah with a roadside bombing, a US military spokesman announced. I had reported the explosion at Fallujah but at that time had no word of the casualties.
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Homeland Defense Funding Plundered for Iraq

For those who believe that the Iraq War was a major detour from the War on Terror, there is excellent evidence for it if any investigative reporters wanted the story. Major funding for anti-terrorism science programs in the US, already appropriated and given out in contracts, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, has been diverted to Iraq funding. The US is as vulnerable today to a dirty bomb as it was on September 10, 2001. But a high-tech program that would allow the detection of neutrons could have made us safer. That program has been mothballed for the time being by Tom Ridge; it is being alleged by my correspondent that the money is going instead to prop up the fragile US presence in Iraq.

I received the following from a source I consider impeccable. It is appalling.

"An angry scientist at one of the national laboratories gave me some (non-classified) insight into how the Iraq war is being financed.

The Department of Homeland Defense allocated half a billion dollars to a project called the Tri-Lab Initiative, which offered grants to teams at Los Alamos, Sandia, and White Sands for homeland defense research. Proposals were made, ranked, and granted funds. For example, something called VLAND would have used techniques developed for the purest of pure science--neutrino research--to create truck-sized neutron detectors to detect hidden nuclear weapons. Apparently, the contracts were signed because new staff was hired. But the money never came, and the responsible Homeland Defense officials stopped replying to calls and emails. The labs have been paying the new staff out of normal Department of Energy funds intended for pure scientific research. The homeland defense projects that were funded are doing nothing. The only exception are projects funded by the Air Force, but the national laboratory scientists prefer civilian funding due to concerns about academic freedom.

Clearly, what has happened is that funds intended for other purposes have been diverted to pay for the Iraq war. None of this is classified, but government scientists are prohibited from using government resources--i.e., their computers or their email account--to make it public."


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Rove should Resign: President Bush and the Wilson Case

It has for some time struck me that despite all the phony talk about "compassionate conservatism," the Bush team has just plain mean tendencies. The giddy pleasure Bush took in executions used to disgust even fellow Republicans, and it briefly emerged as an issue in the presidential debates in fall of 2000. Then in response to home made bombs in Iraq making hamburger of our brave men and women under arms, Bush said "Bring it on!" (He wanted more mayhem wreaked on our troops?) This streak of sadism has come into public view with the issue of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife. Wilson, a former Foreign Service Officer who served his country with distinction in difficult postings, including Iraq, was asked by the CIA to go to Niger in spring of 2002 to check out the plausibility of the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium.

The CIA was asked to check the story by Vice President Dick Cheney. Wilson had deep experience with Iraq and with West Africa, and was able quickly to examine the structure of the uranium production in Niger, which is under Western control. He concluded that the story was false and implausible, and briefed the CIA to that effect. He was, of course, entirely correct. At the time, he did not know that the allegations about Niger uranium were based on forged documents that surfaced with Italian intelligence and got passed on to the British. The fraudulent documents seemed to show Niger acknowledgment of Iraqi orders for yellowcake uranium in 2000. But they were signed by persons who had not been in office since the late 1980s, and the signatures were clumsy forgeries. Who forged the documents is not known. But my own prime suspects are Ahmad Chalabi, who wanted the US to overthrow Saddam and hand him Iraq on a silver platter, and Ariel Sharon's intelligence officers, who wanted the US to overthrow Saddam and hand them Iraq on a silver platter.

The CIA reported Wilson's negative findings to the National Security Council and to Dick Cheney. Since Condi Rice and Dick Cheney don't hear anything they don't want to hear, they somehow construed the report as the mere opinion of an unnamed retired foreign service officer (Wilson's name was not passed up to its superiors by the CIA, which is now highly ironic). Cheney and Rice have both denied knowing anything about Wilson's report, but given USG procedures these denials are simply not credible. Nor was Wilson the only one who was skeptical. Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently urged to include the Niger story in his presentation to the UN before the war, and angrily refused. If Powell knew it was bullshit, then so did Cheney and Rice.

Some reports indicate that it was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that kept the Niger uranium story in play, and that Wolfowitz urged Bush to put it into his State of the Union address in January of 2003.
See:

http://www.liberalslant.com/
jl071703.htm

After the Iraq War, at a time when the Bush administration was still alleging that Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction would soon be found, Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times detailing his mission. Since Bush and Cheney had continued to publicize the fraudulent story about Niger uranium and a post-1998 Iraqi nuclear weapons program (which did not exist), Wilson's account was extremely damaging to them and deprived them of plausible deniability. Without a public account from Wilson of his mission, Bush administration officials could pretend, as Paul Wolfowitz had, that the intelligence was just murky. But if a retired FSO could put the matter to rest with a brief excursion, and if International Atomic Energy Commission official Muhammad el-Baradei could see the forged Niger documents for what they were immediately, then the intelligence was not murky at all. It was crystal clear. There was a fraud going on.

In revenge, two high White House officials started telling journalists in July that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative specializing in tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction. The journalists (six or so according to the WP) declined to run the story because it seemed to them irrelevant to Wilson's allegations. Of course, it was. Feminists will appreciate a possible subtext here, which is that if Valerie Plame got the CIA to send her husband on the Niger mission, then somehow that downgraded its seriousness--it originated with a woman and could be seen as nepotism. (We won't bring up Lynn Cheney here).

Only the curmudgeonly and apparently entirely unprincipled columnist Robert Novak ran with the story, outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. ("Operative" is what he called her in his column then. Today he said he was told she was just an analyst. This claim cannot be true, because he used "operative" in print, and also in a conversation with Wilson). This was on July 14

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/
robertnovak/printrn20030714.shtml

The outing of Ms. Plame as a CIA operative was an attempt to punish Joe Wilson and to send a strong signal to other potential whistle blowers. It is unpleasant to be outed as working for the CIA. It ends your career and makes it impossible to go on consulting in that field. It also potentially endangers large numbers of friends and associates, who are outed along with you. The vindictive character of the action is clear. One reporter told Joe Wilson that after the Novak piece appeared, Bush political strategist Karl Rove said, "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game." Wilson initially thought that Rove's remark might suggest that Rove himself authorized the leak. But on reflection he now admits that it is not conclusive, and Rove could simply have approved of the action ex post facto.

Since the Iraq War was a get-up job based entirely on fraudulent or shaky intelligence that was further slanted in their public presentation of it by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Bush, there must be many US government employees who could tell tales on the administration's dishonesty and incompetence. The White House officials who outed Ms. Plame were telling them that the full weight of the US government would come down on them like a ton of bricks if they dared do any such thing.

Of course, what those two high White House officials did is highly illegal under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Act

http://foi.missouri.edu/
bushinfopolicies/protection.html.
Now CIA director George Tenet has formally requested a Justice Department investigation, and the FBI has been assigned to the case. Some Democrats are demanding a special counsel, since John Ashcroft is highly unlikely to ferret out or punish Bush administration White House officials.

What I would say is that Karl Rove should be made to resign if he said the words attributed to him, "Joe Wilson's wife is fair game." He was condoning the breaking of US law and the endangering of US intelligence personnel and assets, especially in the field of Ms. Plame's specialty, the tracking of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.

Meanwhile, Joe Wilson is a genuine hero, who has spoken truth to power and refused to be intimidated. Anyone in the US government who has any admiration for him and any gumption at all, and who cares about our country, should emulate his example if they have further evidence for deliberate Bush administration discounting of solid intelligence in favor of their stock cover story on Iraq. Make it public. Now.

For those who want to follow this story in detail, see Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo at

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

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Drafting of Constitution and Adopting it may take 18 Months or More

The Constitutional Preparatory Commission in Iraq, which was supposed to make its report on Tuesday recommending how the new Iraqi constitution should be drafted, has failed to reach agreement. The main issues are whether the drafters are to be elected or appointed, and how much the constitution will incorporate Islamic law. The Commission, which has been working on this problem for weeks, consulting with Iraqi notables and holding town hall meetings in various cities, dumped the hard issues back in the lap of the Interim Governing Council (al-Zaman, AFP).

The IGC took weeks to decide that it could not appoint one of its members president, and would instead have a cumbersome 9-man rotating presidency with each incumbent serving for one month. This deeply divided body, which is averse to making tough decisions, is highly unlikely to take the bull by the horns and be decisive in choosing a method.

Even once a constitutional convention is called, Iraqis on the IGC are saying that it is highly unrealistic to expect it to finish its work within 6 months, as called for by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. They think more like a year will be necessary. And Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that it could take four to seven months just to adopt the constitution! Powell believes that elections could be held six months after the constitution was adopted, which would put us in late summer, 2005. But it seems entirely possible that the process could be delayed into 2006. The Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq belittled Powell's deadline of six months (it is represented on the IGC by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim).

The IGC is divided about whether the drafters of the constitution should be elected or appointed, with the Shiites tending to favor election (they are 60% of the population and so would dominate the process). Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a fatwa last summer insisting on the election of the drafters. Fuad Masum, a Kurdish member of the PUK and first prime minister of autonomous Kurdistan, is chair of the constitutional committee, and he said that although it would be better to elect the drafters, if that would take too long another method must be found. In contrast, Ibrahim Jaafari, an IGC member from the expatriate London branch of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party said that Sistani's fatwa was in accordance with Islamic law and was supported by the majority of Iraq's political parties.

Although the IGC itself is largely secular or moderate, having been appointed by the Americans, many, many Iraqis want the constitution to be based on Islamic law. Izz al-Din Salim, a former member of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party from Basra, called "unlikely" the prospect that the constitution would be based on Islamic law or shariah, according to al-Zaman. (The Basra branch of al-Da`wa is said to have rejected Khomeini's notion of the rule of the jurisprudent, and Salim may in any case now be an independent). He added that the constitution must recognize the pluralism and religious diversity of Iraq.

Apparently the US wants the constitution drafted while it is still in control, to make sure it reflects the principles the US wants to impose on Iraq, including extreme laissez faire economics, parliamentary democracy, and safeguards for the rights of women and minorities. But if the Iraqis drag the process of drafting the constitution out for a year or more, and if elections are two or three years off, that would leave a highly unpopular Coalition Provisional Government in place for a very long time, trying the patience of the Iraqi public.

The US should just re-adopt a non-monarchical version of the 1925 constitution and hold elections under it, and let the drafting of a new constitution unfold over coming years in accordance with the desires of the Iraqi public. That way, we could have a new, elected, Iraqi government as soon as January, and the severe problems of legitimacy would be solved. The US will lose some control, and will risk having Iraqis elected that it doesn't like, but the parliament will be diverse enough to make it hard for, say, a pro-Iranian faction to just take over the country.
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Jostling for the Vacant IGC seat of Aqila al-Hashimi

It may seem unseemly, but political forces are already attempting to place their candidate on the IGC as a successor to Aqila al-Hashimi, assassinated last week. CPA head Paul Bremer is said to want an independent professional women with the sort of standing and competency enjoyed by Dr. al-Hahsimi. Many feel that she should be a strong personality committed to feminist principles. The IGC will also probably insist that she be Shiite, so as to preserver the sectarian balance on that body.

Possibilities:

Safiya al-Suhail, whose father was assassinated by Saddam's secret police in 1993 in Beirut.

The Islamic Democratic Tendency is attempting to push its candidate.

The Women's League likewise is trying to get the seat.

Another name that is mentioned is Fawziya al-`Atiya, a renouned sociologist.
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One Polish Soldier Killed, Four US Troops Wounded

Guerrillas in the town of Iskandariya, 45 km south of Baghdad, attacked US troops with a home made bomb on Sunday at 11 am, wounding two. (Note that this attack occurred, not in the usual northern Sunni Arab areas, but in a Shiite region on the road to Karbala.) Guerrillas at Taji just north of Baghdad, blew up a similar explosive device at 9:45 am on Sunday, wounding two soldiers who were taken to a combat support hospital. A bomb went off near Falluja as a US military convoy passed, but no word yet of any casualities. In al-Hilla in the south, armed Iraqis refused to be searched by Polish soldiers, who shot and killed one of them when he fired on them. One Polish soldier was reported killed according to al-Zaman. (- AFP). While the discovery by US troops of two big weapons caches over the weekend is in a way good news, it is also very worrying that there were still large weapons depots of this sort still not under US control 5 months after the fall of the regime! SAM-7 surface to air missiles were among the munitions discovered, which can be used against civilian aircraft (as was done by al-Qaeda in Mombasa last year).

In the wake of Saturday's rocket attacks on Baghdad's Rashid Hotel (long a place that Westerners congregated), the evacuation of remaining UN personnel appears to have been accelerated. Many aid agencies have now pulled out of Iraq, at a time when malnourishment is widespread and sources of income have dried up.
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Kuwaitis Reject Bremer's Call to Forgive Iraq Reparations

Kuwait's government rejected any suggestion that it cease demanding reparations from Iraq. CPA head Paul Bremer recently called on Kuwait and other Gulf states to write off loans they had made to Iraq (mostly during the Iran-Iraq war) and in the case of Kuwait, to let Iraq off the hook with regard to continued payment of reparations for invading that country in 1990. The Kuwaiti Information Minister said that the subject was not open for negotiation. Iraq's external debts may be as high as $200 bn., and Kuwait reparations alone come to $100 bn.. The United States, as the occupying power, has now become legally responsible for those debts (which is why Bremer tried to get them canceled). [I have heard that Bremer himself admitted US responsibility for the debts as long as it occupies Iraq, which I presume implies that the occupying power is technically liable for payment of debt servicing. Since Bremer's administration is broke, I doubt it is doing any debt servicing, which puts the US in the wrong.] (-al-Sharq al-Awsat)
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Constitutional Committee in Basra

The Preparatory Committee for Drafting the Constitution met Sunday in Basra, chaired by Salah al-Battat. Attending members were Drs. Muhammad al-Muzaffar, Mahdi Jad Mahdi, and Safa' al-Din al-Safi. Sayyid `Ali `Abd al-Hakim made opening remarks in which it was mentioned that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had prepared a prototype constitution, which the committee was studying. He said he was sure that the constitution would reflect the spirit of the Islamic legal system, and that it would be an indigenous document. He said the committee was holding serial town meetings, having been in Nasiriya on Saturday. (-al-Zaman). (Note that the reporter's name is `Abd al-Battat, and he may be a relative of the committee chair). The preparatory committee's work has so far been insufficiently transparent, and anyway, the Interim Governing Council should just have elections for a constitutional convention and get on with it. They have surely taken enough soundings by now.
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Bush's Bad News Blues

For Bill Berkowitz's fine piece, "Bush's bad news blues
Administration cooks up new campaign 'to shine light on progress made in Iraq'" in Working for Change/ Working Assets (which quotes this ephemeral servant), see

http://www.workingforchange.com/
article.cfm?itemid=15703
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al-Zawahiri: Overthow Musharraf!

The deputy head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahir, issued a videotape in which he called on Pakistanis to rise up and overthrow President Pervez Musharraf. He also condemned the recent visit of Israeli officials to New Delhi, decrying an Indian/Israeli/United States axis, which they allege keeps the Palestinians down. Al-Zawarihi also warned that Musharraf intended to send Pakistani troops to Iraq, and called for nation-wide demonstrations if that happened. The Jamaat-i Islami in Pakistan has already called for country-wide strikes and demonstrations if Musharraf sends troops to Iraq.
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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Two recent opinion polls, one done by the Zogby group looking at 600 residents from four Iraqi cities, and another done of 1200 residents of Baghdad, have been trumpeted by Bush administration officials and by Rightwing rags like the National Review as containing good news for the US. The officials and rightwing journalists' use of these polls, however, has been sloppy and inaccurate, and a glance at the actual results does not suggest a rosy picture, according to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. Pincus notes, "countrywide, only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off. And 94 percent said that Baghdad was a more dangerous place for them to live, a finding the administration officials did not discuss. The poll also found that 29 percent of Baghdad residents had a favorable view of the United States, while 44 percent had a negative view. By comparison, 55 percent had a favorable view of France."

The situation is even worse than Pincus suggests. For instance, on Sept. 14 on Meet the Press, US Vice President Dick Cheney alleged that Iraqis "including the Shia population" reject an Islamic government by a two-to-one margin. This finding was based on the four-city poll. But only one of the four cities was largely Shiite (Basra), which in my view skewed the results. (Basra has a relatively secular political tradition). The 2 or 3 million poor, relatively theocratic Shiites of East Baghdad were left out of the picture altogether, along with pious Shiites in Najaf and Karbala. If you add them in, the support for an Islamic Republic would go way up. And, it is not clear if the pollsters made the distinction between implementing Islamic law and rule by Muslim clerics. Probably only a third of Iraqis would want the latter. But a lot more probably want Islamic law. Pincus notes that 50% of Iraqis think US-style democracy would not work very well. The US administration shouldn't become convinced by this kind of shaky data that Iraqis are happy with the US occupation or want the kind of government that the US intends to impose.
See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A14545-2003Sep28.html
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Extent of Saddam's Atrocities?

John Laughland questions UK PM Tony Blair's assertion that Saddam put 300,000 Iraqis into mass graves. The figure 290,000 victims of Saddam, he says, comes from Human Rights Watch and they admit it is soft in many ways (i.e. not based on actual body counts, which are so far relatively small). I've seen 60,000 deaths alleged in the 1987-88 chemical attacks on the Kurds. [An informed reader writes to say that the chemical attacks probably killed 8,000, but another 100,000 were made to disappear Feb.-Dec. 1988, which doubles what I misremembered as the estimate on Kurdish deaths in that period to 108,000 or so.] And another estimated 60,000 dead in the 1991 uprising (though I myself would not be surprised if that total were rather higher). There were other campaigns against the Shiites later in the 1990s. I suspect one is talking of at least 180,000 civilians dead at Saddam's hands. That is surely bad enough? What other country of 24 million has killed 180,000 of its own civilians in the past 15 years? There have been other massacres even worse, as in Rwanda. Bosnia was probably a bigger killing field if one looks at proportion of population murdered. But Saddam was one of the world's most egregious butchers of his own people.
See
http://www.antiwar.com/
rep/laughland18.html
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Two US Soldiers Killed

On late Thursday, guerrillas fired a rocket propelled grenade at military vehicles near Kirkuk, killing a soldier from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and injuring two others. In Tikrit, a US soldier, from the 4th ID was killed by a fire in an abandoned building, and another was wounded.



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Sadrist Militia interferes with Burial Rites for Aqila al-Hashimi

Aqila al-Hashimi, a Shiite member of the Interim Governing Council, was buried in Najaf on Friday after having been assassinated, probably by Baathist goons. Ordinarily the body would have been carried to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim at al-Kazimiya, a suburb of Baghdad, for prayers before being taken to Najaf. The way was blocked, however, by an armed Sadrist militia (the Army of the Mahdi), who had been allowed to carry arms because the young radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr was visiting the area. Initially the American troops accompanying the funeral procession in tanks and armored cars arrested four of the Sadrist militiamen. Then a Sadrist crowd gathered, shouting, "Absolutely no, absolutely no to America! Yes, yes to Islam!" and demanding the release of the four gunmen. The US authorities decided to avoid a confrontation. They let the four go. (al-Sharq al-Awsat)

But then it was decided that the militiamen constituted a security threat to the funeral procession, which included high Iraqi officials appointed by the American administration, and so the prayers at the shrine were abandoned. The procession went straight to Najaf. Since Muqtada must have known that al-Hashimi's body would be taken to Kazimiya, his decision to go there and to employ armed militiamen there as body guards seems to me to have been calculated to provoke an incident. Muqtada has forbidden Shiites from cooperating with the United States, and has demanded an immediate US withdrawal, so he was no fan of Aqila al-Hashimi.

The incident shows how little the US is in control on the ground. If it had been, Aqila would be alive, and her funeral procession would not have been turned into a clerical power play.




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Judicial Board Constituted

CPA head Paul Bremer signed an order creating an independent judicial council to oversee the Iraqi legal system. It will be supervised by the interim minister of justice, Hashim al-Shibli.

This system of law is a secular one. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other Shiite clerics, as well as Ahmad al-Kubaisi on the Sunni side, have called for Islamic law and an Islamic judiciary to be implemented in Iraq.
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Guerrillas wound 8 US Soldiers; Kill 8 Iraqis
Guerrillas wounded 8 US soldiers on Thursday, leaving one in critical and two in serious condition. Two roadside bombs blasted their convoy in or near Mosul as it went by. On Thursday night, guerrillas fired mortars into a Baquba market, killing 8 Iraqis and wounding 13.

Donald Rumsfeld's comparison of Iraq to Washington DC in terms of the security situation was always ridiculous (and implicitly racist), but it looks less and less plausible as time has gone on. If these kind of events were happening daily in Washington DC, it would be a national crisis of enormous proportions.
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Aqila al-Hashimi Dies
Interim Governing Council member Aqila al-Hashimi, a long-time official in the Iraqi foreign ministry, died of her wounds on Thursday. She had been shot on Saturday by gunmen. Most informed sources in Baghdad blame the Baathists. Because she had been close to Tariq Aziz, it is possible that they were especially incensed by her cooperation with the Americans. Her assassination is a huge blow to the Coalition Provisional Authority of Paul Bremer, which may find it increasingly difficult to find prominent Iraqis willing to associate themselves with it.
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Talabani's Mosul HQ Attacked; Al-Qaeda Connection
Gunmen sprayed machine gun fire at the party offices in Mosul of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headed by Jalal Talabani at 9 pm Thursday night Iraqi time, according to Al-Sharq al-Awsat. No one was wounded in the attack. Party officials blamed the attack on Ansar al-Islam, a small radical Sunni Kurdish faction that appears to have shadowy links to al-Qaeda. They said that Mosul is hospitable to such radical Sunni movements because it has an old Islamist tradition, going back decades to the beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood there. (The flaw in this argument is that those traditions are among Arabs, whereas Ansar al-Islam, a much more recent phenomenon, is Kurdish). The fair number of violent incidents in Mosul gives the lie to the notion that only the Sunni Arab triangle in Iraq is a security problem. On Wednesday assailants had tossed a grenade into a movie theater.
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Bombing Foiled in Najaf
The shrine police in Najaf accosted two suspicious men carrying bags in that city in the middle of the night of Weds-Thursday. The men opened fire at a police vehicle, but no one was wounded. They then ran away, leaving the bags behind, which were revealed to contain home-made bombs of TNT and detonators. The shrine police opened fire on the men, but they got away. (AFP via al-Sharq al-Awsat).
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Edward Said Dies

I am at a conference and cannot make a long entry today, but wanted to express my condolences to the family and friends of Edward Said, among the greatest scholars of the twentieth century. A Palestinian-American intellectual who illuminated for us everything from Joseph Conrad's fiction to the impact of empire on the British novel, to the rhetoric of Orientalism as a racist enterprise. Edward was controversial, but he was always true to his calling as a progressive. His death diminishes us all. But the cosmic balance is such that his life enriched us even more.
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Dozens of Iraqis Wounded, several Killed

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in the Azamiya district of West Baghdad Wednesday, missing their target of a US military convoy but hitting an Iraqi bus instead. One passenger was killed and 21 were wounded. In Mosul, assailants killed three patrons in a movie theater and wounded 52 others when they tossed a grenade into the midst of the audience. The cinema was said to be showing a pornographic film, raising the question of whether this bombing was the work of Sunni Arab radicals who decry the debasing influence of Western culture on Iraq. In the village of al-Jizani near Baqubah, 41 miles northeast of Baghdad, US troops killed two Iraqis during a house to house search. In Khalidiyah near Fallujah, a US tank killed two boys and when shelled two houses after being hit by a roadside bomb. Baquba and Khalidiya have both witnessed numerous attacks on US troops. Altogether US troops killed nine Iraqis around Tikrit in the course of raids.

Also, guerrillas detonated a bomb outside the al-Aike Hotel in downtown Baghdad, killing a guard and knocking out the generator. NBC has its offices in that hotel.

I heard on US electronic media of an attack on US troops near the Syrian border late on Wednesday, but the print media are not reporting it yet.

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Wesley Clark: Bush has 7-Nation Hit List

A Malaysian newspaper claims to have gotten an advance peek at statements in the new book by Wesley Clark, excerpted in Newsweek. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the report, but here it is: "It quoted former North Atlantic Treaty Organisation commander General Wesley Clark as saying that US President George W. Bush wanted to attack Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan." It says he found out about the plan in November 2001, and deeply disapproved of it, since it did not actually address the sources of terrorism against the US.

http://www.thestar.com.my/news/
story.asp?file=/2003/9/25/nation/
6349568&sec=nation

Iran is a Shiite country that hated the Taliban and al-Qaeda and strongly backed the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan; it almost went to war against the Taliban. Syria is a secular Baath Arab nationalist regime that killed 10,000 Sunni Muslim radicals in 1982 and has attempted to suppress the movement. It has also helped the US interrogate al-Qaeda operatives. Somalia is just a failed state. Sudan isn't much better. The main Islamic militants in Lebanon are the Hizbullah, most of whose energies now go into Lebanese politics, though they also played a key role in expelling the Israelis from Lebanese soil. (Why exactly should the US mind this? Doesn't it support Lebanon's national integrity)? Iraq was likewise a secular Arab nationalist state that attacked religious fundamentalists. Moammar Qadhafi of Libya is a desert messiah with heterodox views and is not related to al-Qaeda; he has been involved in terrorism in the past, but it is not clear he is now. There is not any al-Qaeda-related state on this list.
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Governing Council backs off from Total Economic Liberalization

The Interim Governing Council said Wednesday that Finance Minister Kamil al-Kaylani's remarks on Monday were merely his on opinion and did not represent the views of the IGC. (-al-Zaman) Al-Kaylani had announced a virtual firesale of the Iraqi economy, allowing foreign firms to own 100% of Iraqi companies and to send all the profits abroad if they liked. This announcement provoked enormous anxieties among the Iraqi business class, who complained loudly. The IGC said that only the president of that body (in September it is Ahmad Chalabi) can speak for the IGC on policy. The IGC's attempt to distance itself from al-Kaylani's laissez faire approach is disingenuous, since al-Kaylani is said to be Chalabi's man to begin with.

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Aqila al-Hashimi "Gravely Ill

AP reports that Interim Governing Council member Aqila al-Hashimi, wounded by machine gun fire in an assassination attempt on Saturday, has taken a turn for the worse and is "gravely ill."

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Mudarrisi Criticizes Planning for new Constitution

Sayyid Hadi al-Mudarrisi, a major cleric of the holy shrine city of Karbala, issued a denunciation Wednesday of the process whereby preparations are being made to draft a new Iraqi constitution. He said that the IGC owed the Iraqi people much more transparency about the process. (al-Zaman) He complained, as well, that foreign experts were being consulted, but that the Iraqi people as a whole, and the religious clerics in particular, were not being consulted and were in fact being ignored. Al-Mudarris heads, with his brother Hadi, the Islamic Action Organization in Karbala, which has hardline Shiite views. His statement betrays anxiety that the IGC may give Iraq a secular constitution.

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Bush address to UN Disappointing

The US needs three things from the United Nations desperately with regard to Iraq. The first is legitimacy. It needs a UN mantle for its activities in that country, which will make those activities more acceptable to Iraqis and to the Arab and Muslim worlds, as well as to France and Germany. Second, it needs money. In an ideal world it should be able to get several billion from the wealthy capitalist states of Western Europe for rebuilding Iraq. Third, it needs troops. It needs at least a division (15,000 or so men) as soon as possible, to allow it to rotate a US division out. It needs two or three divisions by next spring, about 40,000 men altogether.

Bush appears not to think that the US needs these three things very badly, since his speech on Tuesday mended no fences with the UN and reached out in no way to the body. So, the US is not going to get much money for Iraqi reconstruction, perhaps as little as a paltry billion dollars all told. Whether it gets more legitimacy and troops depends on the precise wording of the new UN resolution sought by Britain and the US. The latest reports have the Indians again deciding against sending troops, the Musharraf government of Pakistan being very nervous about such a move because of domestic opposition, and even skittishness in Turkey. It is possible that the US will not get its division, and only great good luck would guarantee it 40,000 men. In large part all this is because the US still is acting unilaterally, and refuses to play nicely with the other children.

The one interesting thing Bush said was that the UN should have a hand in writing the new Iraqi constitution and in supervising elections. I don't think Iraqis will accept an internationalization of the constitution writing process, however. Supervising elections is a possible role for the UN. But it is not the sort of concession that would have been needed to get the Security Council on the side of the US. The Bush administration could end up stuck in Iraq in a very bad way. Where is it going to get three divisions next spring if the Turks, Pakistanis and Koreans don't show up? Who is going to pay for them even if they do? If the US, where would the money come from, with a $600 bn. deficit?


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Petroleum Smuggling

The British navy intercepted 7 ships smuggling petroleum out of southern Iraq to the Persian Gulf, according to al-Zaman. Smuggling reduces the country's ability to produce electricity and the availability to Iraqis of fuel. Such shortages provoked heavy rioting in Basra last month. Meantime, a Coalition spokesman expressed confidence that the new Iraqi legal system was capable of dealing with smugglers.
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INC Moves to Take over Iraqi Finances, Economic Policy

More on the ambitious "shock treatment" of the Iraqi economy announced Monday. Apparently Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress pushed for the plan on the Iraq side, even as proponents of the Washington Consensus did so on the American. The INC managed to get Kamil Mubdir al-Kaylani appointed a Minister of Finance and Banking. A Sunni Arab born in Baghdad in 1959, he headed a contracting firm in the capital and holds a degree in economics.

An informed reader wrote me that she was told that "Kaylani was brought in as minister specifically with the plan to announce this [economic liberalization plan]. He was the Iraqi National Congress's nominee as minister." The sentiment among some high Coalition officials is that the plan is "ridiculous" insofar as it lacks any restrictions on the export of profits abroad. Kaylani is also said to have fired several very able persons in the Finance Department.

Ominously, INC chairman and temporary president of the Interim Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, gave an interview Tuesday with Agence France Presse in which he said that the United States civil administration of Iraq must share more power with the IGC, especially "the ministry of finance" and the area of security. (Chalabi is wanted in Jordan for embezzling millions from a bank, and was also dropped by the CIA and the State Department for not being able to account for half of the millions they gave him to oppose Saddam. What Iraq really needs is to have Chalabi in control of the country's finances!)
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FAO Says Millions of Iraqis Suffer Hunger

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) issued a report on Tuesday saying that almost half of the Iraqi population (24-26 million) are poverty-stricken and in need of aid. An estimated 60% are unemployed.

They say that chronic malnutrition afflicts several million persons, including 100,000 refugees and 200,000 internally displaced persons. "The situation of mothers and children in central and southern Iraq is of particular concern," the report says. (Not good. The Shiites in the South are generally friendly to the US and should not be left hungry. The Sunnis in the center have a significant number of persons among them hostile to the US, which being thrown into poverty and hunger after having been at the top of the heap can only exacerbate.)

It is a horrible thing that a potentially rich oil state such as Iraq has been reduced to fourth world conditions by the misrule of the Baath.

The US agency that knows who to deal with these problems is US AID. So why is the Pentagon in charge of Iraqi reconstruction?


http://electroniciraq.net/
news/1105.shtml
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6,000 US Troops have come home Sick or Wounded

Although the number of troops wounded in action in Iraq is still a little less than 1200, several thousand more have fallen physically or mentally ill in Iraq and the military has been forced to bring them home. The total may run to 6,000.


http://www.finalcall.com/
artman/publish/article_1024.shtml
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Ambassador Wilson interview by Josh Marshall, part 2

Talkingpointsmemo has posted the second part of a long interview with Joe Wilson, who served in the embassy in Baghdad just before the last Gulf War, who investigated and disproved the fraudulent claims that Iraq had tried to purchase Niger uranium, but who was ignored by the Bush administration. He also goes into the allegation made by the Bush white house that his wife works for the CIA, as leaked to journalist Robert Novak. As he points out, if the allegation were true, this leak would constitute a serious breach of national security and would merit condign punishment under a 1982 law. Someone high in the Bush administration was attempting to punish Wilson for speaking out on Iraq, and was willing to stoop so low as to put Wilson's wife in danger. (One side effect of this kind of tactic may well be to damage our nation's security, since anyone who thought he or she might end up speaking out politically might avoid giving valuable information to the CIA or other national security agencies for fear of being 'outed' later on). The interview is a must-read.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/
sept0304.html#092203920pm
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Attacks in Mosul, Baquba

Iraqi eyewitnesses reported that an automobile exploded Monday in front of the police station in the northern city of Mosul, wounding a number of people. Guerrillas also mounted a mortar attack on US troops in the eastern city of Baquba, but it was not clear if they hurt any of them. (al-Zaman:
http://217.205.164.249/azzaman/
http/display.asp?fname=/azzaman/
articles/2003/09/09-22/998.htm

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Videotape Shows Powell, Rice, knew WMD Claims False

Australian journalist John Pilger claims to have incontrovertible proof that the Bush administration knew that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and its major figures admitted as much in spring of 2001. Pilger showed video footage of US Secretary of State Colin Powell saying in Cairo on February 24, 2001,"He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours." He also reported that National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice said in April of the same year, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."


http://www.smh.com.au/
articles/2003/09/23/
1064082978207.html

Pilger's evidence gives substance to the recent charge by Senator Ted Kennedy that the Bush administration war on Iraq was a fraud, perpetrated in the knowledge that its primary public justification was baseless.

On the other hand, in his Fox News interview on Monday evening in the US, President George W. Bush admitted that he does not read the newspapers and only knows what is going on in the world from briefings given him by Andy Card and Dr. Rice. It is possible that Rice was part of a cabal in the White House that manipulated Bush into the war by feeding him false information. We already know that Rice's office was responsible for leaving in the State of the Union Address the fraudulent charge that Iraq had tried to buy Niger uranium.

Ret. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC Monday evening, as well. (Maria's is one of the best news shows on television). He was again critical of the way Donald Rumsfeld interferes with military operations, comparing him to McNamara in the Vietnam period. But unfortunately he continued to insist that weapons of mass destruction might yet be found in Iraq. Look, this is ridiculous. What might be found is a few underground holding tanks of chemical weapons. There was no post-1998 nuclear program, and there was no biological weapons program. The chemicals may or may not still exist, and may or may not still retain their effectiveness. They certainly had not been mounted on missiles, and they were not a threat to Britain and the United States. Chemical weapons are a battlefield weapon, not properly refered to as weapons of mass destruction, anyway.
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Muqtada Supporter: Arab-Turkmen Unity against Kurds

A radical young follower of Shiite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr has called for an Arab-Turkmen alliance against the Kurds in Kirkuk. Abd al-Fattah al-Musawi, from a poor family in Karbala, complained bitterly about the secular atmosphere in Kirkuk and the dominance of Kurdish parties. A few weeks ago, Sunni Kurds and Turkmen Shiites clashed over a shrine at Tuz Khurmato, suggesting the alliance to some Sadrists. (-AFP via al-Sharq al-Awsat)
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$8.5 Billion in US Loans to Turkey

The US Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow, signed an agreement Monday that loans Turkey $8.5 bn. to make restitution for the damage done to the Turkish economy by the Iraq War. Snow claimed that the loans were not related to the US request that Turkey send 10,000 peace enforcing troops to Iraq. (AP, Reuters). Yeah and if you believe that one I have this bridge over the Euphrates I could sell you real cheap. (What I want to know is where in the world the Bush administration is getting the $8.5 bn. to loan to Turkey. We're already $600 bn. in debt this year. This whole Iraq thing will bankrupt the country.)
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Israeli Investment in Iraq Prohibited

Planning Minister Mahdi al-Hafez told journalists at the annual IMF/World Bank meetings in Dubai that Israel would not be allowed to take advantage of the "liberalization" of the Iraqi economy, since Iraq had not recognized it and had no plans to. (-AFP)
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Abdul Aziz al-Hakim Says Drafters of Constitution must be Elected

In an interview with al-Zaman, Interim Governor Council member and head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, said that the drafters of the new Iraqi constitution must be elected. He also said that the evidence points to Saddam loyalists as the ones who set off the truck bomb that killed his brother and nearly a hundred others in Najaf on August 29.
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Soldier Suffers Neurological Damage from Bomb in Iraq

For the story of one US soldier wounded in Iraq, which brings home some of the horror, see:

http://www.floridatoday.com/
!NEWSROOM/localstoryA13692A.htm
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Breaking News: Bombing of UN Headquarters in Baghdad

A car drove up to the UN compound in Baghdad Monday morning, and as it was trying to enter, it exploded. It killed at least two people and wounded a dozen or so.

Some reporters assume that suicide bombings equal al-Qaeda or at least religious fanatics. But as Bob Pape of the University of Chicago points out in an excellent op-ed today in the NYT, most suicide bombers have belonged to secular parties, as with the Marxist Eelam Tigers among the Tamils. So this m.o. doesn't really tell you anything.

The last such bombing at the UN was carried out with old Soviet Baath munitions, and it is likely that the Sunni Arab nationalists just want to get the UN out, and to make the point to the UN that trying to rescue Bush in Iraq would be a very, very bad idea. All this on the eve of Bush's address to the UN.


http://www.upi.com/view.cfm
?StoryID=20030922-084252-9838r

Pape's piece is not on the Web free, but see Mark Clayton's account of his theories at the CSM:


http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/
0902/p18s01-lehl.html?entryBottomStory


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3 US Soldiers Killed, 13 Wounded

Guerrillas fired mortar shells into the grounds of the Abu Ghuraib prison on Saturday night, wounding 13 US soldiers and killing two. The use of mortar fire, and the accuracy with which the attack was carried out, suggests Baath military conducted the operation. Mortars are being used more frequently and with greater precision, a worrisome development in the low-grade guerrilla war being waged against the US and its allies in Iraq. This is the second major attack on the prison, which houses Iraqi insurgents captured by the US. Another US soldier was killed yesterday in Ramadi in a grenade attack.
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US Committed to a strong, Centralized Iraq: Muashir

The Jordanian Foreign Minister, Marwan Muashir, said Sunday that King Abdallah II was told when he was in Washington recently that the US opposes a loose federation in Iraq based on ethnic and religious groupings. He was told that Washington wants a strong central government in the country.

Many have suggested that Iraq would best be broken up into Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite mini-states, with or without a loose Federal government binding them tenuously together. It is rumored that the loose Federation idea has some support among the neoconservatives, which is worrisome, since they tend to get what they want.

The problem is that "Washington" or the "US" could mean lots of things. Was it the State Department that told the Jordanians this, or the White House, or the Defense Department?

See my recent comment on the Federal issue at
http://www.juancole.com/
2003_09_01_juancole_archive.html
#106403589297207440
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Rebuilding In Iraqi South Impeded by Lack of Cooperation

A US military spokesman complained that rebuilding in the Shiite South of Iraq was hampered by a lack of cooperation from the local populace, according to al-Sharq al-Awasat. The US also complained about attacks on Coalition troops in the South, though few of these have caused deaths or injuries in that area of the country. The main complaint was that the US army engineers could hardly get the country back on its feet in the face of very extensive car-jackings, killing, looting, and stripping of wires to resell for their mineral value. There is also very substantial smuggling of petroleum products out of the country. The spokesman seemed to say that part of the problem was the inability of the US to seal the Iraqi borders. Since we are often told that things are "quiet" in the South, this briefing is a good reality check. If quiet means few successful attacks on US troops, then fine. But this description of the situation makes it sound like the Wild West out there in the Iraqi south.

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Clark's Statements on the Iraq War Consistent

I really object to the spin the US press put on the statements of Wesley Clark about the Iraq war. All he said is that if he had been sitting in Congress last fall, he would have voted for the initial authorization to pursue the war option, but he would not have wanted that to be a blank check for Bush to wage the war without further consultation. Clark was just being honest. Remember that this was a time only a year after 9/11 and Bush and Blair were implying that they had hard evidence that Saddam was inches away from attacking the West with some particularly nasty weapon.

Clark's subsequent opposition to the actual war last spring was well thought out and principled. It was not a 'flip-flop.' I suppose I sympathize with him because my position also evolved, as I saw the Bush case on WMD collapse in March and then I watched in horror as he just tossed the Security Council aside and invaded Iraq unilaterally. I respect people (like Max Cleland, see below) who opposed the war from the beginning, as Howard Dean also did. But Clark's positions are neither contradictory nor dishonorable.

I think the US public is smart enough and mature enough to be able to deal with a complex, evolving position on a weighty issue. Does everything now have to be dumbed down and unambiguous, just because television likes it that way? Clark is a Rhodes Scholar and a retired four star general who crafted an amazing high-tech victory in Kosovo. He is not a dodo. He did not stumble. It is just that the press likes a simple story. In the last election, Gore was "stiff" and Bush was "dumb." This is late-night comedy, not journalism. Now Clark is "inconsistent." He isn't. He is bright and thoughtful and honest, and the journalists are just having trouble keeping up with him.
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Indian Troops again a Possibility?

The Times of India is reporting that the Indian government, having earlier considered and ruled out a Washington request to send troops to Iraq, is now again toying with the idea. The ToI thinks India sees this move as a way to get Washington to pressure Pakistan to better police the Line of Control with Kashmir, keeping anti-Indian guerrillas from infiltrating across the border. India is also seeking high tech weapons systems from the US in return for such a troop commitment. The problem is that the US may decide that these two bargaining chips are too rich for its blood, and fold on the Indian game.

My own guess is that the renewed Indian interest derives from a realization that Pakistani President Gen. Musharraf may actually send 12,000 troops to Iraq, thus ingratiating himself with the Bush administration further, and detracting from Indian leverage with Washington in the Kashmir dispute between the two countries. The US says it is seeking 40,000 troops from Pakistan, Turkey and South Korea, but Secretary of State Powell has admitted that it will be difficult to get more than a division (15,000).


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=194169
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US Opens Iraq's Economy, but to What?

The US occupying forces blatantly contravened the Fourth Geneva Convention on Monday, announcing that they were opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment and setting low trade tariffs. The economy has been plagued by massive unemployment (estimated by many observers at 60%) since the fall of the Baath regime, which had channeled oil money to employees through state industries and patronage. US civil administrator Paul Bremer, a fanatical devotee of the "Washington Consensus" on the absolute benefits of "free trade," has managed to get the Interim Governing Council to sign off on a wideranging set of new economic regulations.

The new rules allow foreign corporations potentially to dominate important sectors of the economy. Especially worrisome is foreign ownership of banks and deregulation of currency transfers, since it was the proliferation of such approaches in the 1990s that led to the 1997 meltdown in East and Southeast Asia. (Malaysia spared itself by clamping on currency controls, in defiance of the Washington Consensus, and it was spared the worst of the burst bubble that plagued Thailand and South Korea).

The new law allows foreign corporations to buy 100% of Iraqi firms, which is highly unusual in that part of the world. There is no provision for the state to license this activity or to screen the investors, according to the NYT. Worse, any profits can be immediately repatriated abroad, in full. So Iraq becomes an ideal place to launder money; this is the way to fight a war on terror? Don't these people remember the Savings and Loan Scandal of the Reagan Administration, which cost us all billions? Wait, maybe the same people designed these regulations.

Note that the level of import tariffs, 5%, is exactly the level imposed by Great Britain on the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of 1838 and on a defeated Egypt at the Treaty of London in 1840.

On the other hand, attempts at privatization in Egypt and Turkey have often been plagued by difficulties and the process has gone very slowly. This is because bloated state industries are not very attractive investments for the private sector. In Iraq, there is the added problem that you can't drive your car in much of Baghdad and Basra without risking it being stolen from you at gunpoint. Not a lot of investors will rush to put money into a country with that profile. So far the US has virtually ignored the crime wave afflicting the ordinary Iraqis, apart from trying to train and stand up some Iraqi police, who from all accounts aren't getting the job done. It will have to actually bring security to the country if it wants foreign firms to invest there.

I received the following note from an informed reader, concerning these "reforms:"

I met with a high ranking military lawyer who had reviewed drafts of new
proposed laws concerning economic issues in Iraq, such as foreign investment.
He stated that the laws had been drafted in Washington, DC, and that the
attitude in DC and in the Republican Palace is that the IGC's opinion on
their content would not be decisive .

It is also worth remembering that in July the US Government awarded a
contract to Bearing Point (KPMG consultants) to redesign the framework for
Iraqi economic regulation, including the drafting of tax laws. Hardly a
democratic and inclusive approach.

The legal power of the Occupying Power to introduce such changes in economic
arrangements is doubtful. The IGC has no formal legal power at all, as it
is officially a creation of the Occupying Powers and can do no more than
"recommend" arrangements to be ratified by Bremer. Hence, the IGC does not
have the legal authority to introduce widespread changes in economic
arrangements in Iraq.
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Iraqis to Write Iraqi constitution

Appointed Minister of Justice, Hashim Abdel Rahman Chalabi, said in Bahrain according to al-Hayat that the new Iraqi constitution would be entirely the creation of Iraqis, and that no foreign jurists would be involved in drafting it. After the story we just heard about the commercial laws, one wonders whether such categorical statements have much credibility. Meanwhile, the temporary president of the Interim Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, stopped in Kuwait on his way to the UN and promised the Kuwaitis that the new Iraq recognizes them and their border in accordance with UN resolutions.
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Renewed Iraqi Monarchy a Bad Idea

I've heard rumors that the idea of imposing a member of the Hashemite monarchy on Iraq is again making the rounds in Washington. This is a very, very bad idea. Some people think that it will reassure the Sunnis, since the Hashemites are Sunnis. But neither Sunni Arab nationalists nor Sunni Islamists like monarchy. After the impact of Khomeinism, most Shiites are profoundly opposed to the idea. I personally think that it would roil the country and become a focal point of Shiite discontent. (The main reason to bring back a king would be to curb Shiite power as the majority, just as the British did in the first place). Besides, Abdel Rahman Chalabi has already said that Iraqis would make these decisions. Opinion polls suggest that the support for monarchy is less than 25%. It wouldn't pass a referendum.
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Death Penalty to Return?

The new Iraqi ministry of the interior (analogous to Homeland Security in the US) is pressing for the reinstatement of the death penalty in Iraq. Iyad Alawi and other ex-Baath officers have taken over this ministry, and have begun reconstituting the secret police. Apparently they want back the power to put someone up against the wall and shoot him, as well. The creeping re-baathization of the ministry of the interior is one reason the French are right that we need quick new elections in Iraq. Alawi couldn't get elected to save his life. But if the Interim Governing Council is left in place for another year, he won't have to be elected; he will own the place. (Alawi broke with Saddam around 1990 and has been thick with the CIA during the past decade). (al-Sharq al-Awsat, Saturday)
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Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr: Close Iraq's Borders to Mischief

In a fluff piece in al-Zaman, Shiite cleric Hussein al-Sadr, a minor member of the al-Sadr family who preaches at Kazimiya near Baghdad, said his meeting with US Secretary of State Colin Powell had been very fruitful. The US presumably wants to use al-Sadr, who is a moderate, to offset the popularity of his cousin, Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a radical and is anti-American. Muqtada has perhaps 2 million followers among poor, young, urban Shiites, though, whereas Hussein is just not that well known. Hussein al-Sadr, apparently worried about aid Iran may be giving Muqtada, urged that the Iraqi border be closed to mischief-making neighbors. (The huge, rugged, Iraqi-Iranian border would be virtually impossible to "close," however. And, the inhabitants of Najaf and Karbala are eager for the Iranian pilgrim trade to resume).

Meanwhile, al-Zaman also reports that Hussein Khomeini, grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic in Iran, is coming to the United States, where he will meet with Washington power brokers. Hussein Khomeini, 40, is also a cleric, but he has recently come to Iraq and called for a separation of religion and state, and for democratic freedoms, in Iran and Iraq. He has also pushed for the establishment of new religious authorities (maraji`) in the shrine city of Karbala.

One worries that there are elements in Washington who want to invade Iran, and may hope to use Hussein Khomeini as a stalking horse. Bad idea. He has no popularity in Iran, and Iranians will be even less willing to be occupied by the US than Iraqis are.
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Iraq and Vietnam

Max Cleland, former Georgia senator and a decorated war hero from the Vietnam era, who lost three limbs in that war, is comparing Iraq to the Vietnam War. When he says it, it is chilling. (Note, he was defeated in his campaign for another term in the senate by some chickenhawk Republican who characterized Cleland as unpatriotic for not supporting the Iraq war). See
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/
opinion/0903/18cleland.html?urac=
n&urvf=10642059287420.01686803956073002
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Three US Troops Wounded

Guerrillas launched two separate rpg attacks on US military convoys in the Mosul region on Saturday, wounding three US soldiers. There was also an explosion in Falluja.
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Three Way Summit in Berlin Ends "in disaster"

France's Jacques Chirac refused to compromise on two key issues at the Berlin summit between Britain, Germany and France. The meeting was a "public relations disaster," according to Wolfgang Proissl, the foreign editor of the Financial Times Deutschland, reported the BBC.

French President Jacques Chirac said, "There's no point me saying our differences are slight. France believes there should be a change in direction. The United Nations must play a much more significant role." He was also quoted by the BBC as saying, "France is of the view that there must now be a change of course, with a transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi authorities ... as soon as possible, that is to say, in a matter of months. On the basic issues I don't think our views differ, but on the modalites and the timetable we're not yet in full agreement..."

So the sticking points are more United Nations input into Iraq reconstruction, and more Iraqi sovereignty sooner rather than later.

The US resolution will now have to be debated at the Security Council without the advantage of having essentially been approved by the 3 Western European powers beforehand.

I think the French are right in their two main stances. The US lacks legitimacy in Iraq, and order will only be restored when legitimacy is established. The UN can help mightily with that. Likewise, early elections can be and should be held.

It is easy. You just slightly amend the 1925 Constitution. See
http://www.geocities.com/dagtho/
iraqiconst19250321.html

Take out any authoritarian language about monarchy, replace remaining references to the king with "Prime Minister" or "Parliament" and make a few other minor adjustments, require that all further changes need a 2/3s majority of both houses of parliament, and have the Interim Governing Council approve the changes. Announce that the first parliamentary elections will be held under this constitution, but a new one will be drafted after an elected government is in place. Use the electoral rules of the last elections in the 1950s if they are broad enough. Do a quick ad hoc voter registration in local neighborhoods using drivers licenses and identity cards. Use the 1997 census results to establish proportional representation for the various provinces. And, voila--we could have elections before the end of the year fairly easily.

In the 1925 Constitution the Upper House of Parliament is appointed by the king and has 20 members. Instead, it should be elected and have 19 members, one from each province. The Kurds and Sunni Arabs will be slightly over-represented this way.

The lower house of parliament will look like this: 15% of the seats will go to Kurds, fairly evenly split between Talabani and Barzani's parties. They are already on the IGC, so this is not a change. Another 15% or so of seats will go to Sunni Arabs. A lot of these may be angry nationalists and Baath sympathizers and Islamists. But they are only 15%, so they cannot obstruct anything by themselves in a parliamentary situation. 60% of seats will go to the Shiites. 75% of Basra delegates will be secularists. Most delegates from al-Hilla and Amara will be tribal. Sistani and al-Hakim's people will win Najaf. East Baghdad will return radical Muqtada al-Sadr supporters, and they will have about 10% of the seats. Again, they can't do much if this is the case. Even if they allied with the Sunnis, they could not obstruct a 2/3s majority.

The US is being far too cautious about holding elections, because of the bad experience in Bosnia. Iraq is not Bosnia. Here, the problem is the illegitimacy of what is seen as a neo-colonial government. US fears that radicals could come to power are overblown given Iraq's ethnic diversity. The only reason not to forge ahead is that US companies may not get as many contracts this way. Who cares?




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Doctors Optimistic about Aqila al-Hashimi

Her physicians, who have operated once and planned a second operation, are guardedly optimistic about the prospects of Aqila Hashimi, the member of the Interim Governing Council who was attacked on Saturday. She suffered a bullet wound in the leg, and two in the abdomen, injuring her liver, intestines and pancreas. The LA Times reports today, "Hamid Majid Moussa, a Governing Council member from the Iraqi Communist Party, agreed that Hashimi's ties to the old regime might have made her more of a target for loyalists, because Baathists whose hands are not "stained with blood" might be encouraged by her example to cooperate with the Americans."
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100,000 Gangsters in Iraq

An official with the international Red Cross/ Red Crescent in Amman told al-Sharq al-Awsat on Saturday that the 100,000 members of criminal gangs constituted the second largest army in the country. (This number would be larger than the British contingent, but smaller than the 130,000 or so US troops). He said they are well armed, well organized, and have big SUVs. So far the Anglo-American forces have seen the criminal gangs as 'not part of the mission' and have left Iraqis to suffer with a massive crime wave. But if the gangs are as well armed and organized as this official suggests, then they are clearly a security risk to the coalition. Indeed, there is some indication that some of the attacks on US troops are done by mercenaries paid up to $5000 for each American killed. Until the gangsters are brought under control, there will be no peace in Iraq.
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Breaking news: Aqila al-Hashimi Attacked, in Critical Condition

Guerrillas fired rocket-propelled grenades Saturday morning at the automobilie of Aqila al-Hashimi, a prominent female member of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council. When the grenades missed, they sprayed the car with machine gun fire, critically wounding her and several of her body guards. She was whisked away by US forces to an unknown location for treatment.

The BBC is reporting that the US military has made an arrest in the attack.

Al-Hashimi was, according to al-Hayat, in line to become Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations. She has a Ph.D. in French literature and a bachelor's in international law.

Al-Hashimi, a Shiite, had been a functionary in Saddam Hussein's Foreign Ministry. How it is that she emerged from that background onto the IGC is a great mystery, and it may hold a clue as to why she was attacked first. If Saddam or Saddam loyalists are behind it, they would have felt especially betrayed by her, and may also suspect that she had served as a double agent for the Americans in the Baath period, for which her present position is a reward.

The attack is part of a series of damaging assaults on key allies of the United States, including bombings of the Jordanian embassy, the UN compound, and the Shrine of Imam Ali (in the latter of which Shiite leader Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim was assassinated).

Members of the Interim Governing Council had pleaded with US civil adminsitrator Paul Bremer for more security and personal protection after the assassination of al-Hakim on August 29, but had been rebuffed. Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum, a Shiite cleric and member of the IGC, suspended his membership in protest at the US failure to stop the assassination of al-Hakim. The attack on al-Hashimi may make it increasingly difficult for the US to find open allies among notable Iraqis.

She often used her background in an attempt to legitimate the IGC. At a news conference at the UN last July, there was the following exchange:

"Correspondent: . . . you are basically a puppet [of] . . . the US government. And this is for Mrs Al-Hashimi - how do you respond to the words indistinct from Saddam Husayn's government. What is your reaction to that and how representative do you think you are?

Al-Hashimi They are free to say what they want to say. It is a democratic country. Under Saddam, I was in foreign affairs. I am still serving the country."

James Rupert, reporting for Newsday, had noted just a few days ago, "Last month, hooded gunmen issued a videotape to the al-Arabiya television channel calling the council members 'spies and traitors. We will kill them before we kill the Americans,' said one of the men, claiming to speak for Islamic militants among the anti-U.S. resistance fighters here."

As you know, I believe that these attacks are mainly the work of Sunni Arab nationalists who are attempting to expel the US from the country and to deny the US powerful allies.

Tarek al-Issawi in Baghdad argues that the Interim Governing Council still largely lacks legitimacy inside Iraq, where it is seen as an American puppet regime, despite its successes in gaining some international recognition. He sees this assassination attempt as a further assault on the body's legitimacy.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/
world/wire/sns-ap-iraq-governing-council,0,
5512352.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines.

Body and Soul, a Weblog, claims that Chalabi's own security forces had been protecting the IGC members. Chalabi has been pressing for the creation of a new security police that would be under his control, presumably so that he can use it to take over Iraq and thwart any foolish moves toward actual democracy. He used the attack on Dr. al-Hashimi to argue again for this plan.

http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/
blog/2003/09/baghdad_rentaco.html

Other Links:
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/
story.asp?j=66251660&p=66z5zz4x&n
=66252269


http://www.newsday.com/news/
nationworld/world/ny-woiraq0918,0,891298.
story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Two US Troops Wounded

Guerrillas launched two separate attacks on passing US military vehicles near Khalidiya on Friday, wounding two Americans. The attacks led to a heavy exchange of fire that left an Iraqi dead.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Powerful Explosion in Baghdad

The NYT reports, "The violence continued in Iraq as a bomb exploded by a highway here in the capital on Friday night, with a boom that echoed through the city and sent a plume of white smoke hundreds of feet in night sky. The blast, just before 9 p.m., hurt no one but set nerves on edge in a city that has been bracing for another major attack against U.S. soldiers — or anyone perceived to be cooperating with their occupation of Iraq . . . The explosion was powerful enough to lift a passing taxi — carrying the driver, his wife and six children — off the pavement, the driver, Mohammad Adnan, said. In addition to smashing the taxi’s windshield, the blast ripped clean about 100 feet of metal guardrail. There did not appear to be any U.S. troops nearby."


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bremer Decries Iranian Actions in Iraq

US civil administrator Paul Bremer gave an interview with the Daily Telegraph in which he decried what he called Iranian meddling in Iran. He said Tehran "continues to meddle in various ways in Iraq's internal affairs." He said that Iranian activities included "support for various people, some of whom have taken violent action against both Iraqis and against the coalition." The Telegraph inquired if Iran had been involved in bombings and shootings. Bremer replied, "There's certainly some indication of that, yes."

On another front, al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Interim Governing Council refused to accept the credentials of the proposed Iranian ambassador to Baghdad, Col. Reza Saif-ol-Ilahi, a hardliner close to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. It is alleged that President Khatami had been opposed to this appointment, as well.

I am suspicious of the drumbeat against Iran, because I fear the Washington hawks would very much like to attack Syria and Iran, and would like to use Iraq as a pretext for doing so. We have seen how they set up Iraq for an invasion with phony charges, so it is wise to be suspicious of what they say about Iran.

That said, Bremer is seeing intelligence to which the rest of us are not privy, and there have been similar reports in the Arabic press of Iranian radicals infiltrating into Iraq. It would be interesting to know, though, specifics. The Iranians are very unlikely to have hooked up with Saddam remnants in the Sunni Arab triangle. But there have been some suspicious incidents in the South in which one could imagine agents provocateurs playing a role. One was the demonstrations in Karbala, from which US Marines took fire, causing them to kill one demonstrator and wound nine. I had assumed that this was a Sadrist operation, but one could imagine the Quds Brigade or Revolutionary Guards setting up the US in this way. (The Marines probably had no idea that they were being cast in the role of Pontius Pilate in a religious morality play that appealed to powerful symbols of Shiite theology). Likewise there is some evidence that the riots in Basra against the British, while they expressed genuine discontents, may have been whipped up by radical preachers. Again, the likely suspects were Sadrists, but Iranian agents are a possibility. Another place you could imagine hostile Iranian activity is Baquba, a city in Diyala close to the Iranian border, where Marines have frequently been attacked. Baquba is mixed Sunni and Shiite, and some of the attacks have been from Sunni nationalists. But a local Shiite cleric there has been arrested twice by the Marines on unspecified charges (provoking Shiite demonstrations), and the Badr Corps, trained by the Revolutionary Guards, fired on the Marines there last May.

Still, I have to say that the Iranian factor in the Iraqi resistance seems to me likely relatively small so far. Most of the opposition is coming from Baathists and Sunni Arab nationalists, along with some Sunni Islamists. If Bremer has evidence of Iranian help to those forces, that would be alarming, but there is no evidence for such an allegation in open sources, and it is not very likely. The Iranians hate Saddam and aren't likely to help radical Sunnis. They might do it to hurt the US, but it is counter-intuitive and I would need to see proof before accepting it.

Indeed, one counter-argument is precisely that much of the Shiite South is not hostile territory for the US. Saul Hudson of Reuters had a fine report on Kut on Friday, which shows a town almost self-governed, with the Ukrainian troops positioned outside, where things seem fine. Yet it is precisely in places like Kut, near Iran with a Shiite population, that Iranian infiltrators could have hoped to be most successful in stirring things up. See
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.
jhtml?type=worldNews&
storyID=3476558

(In contrast, the situation remains dire in Sunni Baghdad:
http://www.ajc.com/news/
content/news/0903/20iraq.html)

The one possible connection is that the technique of roadside bombs that has proved so devastating for US troops was pioneered by the Shiite Hizbullah in Lebanon to get the Israelis back out of their country. Some security analysts see this modus operandi and suspect Hizbullah action in Iraq. I think it is easier to assume that smart Baathist intelligence officers watched southern Lebanon closely and learned by example. Anyway, Iranian and Lebanese accents are easy to spot, and if such infiltration is going on, the US should be able to produce prisoners that demonstrate it. They haven't, so far, to my knowledge.

The bottom line is that the opposition to US presence is mainly from Sunni Arab nationalists and is home grown. That is not a pleasant message to bring back to an American public that had been assured that "the Iraqis" would "dance in the streets" on the US arrival. So, attempts keep being made to divert the attention of the US public, to al-Qaeda, or Iran, or some other actor that suits the Washington hawks better as a PR "hook."

The danger is that, having detoured from the important work against al-Qaeda by going to war against Iraq, the US will now take further detours and end up with more orphaned failed states for which we are responsible, weakening us, bankrupting us, over-stretching our military, and setting us up for the coup de grace.




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq must be Kept together as a Single State

The splitting up of Iraq into three countries would be unacceptable to all
the neighbors, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and they are powerful
enough that it probably cannot happen over their objections. Even
President Khatami in Iran has begun speaking about the necessity to avoid
Sunni-Shiite turmoil in Iraq.

Moreover, I do not know of any significant social or political force in
Iraq that wants the country broken up into three independent states. The
Shiite parties mostly descend from al-Da`wa, which has all along had a
subtext of Iraqi nationalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, it is said that up
to ten percent of al-Da`wa members were Sunni. In 1995, al-Da`wa broke
with Ahmad Chalabi's INC precisely because Chalabi acceded to Kurdish
plans for a loose federation, whereas al-Da`wa wants a strong central
Iraqi state (run by Shiites according to Islamic law). The way in which
the Shiite Arabs reached out to the Turcoman Shiites recently shows the
sort of national linkages that are emerging (even though the Turcoman
would be considered ghulat or theological extremists by mainstream Twelver
Arabs).

Although Iraqi Kurds may want loose federalism, they know that
independence would provoke Turkish intervention. Moreover, independence
is not all it is cracked up to be. Ask the Slovaks, who are sinking into
agrarian poverty while Prague gets back on its feet. One of our intrepid
petroleum analysts should correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding
is that the Kirkuk oil fields may well be depleted soon, and the future of
Iraqi petroleum production lies in the south.

If that is true, for the Iraqi Kurds to secede into a landlocked declining
economy would be political and economic suicide.

Likewise, the Sunni Arab triangle is simply not a viable state (and would
lack petroleum income). Basically, people in Falluja and Ramadi would be
seceding to become a second Jordan, only smaller and poorer.

Iraqi nationalism has won. It is likely that both internal and external
actors will work to keep the country together.

The Middle East suffers from having small countries imposed by Western
colonialism, such that the petroleum wealth is in tiny principalities and
the human capital in huge but poor countries like Egypt. The region
doesn't need any more small poor countries with populations of 4 million
each.

The alternative is to build into the new Iraq guarantees against a tyranny
of the Shiite majority. Have a bicameral legislature that over-represents
the Sunnis slightly. Have a bill of rights. Have elected provincial
governors and legislatures with their own local purview that the central
state cannot over-rule. In other words, learn something from a success
story: the US constitution.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Diyala Bridge Cost Overruns

More reader reactions to the Riverbend posting about US over-spending on construction projects in Iraq:

From Nabil al-Tikriti:

"Karen Magoon's websearch is insufficient proof of the
inaccuracy of the riverbend blog's claim. I've been to Iraq
a number of times, and through my relief work I've had quite
a lot of experience dealing with military in the field,
bizarre contracting arrangements, and shady dealings in
non-metropole locales (Somalia, Kosovo, Albania, Iran, Iraq,
etc). In almost everything I've seen and experienced, a web
search of the location, contract, or event turns up nothing.
The web remains a woefully incomplete search engine,
relying on whatever information is posted on it. So, while
what Ms. Magoon turned up on the web was valuable, it did
not disprove the riverbend claim..."

and from Sally Ann Quinn:

"I assume we are speaking of the 135 meter span over the Diyala River (tributary to the Tigris) in the southeast sector of Baghdad where there was a hole blown in the deck by retreating Iraqi defenders. There are also severed utility lines passing through the underdeck.

I am skeptical about looking for information on reconstruction contracts such as the New Diyala Bridge in the public record and expecting to find something (i.e. returned by simple query using the Google search engine and a visit to the Halliburton or Bechtel website).

Surfing through construction.com, the Seabee's site, McGraw Hill and performing search engine retrievals in French and Italian, I read not only mention of road and bridge reconstruction but upgrade to US interstate highway standards. I also read that the Iraqi construction firm Mahmood Bunia and Sons seems to be the beneficiary of multiple contracts. This firm is part of an international consortium headquartered in Singapore and lead by Windmill International Partnership. Further, I read that since there is no banking in Iraq yet, all business in conducted in cash and hence, no paper trail.

If US interstate construction standards are to be applied to highway/bridge reconstruction combined with lack of oversight of a banking paper trail, then this is a invitation for monkey business. Although I cannot justify Riverbend's claims nor refute Ms. Magoon's inference, I think there may be something to Riverbend's statement concerning inflated repair bills. In any case, I'd like to underscore that we're working with opinion and hearsay without the benefit of a direct line to the Interim Governing Council or Halliburton.

There have been plenty of challenges lately to Riverbend and her blog from people demanding corroboration, hard facts and revelation of her identity. As someone who is an opponent of our unilateral action, has lived in Baghdad and being a geek girl myself, I have sympathy for our gentle blogger. I admit that this may color my opinion that publishing Ms. Magoon's email is taking a chink out of Riverbend's virtual blogging reputation by holding her to a higher standard than...the current Bush administration. "

(see
http://www.juancole.com/
2003_09_01_juancole_archive.html
#106378192373082131

and


http://www.juancole.com/
2003_09_01_juancole_archive.html
#106394919956867792

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Three US Soldiers Dead, perhaps a dozen Wounded

Guerrillas throughout northern Iraq subjected American troops to a large number of deadly attacks on Thursday, killing at least three US soldiers and wounding perhaps a dozen.

Outside Tikrit, Saddam's home town, guerrillas killed three US soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division and wounded two others. In Khalidiya, west of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked an army vehicle and set it on fire. Eye witnesses said between four and eight soldiers were pulled out of the vehicle, suffering from bad burns. At least two US soldiers were wounded near Ramadi, and there were rumors of many more being hurt there. Beginning Wednesday night, guerrillas launched a series of attacks on US troop in Mosul to the north, but al-Hayat, which reports the attacks, could learn nothing of the outcome. (-Wire Services, al-Hayat)

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Kurdish/Arab Violence in Kirkuk

Dozens of armed Kurdish men in Kirkuk attacked Arab tribesmen near the city on Thursday afternoon, according to al-Hayat. The Kurds descended on the village of Hayfa, apparently intent on reclaiming it. Many Sunni Arabs had been given land by Saddam, at the expense of Kurds and Shiites. The head of the Budayr tribe, Kazim al-Hani, said that a fierce battle with light arms ensued, lasting for about half an hour. In the aftermath, the Arab tribes of the area determined to create an armed paramilitary force to defend their land holdings, which comes to about 5,000 acres. The Arab tribespeople also insist that Kirkuk is not a purely Kurdish city.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Police demonstrate in Basra

The police chief of Basra has been removed from office by the British. About two hundred policemen loyal to him staged a protest Thursday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Uncompetitive Halliburton Contracts worth Billions in Iraq

The contracts given last February by the US military to Halliburton for putting out petroleum fires and getting petroleum pumping again after the war were initially worth only a few million dollars, but their worth is now estimated at $3 bn. and it could go to $7 bn., according to AP. The contracts were given to Halliburton because the Defense Department had already awarded it a contract to do such emergency work. That original contract was awarded after competitive bids. Congress is beginning to be up in arms about this way of proceeding. It is one thing to have a program for emergency needs, it is another to let it turn into an uncompetitive award of long-term contracts worth billions. Halliburton subsidiaries also got the contracts for servicing the US military in Iraq--building quonset huts, providing air conditioning and other facilities, etc. The dirty secret here is that many of those subcontractors refused to go to Iraq in spring and summer, because it was dangerous and their civilian employees balked. As a result our brave troops "looked like hobos and lived like pigs," according to one GI. This fiasco should make the US military completely rethink its reliance on civilian contractors for such services in the immediate aftermath of war.

Meanwhile, it is coming out that Cheney hasn't cut as many of his ties with Halliburton as had been believed.

see
http://www.smh.com.au/
articles/2003/09/19/
1063625189001.html

With regard to the Iraqi Web Log entry that I shared about exorbitant costs in repairing the Diyala bridge in Baghdad, reader Karen Magoon responded as follows:

"With regard to the above referenced posting leading to another weblog, I
did some (admittedly cursory) internet research after reading the posting.
I am always ready to believe the worst when warranted, but this has all the
earmarks of a wild rumor. A search for "New Diyala Bridge" on Google News
and web search only returns references to the weblog entry you site. I ran
a search on Diyala at Janes.com and came back with nothing relevant. It
seems unlikely to me that an American company would get such a juicy
contract and not show up in the Janes business section.

Finally, since Bechtel was awarded the contract for capital construction, I
went to their site. I searched their subcontract list without specifically
finding the New Diyala Bridge. I did find reference to three bridge
reconstruction subcontracts, all of which are to purportedly Iraqi firms.
Additionally, it seems highly improbable that Bechtel would be willing to
pay a subcontractor for such a job even 1% of $50 million."

Very truly yours,
Karen Magoon

Many thanks to Karen for trying to track this story down, and for her judicious judgment in the matter. I guess the ball is in Riverbend's court.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ambassador Joe Wilson on Iraq - Interview by Josh Marshall

The full story of Ambassador Joe Wilson's investigation of (fraudulent) claims that Iraq had signed a deal to buy uranium from Niger is given in his interview with Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. Wilson, who served in the US embassy in Iraq until the first Gulf War, also makes trenchant observations about the US mishandling of post-war Iraq. Recently Vice President Dick Cheney claimed never to have heard of Wilson, and Cheney also insisted on leaving open the possibility that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Both statements were ill advised. Bush had to come out and contradict Cheney on the 9/11 canard. Presumably this is because it is now election season, and Karl Rove knows that the administration's credibility is now fair game. And the Saddam-9/11 story is among the biggest fraud in American history. The first part of the extended and highly informative interview, which is a must read for anyone interested in the Iraq issue is at
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/sept0303.html#091803639pm

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No Smallpox Program in Iraq, Either

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in his UN presentation that Iraq had the capacity to produce smallpox, one of the reasons it had to be attacked immediately.

A special team scouring Iraq for a smallpox weapons program came up empty. The building the CIA thought might have been used for the program was full of cobwebs. Satellite photos had shown trucks coming up to the building, causing the CIA to worry that a biological weapons program had been started back up. It turns out that the trucks belonged to looters who were stripping the abandoned building. Iraqi biologists all say there was no such program, and they have no reason to lie, now.

This further case of missing weapons programs appears to be more a matter of paranoia than deliberate deception. I doubt Bush got innoculated, and called for millions of Americans to get shots, while believing there really was no threat. The mistake also shows the drawbacks for US intelligence of relying on high tech electronic surveillance rather than human intelligence. If the CIA had developed Iraqi agents in Iraq, one of them could just have visited the building and seen the cobwebs. If trucks of looters could get in, so could an agent.
See
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/
story/RTGAM.20030918.wpoxx0918/
BNStory/International/
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Soldiers Wounded

AFP reports "four more soldiers wounded in two separate attacks on convoys."
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US Tempts Pakistan with Aid, in return for Troops in Iraq

The US is putting pressure on Pakistan to send up to 10,000 troops to Iraq, using foreign aid and debt relief as a carrot, according to Reuters. Pakistan had owed the United States $3 billion by summer of 2001, but the article maintains that much of this debt has been written off and new aid given gratis, to the tune of $3 bn total.

The US needs to be able to rotate a division out of Iraq in Feb.-March, about 15,000 men, and therefore needs the equivalent of a division from international sources. So far India has refused, citing a need for military manpower to deal with the civil disturbances in Kashmir and insisting that the UN play a bigger role in rebuilding Iraq. Turkey probably would put 10,000 men in, but the new Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, has said Iraq doesn't want troops from neighboring countries. Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that he thinks it would be good to have a Muslim contingent in Iraq, because of their cultural sensitivity. (Actually non-Arab Muslims wouldn't be that much better at communicating or knowing local culture, and if they were Sunnis in a Shiite area that could cause trouble in itself).

The whole Arab world has said no to providing troops, including Egypt, though Jordan may in the end send some. Pakistan is therefore looking like the most plausible provider of a good part of the needed division, though this move would be problematic for domestic politics. I explain below.

The $87 bn. asked for recently by US President George W. Bush includes another $200 mn. for Pakistan debt relief. The article maintains that the president has promised Pakistan yet another $3 bn. in new aid and final retirement of old loans. In summer of 2001, Pakistan was about $37 bn. in debt. That debt has now declined to $34.5 bn. and falling. More important, average debt servicing has fallen from $6-7 bn. a year in the late 1990s to $2.5 bn. a year now. Pakistan is being given help by the Club of Paris to reduce its high-interest multilateral debt, of $12.5 bn. at 11% interest, in favor of concessional loans at very low interest. Its debt servicing may therefore fall soon to only a billion dollars a year. About $6 bn. was owed to Japan, which is also easing repayment terms, in cooperation with the US, to reward Pakistan for helping in the War on Terror. (Pakistan has caught about 500 of the 1000 al-Qaeda operatives that fled there from Afghanistan, and turned most of them over to the US, including some very big fish).

All these numbers mean that Pakistan's sudden about-face in turning on the Taliban in September of 2001, and its close military and security alliance with the US since then, has been a huge economic windfall for the government. (Whether ordinary people have benefited is another question, though the Pakistani economy as a whole has seen an uptick in the past year, and is expected to grow 4.5% this year after several years of lassitude.)

Because the government is benefiting, and because the government is largely still in the hands of the military, despite the restoration of a weak, hung parliament in Oct. 2002, it is possible that these economic incentives will in fact lead Pakistan to send troops to Iraq. Such a move would be hugely unpopular among the Pakistani public, which sees the Iraq war as Western imperialism. It will give the religious parties yet another platform on which to campaign against the government, and contribute to a certain amount of instability. This dilemma is an example of the many and subtle ways in which the Iraqi campaign is actually interfering in the successful prosecution of the war on terror.


http://famulus.msnbc.com/
FamulusIntl/reuters09-17-202023.asp?reg=ASIA

Note that if Bush and Rumsfeld had not arrogantly pursued a purely unilateral war, we would not be in this position. Note, too, that not only are troops not forthcoming, but the European Union is willing to donate only a risible sum to Iraqi reconstruction. This is one reason that each of us Americans is going to have to fork over $305 (actually much more since it will be borrowed) for the initial tranche of Bush's Iraq economic program.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.