Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Saturday, January 31, 2004

Rieff on Iraqi Shiites

David Rieff"s excellent firsthand report from Iraq on the Shiite movements there in the New York Times magazine is now available online (free registration required).

This report seems to me among the more realistic and informed assessments of the situation yet to appear in the Western press. Rieff has done an excellent job of eliciting the views of the major players (Bashir Najafi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Shiites on the street), and conveying the underlying resentments against occupation that are burning slowly beneath the surface.

One reader suggested that it was the Sunni insurgency that brought the US around to seeking an indigenous government, not the Shiites. This is a fair point, but obviously as of Nov. 15 Mr. Bremer believed that the situation could be addressed by stage-managed elections based on appointed "councils." It was Sistani that challenged this procedure and insisted on open, general elections.

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Dutch Embassy Destroyed by Rocket; 4 Policemen gunned down in Mosul

According to wire services, Baghdad was shaken by several explosions late Friday night, including two rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad that set it ablaze briefly before the fire was extinguished. No one was harmed, since the building was unoccupied. US officials put Baghdad on a major alert. Holland has 1200 troops in southern Iraq as part of the US-led military coalition. It had pulled out its embassy staff last October, citing poor security.

Guerrillas in Mosul sprayed gunfire at four Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint, killing three and wounding a fourth. Over 600 Iraqi policemen have been killed since mid-April.

South of Kirkuk, guerrillas fired on a checkpoint of the Iraqi Civil Defense Forces in a place called Salman Beg. The Iraqi police returned fire, claiming to have killed one of the six attackers and to have wounded another.
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Debate Begins on Constitutional Provisions in Iraq

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a fine piece today discussing debates in Iraq over the Fundamental Law that will govern the country until a constitution is crafted.

She points out that several members of the Interim Governing Council reject the idea of a 3-man rotating presidency, in part on the grounds that it may institutionalize ethnic divisions and will be inefficient (Bosnia is cited as an example of how it can go bad).

She also reveals that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Abdu'l-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic revolution in Iraq, have prepared their own team of census and electoral experts to make the case to the United Nations Commission being sent by Kofi Annan that free and open elections are possible.

[Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Adnan Pachachi of the IGC says that the UN Commission's recommendations will not be binding on the governing council. Pachachi is angry about the extent of Shiite power and the influence of Sistani, as are many Sunnis.]

The Fundamental Law will have a bill of rights, and will try to ensure representation in parliament of women (some percentage of seats will be set aside for female candidates, as in Pakistan). But it will also specify Islamic law as a principal source of Iraqi law, which worries some observers. (This provision was insisted on by Sistani and seems to be supported by Paul Bremer.)
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MI6 to be Called before Parliament on Weapons Estimates

The London Times reports that "Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, will appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ms Ann Taylor, the former Labour Cabinet minister, to give further evidence on why he believed that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons was reliable and accurate. It was MI6 that provided the bulk of the intelligence for the Downing Street dossier that underpinned Mr Blair’s decision to go to war."

That is, despite the whitewash carried out by the Hutton Commission, Tony Blair's government will not entirely avoid an inquiry into where in the world it got the idea that Saddam Hussein was a major threat to the UK and had WMD ready to launch "within 45 minutes."

Note that parliamentarians of his own party are carrying out the inquiry, which is a good model for Republicans in the US Congress. The intelligence failures with regard to Iraq were a bi-partisan affair (though only the Bush administration magnified them by making war policy based on them), and Republicans who care about the credibility and security of the US should want to know as much as anyone what went wrong and how to fix it.

A reader helpfully comments:

"It's a committee of Blair placemen meeting in secret and reporting in secret directly to Blair. He then has the power to redact any part of their findings he doesn't like, ask them to do it again, or chuck it in the bin. Not exactly a democratic model for America to follow (but one they'd probably like to)." Oh, well.


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The Islamic Party: Neither US nor IGC Suited to Organizing General Elections

Az-Zaman reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party (the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood) has expressed support for the Nov. 15 agreement between the US and the Interim Governing Council, saying that elections based on provincial councils would produce a government capable of restoring Iraqi sovereignty. Party leader Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a member of the Interim Governing Council, argues that the IGC and the Americans are incapable at this point of presiding over direct elections.

Abdul Hamid rejected the idea that has been floated by Ahmad Chalabi and others, of simply expanding the IGC by appointment and turning the governance of the country over to it. He rejected any method of selecting the new government that did not depend on some sort of elections such as would reflect the will of the Iraqis. The party stated its complete faith in the principle of direct elections so as to produce a new legitimacy in Iraqi politics, but seems willing to wait until 2005 to hold these direct elections.

Abdul Hamid, as a fundamentalist Sunni, appears to fear that direct and open elections held in May might produce a government dominated by Shiite hard liners.
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Demonstrations in Halbaniya

Hundreds demonstrated peacefully in the Sunni Arab town of Halbaniya on Friday against US tactics, and against the curfew imposed on the city by the US authorities. (-Ash-Sharq al-Awsat).
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Friday, January 30, 2004

Who is Hasan Ghul?

The Kurdish peshmergas apprehended an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda trying to sneak into Iraq recently, and the US hailed the capture as significant. Ghul was said to have been working directly under Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of the planners of September 11. But the London-based moderate Saudi newspaper al-Hayat raised the question today of who he really is. They called an Egyptian expert on the al-Gihad al-Islami organization of Ayman al-Zawahir, and he said the only senior al-Gihad/ al-Qaeda figure named Hasan had been killed in the Afghanistan war. Hani al-Siba'i speculated that "Hasan Ghul" may just be the name on a passport that the fugitive managed to get hold of. I did a quick Nexis search and did not come up with entries for this name before the capture. So, who exactly was captured?

There seemed to me to be a contradiction in the statements during the past couple of days of Gen. John Abizaid and those of Gen. Rick Sanchez about al-Qaeda in Iraq. Abizaid seemed to play this factor down, Sanchez to play it up.

Abizaid expressed security concerns not only about Afghanistan (where he denied that the Taliban are resurgent) and Iraq, but also about US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which have a domestic problem with radical Muslim extremists. (The problem in Pakistan, by the way, was in part created by the Reagan administration during its alliance with dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan).

What I don't understand is why, if you are cataloguing security risks to the US in the region, you would not add in the militant Israeli settler movement in the West Bank, which produces more hatred toward the United States in the Muslim world than any other single factor. If some foreign country had grabbed part of Virginia and was pouring settlers into it, kicking out Americans, and declaring it no longer US soil, don't you think Americans in Maine and California would be upset about that, and resentful toward the foreign invader?


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Is Kerry's Inconsistency on Iraq a Liability?

Mother Jones,, rather unaccountably relying on Max Boot, raises the question of whether Kerry's changing Iraq position will hurt him in the campaign. Kerry voted for the congressional authorization of the war, but then voted against Bush's request for $87 billion more after the war ($20 bn. for Iraq reconstruction).

So far Iraq isn't a big factor in the campaign, and unless things go badly wrong, it may not emerge as such. So it isn't clear that Kerry's position will be relevant one way or another. But the journalists' fixation on "consistency" is anyway not usually shared by the public. After all, Kerry's positions have been pretty typical of most Americans--initial support for the Iraq war, then profound dismay at the Bush adminstration's handling of the aftermath, then sticker shock at the $87 bn. request (which won't be the last).
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Bahr al-Ulum: Federalism can work with 18 Provinces

In a recent interview in al-Siyasah, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum implicitly opposed the Iraqi Kurds' demands for a consolidated Kurdish state:

"(Bilal) Do you think federalism is good for Iraq?"

"(Bahr-al-Ulum) First of all we do not accept the division of Iraq or any situation that leads to the division of Iraq. We stress the unity of the homeland and its territorial integrity. We must spare this country anything that might lead to its division or fragmentation. But I believe that we must make a step towards the creation of 18 governorates enjoying some self-rule and not relying on a central government or a regional federation. This could help citizens serve their interests and objectives. But we should not work for a strong federation that might cause problems."
(via BBC world monitoring via Lexis Nexis.)

Bahr al- Ulum, a Shiite clergyman close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and a member of the Interim Governing Council, has thus rejected the idea of "regional federations" of the sort the Kurds advocate. Most Shiite Arabs are opposed to the Kurdish plan, favoring a relatively strong central government, which they plan to control. The Shiite demonstrations of January 20 included among their demands the rejection of the Kurdish demand for an ethnic canton and a very loose federalism. Bahr al-Ulum appears flexible on the second issue, but not on the first, and he probably is a good guide to mainstream Shiite views.

For contemporary views on Iraqi politics among Kurds in the north, Tom Hundley's Chicago Tribune piece is well worth looking at.

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Hilfiker on Army Strong-Arm Tactics in Sunni Heartland

Dr. David Hilfiker of the Christian Peacemaker Team has written an important account, presented by Tom Engelhardt, of the tactics employed by Col. Nate Sassaman in dealing with Sunni Arab Iraqis. Sassaman is alleged to have said several things about Iraqi Muslims that verge on racism, and his tactics, such as imprisoning the entire village of Abu Hishma with razor wire (probably borrowed from the Israelis), have brought notoriety to the United States in Iraq.

Hilfiker doesn't say so, but the Sassaman approach is vehemently contested by the US Marines, who stress winning hearts and minds, and probably were on the verge of making important breakthroughs in places like Fallujah when they were withdrawn and replaced by the army.

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John LeCarre on Iraq Intelligence Failure

From Laura Miller's recent interview in Salon.com with the famed spy novelist David Cornwell and former British foreign service officer:

"I think it's perfectly true that after the Cold War ended and the secret war against terror and the business of spying on terror got going, as always the new war was being fought with the weapons of the old one and it didn't work. It's terribly difficult to spy on a multinational organization that doesn't oblige you by using all the toys you can catch them out with: telephones, cellphones, radio, codes that you can break. It doesn't have a command and control structure that you can penetrate . . .

That's one side of it. The technological revolution in intelligence left people with the notion that the human side of intelligence was of secondary importance. I think that's always been a great nonsense. It was a great nonsense in the Cold War too, even if we did manage to break their codes. I think the CIA and the Brits or whoever else would much rather have had access to Gorbachev's private secretary than to Gorbachev's telegrams. Human sources -- you can ask them questions, they can reply . . .

Your intelligence budget for the CIA alone is, I think, $30 billion a year. The result is a huge proliferation of junk. The art of refining that and turning it into a lucid statement you can write on a postcard and put in front of a busy politician really is very, very difficult stuff. The intelligence business is threatened by exactly the same bad people that your business is threatened by . . . In the intelligence world, with so much money around, there are tremendously sophisticated peddlers who are just making stuff up, feeding information to the empty areas of your head and taking huge sums of money for it and disappearing into the smoke. And I think some of the intelligence services fell for some of that stuff."

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Thursday, January 29, 2004

10 Members of Iraqi Civil Defense Force wounded in Blast

Guerrillas in the northeastern town of Baquba donated a big bomb, targeting a patrol of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force, and wounding 10 of them, according to Reuters.
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10,000 Shiites Protest in Nasiriyah, seek Resignation of Provincial Council

Az-Zaman newspaper reports that Muqtada al-Sadr's organization staged a demonstration of 10,000 in the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah on Wednesday. They were joined by the Fudala' Party, also adherents of the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr, but who follow Muhammad Yaqubi rather than Muqtada, Sadiq's son. Elements from the Sadrist militia, the Army of the Mahdi, also rallied.

They demanded that the appointed provincial council of Dhi Qar province resign, including the governor, Sabri Hamed Badr al-Rumaidh, and be replaced by a popularly elected provincial grovernment. They also wanted the officials and bureaucrats appointed by the current provincial council to be sacked.

AP reported that they chanted, "No to Israel! No to imperialism! No to America!" Nasiriyah, a city of about half a million inhabitants, is 350 kilometers (215 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Az-Zaman says that there had been an earlier demonstration (presumably the one on Tuesday January 20, held in a number of Shiite towns).

AP says that Coalition authorities are denying that al-Rumaidh has resigned, saying only that he has withdrawn from view.

This demonstration clearly is part of pre-election politics. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called for open national elections. The US says it wants to use the appointed provincial councils to select an electoral college. Muqtada's followers are hedging their bets. Even if the US sticks to its guns and uses the provincial councils as the electorate, they seem to be saying, they want the provincial councils themselves to have been freely elected beforehand.

Similar demonstrations showing dissatisfaction by Shiites with their Coalition-appointed provincial or municipal councils have broken out in recent weeks in Kut and Amara, two other major southern Shiite towns.



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Pachachi Envisages Triumvirate as Iraqi Executive

AFP/al-Zaman report that Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian interim president of the Iraqi Governing Council, envisages that the new transitional Iraqi government due to be installed July 1 will have a three-man executive. He said that the transitional parliament will elect the three presidents. He also insisted that the three-man executive would have real powers and would not just be window dressing. The three would appoint the prime minister, and would approve cabinet appointments along with the parliament, and would have the power to sign or veto legislation. He envisaged legislation originating with government ministries and then being ratified by parliament and by the 3 presidents. Another spokesman said that the 3 would not necessarily reflect Iraq's major ethnic groups.

This system is completely unworkable and highly undemocratic. The parliament should be the body that chooses the prime minister. The parliament should be the body that thinks up laws and passes them. Pachachi's scheme seriously blurs the separation of powers, which is a key element in democracy. The 3-man presidency would potentially always be over-ruling the prime minister. Iran after the Revolution initially had both a president and a prime minister, and they fought so viciously and produced so much gridlock that eventually the office of prime minister was abolished.

Pachachi and his backers (possibly the Americans) clearly want to use the 3-man presidency as a brake on Shiite dominance of parliament and the likely Shiite prime minister.

I think such an "executive" would be unable to decide on anything, just as the Interim Governing Council has had trouble making tough decisions. Pachachi and his aides are saying it would prevent the concentration of power in the hands of one man. Uh, Adnan, that's what an independent legislature and judiciary are supposed to be for.

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Hutton Inquiry Whitewashes Blair Government's Exaggerations

Seumas Milne of the Guardian argues that the report by Lord Hutton on the David Kelly affair is biased in favor of the government of Tony Blair.

This affair is extremely complex. Let me see if I can get it basically right, in a concise way. David Kelly, a microbiologist, had worked for the British ministry of defense and served as a UN arms inspector in Iraq.

It is probably unrelated to the story that in the course of his inspections he met a US servicewoman, Sgt. Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American. She is alleged to have been an undercover US intelligence officer, but denies it. She, incidentally, had become a member of the Baha'i Faith when whe was a teen in the US. She converted Kelly to the religion, which was founded in Baghdad in 1863 by the Iranian notable Baha'u'llah. The Baha'i faith's principles include the unity of the world religions, the unity of humankind, and the desirability of a federal world government. (Truth in advertising: This author joined the religion in 1972 but was forced out of the community in 1996 by fundamentalist elements in the leadership, who try to impose censorship and conformity on vocal intellectuals.) Actually, I think that any serious person from the West who spent a lot of time in the Middle East would find Baha'i, with its scriptures' liberal theology and acceptance of both the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic heritages quite attractive. (The more fundamentalist side of the religion is usually hidden from outsiders and new believers, and is probably more pronounced in the US than in the UK anyway.)

Kelly returned to his home in Oxford. He was convinced that Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons, and appears to have advised the British government of this belief.

But then beginning in the fall of 2002, he had three conversations with Andrew Gilligan, a BBC defense reporter, from which the reporter took away the impression that Kelly thought the case for Iraqi WMD was being exaggerated by the Blair government. One issue was whether Blair's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, had intervened in the wording of a British security report on Iraq to make it seem more alarming than did the original phraseology. The reporter then went public with the charge that the Blairites had deliberately exaggerated or in the quaint British phrase "sexed up" the evidence for Saddam's weapons capability. This was on May 22, 2003.

The Blair government strenuously denied any such intentional tampering with the facts, and put enormous pressure on the reporter and the BBC to retract.

On July 4, Kelly came in from the cold and let the Blair government know that he was one of Gilligan's sources, but denied being the sole source or of alleging all the misconduct that Gilligan did. Blair officials were relieved that Kelly was a relative outsider who wouldn't have had intimate knowledge of cabinet meetings, e.g.; they also knew that Kelly was himself a hardliner on Iraqi WMD, and that it was likely Gilligan had exaggerated Kelly's critique. They made a deliberate decision to out Kelly. Kelly had a security clearance and wasn't supposed to be talking to journalists, and the Blairites considered prosecuting him under under Draconian British law. He was outed on July 10, 2003. Campbell was particularly hard on Kelly, and resigned later that summer.

Kelly was then found dead in the woods on July 18, 2003, having swallowed a lot of pills and with a wrist slit. (Mai Pederson said in the Sunday Mail this past Sunday that Kelly had always complained of difficulty swallowing pills and refused to take Tylenol, and she flatly disbelieved that he would or could have committed suicide in this manner. He had once confided in another friend that if there were an Iraq war, he feared he would be found dead in the woods [though it may have been Saddam's agents he feared.] The British authorities have treated his death as a suicide.)

After his death there were attempts to discredit Kelly on the grounds of his being a Baha'i, with the tabloid press misconstruing the religion as a "cult." The Baha'i faith is a perfectly respectable religion, to which have belonged US poet laureate Robert Hayden, jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, painter Mark Toby, and thousands of other Americans and Britishers. I think there is an authoritarian dark side to the administration of the religion, which practices shunning, but then the same thing is true of the Amish. It doesn't mean they are disreputable. This charge against Kelly was just a smear. The Baha'i angle may have been irrelevant, anyway. The rank and file of Baha'is tend to be peaceniks and most probably disliked the Iraq War. But the leadership is often very conservative and interested in patronage from governments, and it forbade Baha'is to demonstrate against the war, even as individuals, in winter of 2003. Kelly was a relatively new Baha'i and did not even live in a big community, and is unlikely to have been aware of community politics on the issue.

Blair denies having been involved in the decision to out Kelly, but he appears to have chaired the meeting where the decision was made, so either he is lying or he doesn't pay much attention to what is going on around him. About half the British public think he is lying. There is a lot of evidence by now that especially in fall of 2002 the Blair government did in fact exaggerate the intelligence on Iraqi WMD, changing the wording of intelligence estimates so as to make them appear more conclusive than they were (see Milne's piece, above). So the substance of Gilligan's report actually seems unexceptionable, though whether what was done could be characterized as a "sexing up" of the documents may still be in dispute. I suppose what is at issue is whether Blair & Co. were acting in good faith or being dishonest, and their high dudgeon comes in part from a conviction that they were acting in good faith and just "tightening up" the language of the security reports, which they actually believed were dire. But that is a pretty low bar. For all we know even Cheney believes the incredible things that come out of his mouth regarding Iraq. I take it that the phrase "sexing up" has connotations of dishonesty or insincerity. If Gilligan did anything wrong at all, it was to venture into the territory of intentions, which is admittedly an ethical issue for journalists (how can you know an official's private intentions? Shouldn't you avoid imputing intentions?)

In the weird world of commissions, the fault in this affair has mainly been laid on the BBC, the chairman of which has just had to resign. This outcome seems a real shame, since the BBC was among the better sources of news coverage on the Iraq war, and this scandal will be used by some government officials impatient with the Beeb's famous autonomy to rein it in and make it a house organ for the party in power.

Kelly's death is still a bit of a mystery. Whoever outed him really should be made to resign, since it was most improper, but given the tenor of the Hutton report that is unlikely to happen. Ironically, Kelly, like most of the weapons inspectors, probably wasn't suspicious enough of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD or the ways in which the US and British governments spun it.


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Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Bomb at Baghdad Hotel kills 3; In other attacks, 6 US Troops Killed, 2 CNN Employees, 4 Iraqi Policemen; 6 US troops Wounded

There was so much violence of so many types in so many places in Iraq on Tuesday that it took me some time just to track it all down and summarize it. Kudos to CNN for among the clearest summaries. It made me depressed that 6 of our guys bought the farm.

CNN reports that guerrillas detonated a truck bomb in front of the Shahin Hotel in the ritzy Karada district of Baghdad just before midnight Tuesday. Much of the hotel was occupied by Iraq's interim minister for labor, Sami Azara al-Majun, and his staff. He and other officials were safe, but between one and 3 bystanders were killed.

Tuesday had earlier witnessed 5 attacks that killed 6 US soldiers and 2 CNN employees, along with 4 Iraqi policemen and a civilian.

Guerillas detonated a roadside bomb near Iskandariyah at 8 pm Iraqi time, killing 3 soldiers from the Combined Joint Task Force 7. Another three were wounded.

At 1 pm in Khaldiyah, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb and killed another three US soldiers along with an Iraqi civilian. The explosion wounded 3 US troops and 4 Iraqis.

A CNN crew was ambushed near Baghdad on Tuesday, with the driver of their vehicle and their translator being killed. A cameraman in another vehicle was slightly wounded.

Guerrillas in the holy Shiite city of Karbala drove up to the Polish military HQ and opened fire, killing one Iraqi policeman and wounding two others.

Guerrillas in Ramadi, in the Sunni heartland, killed 3 Iraqi policemen Tuesday outside their police station.

US troops operating in the Sunni Arab region arrested several suspected members of the Jaysh Muhammad, a guerrilla cell operating there (sounds like Sunni fundamentalists).

Members claiming to be from a Muslim party occupied a Red Crescent office in a ritzy Baghdad neighborhood Tuesday, injuring one of the Red Crescent staffers. Iraqi police came to the scene.

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Informed Comment up for Koufax Award

2003 Koufax Award Finalists Best Expert Blog has been announced, with this column as a finalist. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported the site so warmly!
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Humanitarian Grounds for Iraq War?

Re: Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a
Humanitarian Intervention
", 26 January 2004, Keynote essay to Human Rights Watch, "World Report 2004."

My reply, from a discussion list:

I deeply disagree with the way the Bush administration pursued the war
against Iraq. The hyping of unfounded 'intelligence,' the backroom deals
with corrupt or authoritarian expatriates, the spying on the UNSC
ambassadors and then the discarding of them, the disregard for the United
Nations Charter, the undermining of international law and the law of
occupation--all of these steps and policies made our world so much more
shoddy and dangerous and mistrustful.

That said, I simply must disagree with HRW and Mr. Roth that there were no
humanitarian grounds for such a war. I believe that what Saddam was doing
to the Marsh Arabs from the mid-1990s could legitimately qualify as a
genocide. Likewise, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. Although the
latter was carried out some years ago, the former had been recent and
ongoing. Moreover, there is not in most legal systems any statute of
limitations on murder, so I am not sure why there should be one on
genocide or mass murder.

In short, I believe that the United Nations Security Council was obliged
to remove Saddam Hussein from power on the basis of egregious violations
of the UN Convention on Genocide

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html#CAG.

The proper way for the Bush administration to have proceeded was to apply
to the UNSC under Article 8 of the convention.

"Article 8
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United
Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they
consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide
or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3."

In so saying, I do not mean to give the Bush administration a pass on its
behavior, since vigilanteism is not the same as lawful prosecution. Bush
lynched Saddam, when in fact his regime should have been put on trial and
removed by the Security Council.

I do not believe most Iraqis would agree with HRW on this one, and they
are the ones who had to live with that regime.


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Sachedina Interview by Cobban: Sistani is Trying to Bring in the UN

Helena Cobban's interview with Shiite thinker Abdulaziz Sachedina of the University of Virginia is a must-read contribution. Sachedina has recently been to Iran and moved among the Shiites. Interestingly, he seems to think that there is more support for Muqtada al-Sadr than for Sistani except in Basra. From a distance, I would say that Sistani has more general, but vaguer authority, whereas the devotees of Muqtada are really devoted. Sachedina doesn't think Sistani has read Gandhi or knows his philosophy, but allows that some of his followers may have. He believes that Sistani wanted to get the UN involved in the Iraqi elections, and that was one of the real goals of his recent activism. I concur entirely.
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Bush: Saddam posed grave threat to US

Bush maintains that despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."

This allegation simply is not true, however much a monster Saddam may be.

Let's look at the issue Harpers style:

US population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million
US per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: 700
US nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0
US tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0
Number of foreign troops and civilians US military has killed since 1968: approx. 2 million
Number of foreign troops and civilians Iraqi military has killed since 1968: approx. 250,000


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Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Breaking News: Kerry Wins New Hampshire

Caught Kerry's victory speech on CNN. With 73% of precincts reporting, he still has 38% of the vote, a 12-point lead over Dean. The race for third place is still tight, with Clark at 13% to Edwards's 12%. [As you know, that is about where it ended, save that Kerry got 39%.]

Kerry's sudden reemergence is remarkable, but on the face of it, it isn't so strange that a long-serving Massachusetts senator should win New Hampshire, nor that a former governor of Vermont should have also done well there. Iowa and New Hampshire are famously not bellwethers for the rest of the country, and are more a Darwinian mechanism for weeding out the weak and unsuited than an indication of who will win the party's nomination.

On February 3, Edwards will probably take South Carolina (with Sharpton doing double digits there too), and Edwards could do well in Oklahoma and maybe Missouri, as well (though Gephardt's endorsement is expected to help Kerry there). If Kerry can finish second in South Carolina, it would be very significant for him. But it will be tough; Clark could do well there, more because he is from Arkansas than because he is a former general.

You'd expect Kerry to take Delaware. Arizona, New Mexico, and North Dakota are probably up for grabs. But the basic fact about next Tuesday is that it probably just won't settle anything, and will keep alive candidacies rather than ending them. I'd say Clark has to win at least one to remain viable, and obviously Edwards has to carry South Carolina and maybe one other to look credible going forward.

A few days later, Michigan and Washington state have their votes, and they are big states that matter, where the victories will tell us something. One thing Michigan will tell us, as the Detroit Free Press has pointed out, is whether Kerry or some other candidate can get out and win the African-American vote. African-Americans are some 12.9% of Americans, but almost all of them vote Democrat. If we say the country is about evenly divided between voters for Democratic candidates and voters for Republican ones, obviously the 52% of the country that votes Democrat in presidential races is about a quarter African-American. This is a problem, since the poor and the young vote in lower numbers than the wealthy and the senior. African-Americans are very disproportionately poor and young. So one key to a Democratic victory is having a candidate about whom African-Americans can get excited, who will actually draw them to the polls (having an honest state election system that ensures their votes are actually counted also helps).

And, I have a theory about Kerry. A key element of his appeal is that he is a Vet. It may help him that he is a prominent Vet who has worked for the interests of veterans (unlike Bush, who wanted to cut veterans' benefits and who waited out Vietnam with a country club assignment in the Texas air national guards [which he tried to get out of, as well]). And being a Vet who is pro-veteran is the one thing that might enable a candidate to appeal to both African-Americans and white Southerners. Because both have a strong military tradition, and both have served in the US military during the past 40 years in numbers disproportionate to their percentages of the general population. It is probably not a primary consideration, but it may be a factor--especially at a time when the families of servicemen and servicewomen, reservists and national guards are upset and worried about Bush's Iraq policy.


Kerry made one Middle East reference in his speech, saying he was going to support US independence from petroleum so that no American young person would have to serve militarily in the Middle East. He implied that the Iraq war was about securing petroleum supplies or about keeping them inexpensive, or something. My advice to Senator Kerry is to drop this particular grace note. There is no near-term replacement for petroleum that is nearly in the same price range or which doesn't have very bad implications for the environment. Coal produces acid rain. Wind generators kill lots of birds and give human beings migraines. Solar is expensive and photovoltaic cells for large-scale production require a lot of exotic metals that are toxic (including cadmium and selenium) and the cells will be hard to recycle [solar is anyway really, really expensive]. Nuclear produces pesky radioactive isotopes that are hard to store safely, can fairly easily be used to make dirty bombs or enriched to become nuclear bombs, and last for thousands of years.

Petroleum costs around $25-$30 per barrel, and is likely to go on doing so for decades. (Those who argue for an imminent shortage ignore the likelihood of further big finds--it is like the old 'Limits to Growth' fallacy of the early 70s that predicted all kinds of metals would be rare and extremely expensive by now, but ignored the simple fact that when metals get more expensive, more of them tend to be mined.) Every other fuel source is 'way more expensive or more damaging to the environment. So, who wants to pay twice as much for their monthly heating and energy bills? Or have their skin corroded by acid when it rains? Moreover, petroleum is plentiful and lots of countries are happy to pump it for the current price, and it is not necessary to do things like invade and occupy Iraq to have inexpensive petroleum. Saddam's petroleum was making its way to the US. No producer could afford to boycott the US long; that way lies bankruptcy. The main problem of OPEC and other petroleum producers in the mid-1990s was that there was an oil glut. Prices dropped to near $10 a barrel for a while in the Clinton era.

So, the promise is unrealistic and the premise is flawed. If Cheney took us to war about petroleum, it was not for our general economic benefit but to open investment and money-making opportunities for US petroleum corporations--opportunities that they could have gained more easily by exploring Pakistan and India more intensively. And, if the US were willing to put the money into insulating and increasing fuel efficiency, it could cut its petroleum consumption by a third easily, which would be good for the environment and economically would benefit the country over the subsequent decade or two (the Europeans pulled this off after the oil price shocks of the 70s). However, the American public does not want to hear about conservation and this is a project that should only be undertaken in the second term of a president, not on the campaign trail.

If Kerry wants to bring this issue up, the right way to do it is to say that international cooperation on security in the Persian Gulf would be a better guarantee of energy security for the country than unilateral American military action.

[Dear Environmentalists: I am one of you; I have been reading and thinking about the environment for 40 years. I helped organize trash pick-up along the road for the first Earth Day. I am not saying that no alternative sources of energy should be used or encouraged. Indeed, I am all for throwing money at research and development, and encouraging environmentally safer energy sources. Better fuel cells would be all to the good. But they would increase gas mileage in automobiles to 60 miles a gallon, not abolish petroleum. I am saying that independence from petroleum is a chimera as long as it and natural gas are 10 times cheaper than solar power. Even if Kerry got two terms, he would not be able to move the country anywhere near independence from foreign petroleum and it is therefore a bad idea for him to suggest that he could. I am talking about real-world economics and political good faith here.]



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Breaking News: Same as Headline Below

Still watching CNN. With 30% of precincts reporting, Kerry has a very impressive lead over Dean still. Kerry is getting in the high 30s, Dean only in the 20s. Blitzer began by saying CNN exit polls were showing a tight race, but unless it is the upper middle class precincts that haven't reported yet, I don't see how it can be that close. Maybe former Dean supporters who switched to Kerry at the last minute just couldn't bear to admit it to the reporters (maybe they were with their Dean-supporting friends at the time).

CNN hints around that New Hampshire has a strong class divide, with a lot of blue collar workers and a lot of upper middle class liberals. Then it reported that the "moderates" are favoring Kerry, the "liberals" Dean. I wonder if we can conclude that the working class is voting for Kerry and the upper middle class for Dean. American news reporting is so nervous about class. I wish they would just come out with it.

Edwards has opened up a small 1-point lead over Clark. It may not be statistically significant, but if it holds a third-place finish for Dean could mean a lot going into South Carolina next week. Clark's earlier high poll numbers in New Hampshire now look like a fluke.
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Breaking News: Kerry Leads, Dean close second, Edwards and Clark tied for Third

I'm watching CNN. With just 13% of precincts reporting, Kerry has the lead over Dean in New Hampshire. The exit polls seem to show that the race is much closer than Kerry supporters had hoped. Edwards and Clark both have 13% of the vote each.

If Kerry and Dean come in very close, it does look as though this is a 4-man race for the next month at least. Clark had earlier done much better in the polls, and one wonders if he can survive a fourth-place finish if Edwards overtakes him.

As Carville noted, this is fun. Maybe on May 31 Iraqis will be seeing whether the Dawa candidate or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is doing better in the voting for parliament . . . But at the moment something much more boring and less democratic is being planned for them in Washington.


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Bombs Rock Baghdad on Monday

Powerful explosions rocked downtown Baghdad at 10:35 pm local time on Monday, as a rocket also landed in a parking lot near the American headquarters. It is where Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer and his aides park, but no casualties were reported. Sirens went off and US officials at the Coalition compound were told to take cover.

A man getting off a bus in Baghdad stepped on and detonated a roadside bomb. He was killed, and three other passengers were wounded.

Later on Monday, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb in West Baghdad neighborhood, wounding a civilian and inflicting damage on three vehicles.

Guerrillas in the Sunni Arab areas west of Baghdad launched two attacks on Iraqi police, killing 7 of them.

Near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, guerrillas blew up bombs outside the Spanish garrison, but, again, no damage was reported.

In the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, two small rockets exploded at the US military base there, but no reports of damage.
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Kerry, Edwards surge in New Hampshire; Health Care beats Iraq as Concern

Only 10 percent of the voters in New Hampshire think Iraq is the most pressing issue in the campaign. I was surprised to find that 22 percent put health care as an issue first, as opposed to 16 percent who focused on the economy.

The Washington Post reports of the voters in the New Hampshire primary, "Health care (22 percent) topped the list of issues considered critical by voters in a recent University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll, ahead of both the economy (16 percent) and the war in Iraq (10 percent). "

It seems to me that what is really important in the recent poll figures on the New Hampshire primary is not the absolute numbers or the relative placing, but the graph of movement. I find the tracking numbers at zogby.com over the past week telling. Kerry went from 23% a week ago to 31% on Monday. That's an enormous surge, with him ending at 130 percent of where he began. Unsurprisingly, Kerry's Web Page has a section on health care entitled "Affordable Health Care for Every American." Health care is an area where the 'free market' is clearly not working, but is rather producing 22% inflation that is extremely worrisome to employers and employees. And, of course, the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance of any sort are second class citizens facing penury or death if anything goes wrong. The problem is not, as Bush implies, malpractice suits which account for about 2% of the cost of health care. And, maybe this is an area where the electorate wants something done, and where a Massachusetts liberal can be trusted to do it.

Dean went from 25 to 28 in the same period. Good, but the rate of surge is far less.

Clark actually fell from 16 percent to 13 percent over the week, a bad sign for him. Edwards nearly doubled his numbers from 7 percent to 12 percent. If the Edwards surge continues on Tuesday, and the Clark decline steepens, Edwards could actually tie or beat Clark, setting up a very interesting race among two Southerners for South Carolina.

I saw Jerry Brown, former California governor and current mayor of Oakland on O'Reilly* when I was channel surfing, saying that it could be a 4-way race for a while. Brown may well be right about that.
------------

*P.c. readers should please not send me emails complaining about my watching O'Reilly. Life is hard and I have to get my laughs somehow.

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Annan Will Send UN Election Team to Iraq

Kofi Annan will send an election commission to Iraq, the Washington Post reports. This United Nations commission was the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and initially the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by Paul Bremer was said to be "deeply offended" by the Iraqi attempt to involve the UN in the electoral process.

Annan has already said in the past that he thought holding open elections was impossible before July 1. But Sistani is convinced that an open-minded commission from the UN would discover on examining the situation on the ground in Iraq that popular elections are possible, after all.

As I mentioned last week, the British military authorities in Basra have come to the latter conclusion, as well, and have not been shy about saying so, even though this conclusion differs from the position of the civilian government of Tony Blair. (The British military felt badly used in Bosnia by the civilians, and many resent the lack of equipment they have to suffer with in Iraq, and they therefore tend to speak out with what seems to me striking candor.)

Sistani's success in involving the UN has guaranteed that, whatever the outcome, Iraqi elections will not be merely a US project, but will have substantial input from the world body. Since this input will help bolster their legitimacy in Iraq and the Arab world, I think it can only be a good thing.
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Iraqi Women's Rights Imperiled

Sarah el Deeb of the Associated Press explores the implications for Iraqi women of the US tendency to appoint men to high office, to exclude women, and to bow to vocal patriarchalists whenever challenged. Western commentators, including George W. Bush, who think women's rights have actually improved in Iraq since the war, have no idea what they are talking about. The attempt of some powerful male members of the Interim Governing Council to impose religious personal status law on Iraqi women still hangs in the balance.
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Controversy over 45 Minute Claim

Nick Theros is denying stories that appeared in Newsweek and theThe Guardian that claim to demonstrate how expatriate networks suckered the United States and Tony Blair into believing exaggerated claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction capacitities.

Here's the story: Patrick Theros (an Ann Arborite) is a former US ambassador to Qatar and had been a long-serving State Department diplomat. At one point he was over-all coordinator for anti-terrorism efforts in the US government. He more recently served as president and executive director of the US-Qatar Business Council. Note that the Qataris were most alarmed by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Qatari pilots flew missions against Saddam's forces in the Gulf War. Many in the Gulf sheikhdoms rightly despise Saddam and his regime and wanted it gone.

Newsweek and the Guardian maintain that Mr. Theros's son, Nick Theros, became a spokesman for Iyad Alawi and his Iraqi National Accord. Alawi himself was a civilian Baathist (a neurologist) who broke with the party and became a successful businessman. In 1990 he founded the Iraqi National Accord, which mainly grouped ex-Baathist officers, mostly Sunni Arabs. The INA attempted to provoke several coups in the 1990s, but failed. It was backed by the CIA when Ahmad Chalabi proved unreliable and unable to account for millions of the dollars given him by the US State Department and the CIA.

Nick Theros denied in a widely circulated email today that he was an INA spokesman. He said:

>First, I am not, as implied in this piece, a representative of the INA. I
>articulated this clearly to Hosenball and added that I and Theros & Theros
>represent Dr. Ayad Allawi's interests -- in his capacity as a member of the
>IGC -- in the United States. I told him I do not / could not speak for the
>INA. His claim that I "confirmed that the INA was the source of a purported
>secret document" is patently false. I merely mentioned that the press
>reports could be accurate because the INA has had a long relationship with
>MI6 and CIA and was active in gathering intelligence prior to the war.


Newsweek and the Guardian reported that Theros passed on to MI 6, British intelligence, the allegation by a former Iraqi air-defense officer named Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh, that Iraq could deploy chemical weapons in as little as 45 minutes. Whatever its source, it is clear that this uncorroborated anecdotal information from a single source was accepted as Gospel by Tony Blair's government, and the Prime Minister even famously quoted it in an over-heated speech and then included it in an influential 2002 government report. The Newsweek article alleged that Nick Theros admitted that it was "a crock of shit."

Theros replies:

"Last week a Newsweek reporter, Mark Hosenball, called me to follow up on
>several stories that appeared in the UK press alleging that Dr. Ayad Allawi
>and the INA were the source for several controversial intelligence claims
>-- namely, the claim that Saddam could have launched WMDs within 45
>minutes; the Niger Yellow Cake controversy; and the recent claim that 9-11
>hijacker Mohammad Atta had trained with Abu Nidal in Baghdad. Further,
>these are not "fresh leaks" as Hosenball states, but old stories. They are
>in fact not "leaks" at all. Both Dr. Allawi and Col. Al-Dabbagh merely
>acknowledged that they had passed on intelligence information to MI6 as
>received. They were not "hyping" or politicizing intelligence, but rather,
>passing raw intelligence reports for analysis by US and UK intelligence
>agencies. End of story -- which is why more responsible reporters haven't
>followed up."


Theros ends,

"Finally, Hosenball actually went ahead and quoted that I had said that the
>"claim now 'looks like it could have been a crock of s--t'" implying that
>Col. Al-Dabbagh'sinformation was dubious. NO. NO. NO. Commenting on
>Al-Dabbagh's statements to the Telegraph, I said that Saddam probably did
>tell / deliver "crates" to his troops claiming that they were "a secret
>weapon" to use against the invading American forces but since no one saw
>what was in the crates, it "could have been a crock of s--t" designed for
>moral purposes.
"

Informed Comment earlier remarked on the Newsweek and Guardian stories as they appeared, and accepted the allegation that Theros was a spokesman for the Iraqi National Accord. It is apparently more accurate to say that Theros is a publicist for Alawi himself, and I apologize for the inaccuracy.

That said, it seems to me that Theros doth protest too much. It is obvious to me that the Iraqi National Accord and Iyad Alawi passed to British intelligence and to Con Coughlin at the Telegraph a series of patently false reports that bolstered the case for war against Iraq but which were wholly unfounded. (Coughlin is either gullible or disingenuous.) For Alawi now to say that he was innocent because he was only providing "information" to be "evaluated" is an attempt to escape responsibility for his own actions.

All those naive conservatives over at the Weekly Standard and the National Review who practically had an orgasm when they saw the memo Doug Feith leaked full of cherry-picked 'intelligence' about Saddam links to al-Qaeda should go take a cold shower. Turns out that Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh was also a primary source of such allegations. Al-Dabbagh could have sold that crowd the 14th of July Bridge in Baghdad and they would have paid a premium for it. Want to bet that if we could see where Feith's 'information' came from, it would all be single-source unreliable defectors pimped by Alawi, Chalabi and the other fraudsters?



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Mahatma Sistani?

From a European peace worker in Iraq, a week or so ago:

"I have heard that Sistani has promoted among his followers the Gandhian method of disobedience against the occupation power, if the situation seems to go out of hand [i.e. if the US rejects direct elections]."

If this report is correct, it would make sense of Sistani's intransigence on the need for open elections, and his resort for the first time recently to calling mass urban demonstrations.

My wife, Shahin Cole, says that figures such as Sistani who decide to seek to influence society, are like stage magicians. They do not pull out all the stops and perform their most complex and dazzling trick first. They start small, showing only the tip of their wand. Then they wave around the whole wand. Then they reach deeper into their bag of tricks for ever bigger props and effects. Sistani's fatwa or ruling of June 28 on the need for delegates to a constitutional convention to be popularly elected was the first, small demonstration of his powers. The 100,000 in the streets of Baghdad on January 19 was a further such demonstration. But if he does mount a campaign of civil disobedience to force free and fair elections, that will be the time for him to make the elephant disappear.
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Monday, January 26, 2004

6 US Soldiers killed over Weekend, Over a Dozen Wounded; 2 Iraqi police dead, dozens wounded; Helicopter Crash

The low-grade guerrilla war against the US military continued at a heated pace over the weekend..

On Sunday, a soldier died of wounds inflicted by a rocket-propelled grenade attack near Beiji, north of Baghdad..

In a separate incident, according to the WP, a riverboat capsized while on patrol, and one out of the 4 US soldiers on board went missing, in the north near Mosul early on Sunday. The US military then sent a helicopter out to look for the lost soldier, and the helicopter went down with its two crewmen (the cause of the crash is unknown). Then an Iraqi police team secured the region for a search for the helicopter and one of them was killed at a makeshift checkpoint in a drive-by shooting. Arriving US troops met small arms fire. Two Iraqi police and a translator were killed in the same region, either, as the WP says, in the capsizing incident, or, as wire services suggested, in a separate one. This area seems to be like the Bermuda Triangle or something.

On Saturday, guerrillas near Khaldiyah in the west detonated a car bomb, killing 3 US troops and wounding 6; they wounded 8 Iraqis, as well. On the same day, guerrillas drove a car bomb into a military checkpoint, near Fallujah, killing another 3 US soldiers and wounding six. A third attack, at Samarra north of Baghdad, narrowly missed a US convoy but killed 4 Iraqis and wounded 40.
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Sunday Times Alleges Torture, Kidnapping in Basra

The Sunday Times carried a story that members of the Badr Brigade of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq are being used as a sort of secret police in Basra with the permission and even oversight of the British authorities there. The article says that the militiamen (who had been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) have formed death squads that have engaged in kidnapping and torture, and that the whereabouts and condition of many of the suspects arrested remains unknown even to their close kin. Some eyewitnesses are quoted as saying that the headquarters of this secret police is festooned with posters of Ayatollah Khomeini. The story attempts to implicate in the leadership of this secret unit the British-appointed governor of Basra, Wa'il Abdul Latif.

The report seems to me likely sensationalized, but it is certainly the case that the Shiite militias have a great deal of power in Basra. Whether some of them have been recruited into a formal unit of the Basra police needs more investigation.
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The Question of Elections in Iraq

In the past week, two significant demonstrations were launched by Iraq's Shiites, including one on Monday 1/19 that involved an estimated 100,000 in the streets of Baghdad (including, from all accounts, some Sunnis who support open elections). The other, on Tuesday, was smaller and drawn from the poorer, more radical elements of the community who incline toward Muqtada al-Sadr. I cannot underline strongly enough how significant it is that Sistani was willing to go to the street in this way, and that so many tens of thousands responded.

This move seems to me to signal severe trouble ahead. The US is making intransigent noises, despite a Guardian report last Thursday that Mr. Bremer might give in and hold open elections. Were the US really to insist on sticking to its guns, the Bush administration might well face the prospect of hundreds of thousands of angry Iraqis demonstrating all this summer and into the fall, with the attendant danger of violence breaking out between them and US troops. The US public may not care very much about Iraq, but they certainly won't want to see US troops shoot down innocent civilian protesters because the Bush administration would not allow free and fair elections.

On Friday, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani asked Shiites not to demonstrate. He felt the point had already been made, and that it was time to let Kofi Annan and the United Nations deliberate. (This according to Edward Wong of the NYT.) Again, it is highly significant that, at this stage of the game, at least, he was able to turn off the spigot. But there is a danger that if he accustoms Iraqis to demonstrating in the tens of thousands, he will lose control of them if the US disappoints them.

Meanwhile, members of the Interim Governing Council who earlier had favored the US approach to carefully controlled elections, based on the Coalition-appointed provincial councils, defected to Sistani. Over the weekend Ahmad Chalabi told a skeptical audience at the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, that he now favored open elections and believed they could be held. And Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq with its 15,000-strong Badr Corps paramilitary, told Reuters the same thing this weekend: "It can be done, if we want it and make the effort. I believe they can be run."

Az-Zaman reported that al-Hakim admitted, "Ideally elections would depend on the existence of a census, an electoral law, and a law governing parties . . . There are problems . . . But I believe that [elections] will express the opinion and the will of the people . . . will give a voice to all, and holding them is feasible."

Sistani initially portrayed his initiative to press for open elections as a blow struck for indigenous Iraqi political figures against expatriate carpetbaggers, but now even the carpetbaggers are saying they think it is a good idea. Chalabi, Alawi and the others must have thought at first that it would be easier for them to ensure their election and power with the stage-managed American plan (under which the expatriate-dominated Interim Governing Council would choose a third of the electoral college in each province).

In the above-cited article, Wong maintains that Sistani only pressed for the open elections after being privately assured that they were feasible by UN figures behind the scenes. This tidbit of information accords with my own view, that Sistani's appeal to the UN is not so much a request for help as a demand that it do the right thing. Kofi Annan will decide in the next couple of days whether and when to send an election feasibility commission to Iraq. He has a two-man team on the ground now.

Meanwhile, Rory McCarthy reports from Baghdad for the Guardian that a council of (fundamentalist) Sunni clerics has denounced the plan to hold elections, saying that Sunnis would boycott them if held under Coalition auspices. This rejectionist stance seems unlikely to be widely shared among Iraqi Sunnis, most of whom are nationalists rather than religious fundamentalists. If they did boycott the elections, they would just increase Shiite dominance. (It would be a mirror image of what happened in the recent elections in Bahrain, a Shiite-majority country where the Shiites boycotted the elections and allowed Sunni fundamentalists to dominate parliament.)

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Kay, Powell, Backtrack on WMD

It seems to me that David Kay's resignation as weapons inspector in Iraq and his open admission that there simply are no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq of any significance, has settled the issue. Kay snarkily went out suggesting that there may have been "programs" (read: vague plans and worthless offices).

He also hinted around that a lot of goods had been transfered to Syria last winter before the war, implying that these may have included chemical stockpiles. Kay offered no proof for this speculation, which comes out of the same Western and Israeli intelligence sources that said Saddam was 3-5 years from having a nuclear bomb. The Syrians have denied it. (Bashar al-Asad would have had to be brain dead to take delivery of Iraqi WMD on the eve of a US invasion of Iraq that had been hyped as grounded in Iraq's possession of WMD!) [I now hear that Kay has retracted even this insinuation, saying he was misunderstood.]

So, the case has completely collapsed, and Kay is left with nothing but vague and unproved insinuations even in the small matters to which he continues to cling for whatever odd reason. Even Colin Powell is backtracking. Only Tony Blair seems so unwise as to try to maintain the case, and it is the sort of intransigence that may get him dumped by the Labor Party as an increasing liability.

Kay is trying to blame the US intelligence services and to protect the Bush administration. This, like much of Kay's past work, is disingenuous.

It is true that the US had no human intelligence assets of any significance in Iraq, who could have done a simple site check of things that had looked suspicious in the satellite photos. Since the US spread around millions to Iraqi tribal sheikhs and others, the problem was not money. There is no good reason for the failure to develop such intelligence, except that it would have required that somebody go out and do recruiting in dangerous conditions and be able to speak Arabic, etc.

But Bush and his officials were the real problem. They were determined to go to war regardless of the intelligence. Neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the Rockingham Group in the British military cherry-picked and politicized vague "intelligence" (i.e. unsupported anecdotes) fed to them by figures like corrupt expatriate Iraqi businessman Ahmad Chalabi and very likely Israeli intelligence. The groups that wanted the war, wanted it so badly that the shakiness of the "intelligence" did not matter. The intelligence was just spun.

For a good account of how US intelligence got into this mess, seeRobert Parry's "Why US Intelligence Failed".



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Wednesday, January 21, 2004

3 US soldiers Wounded in Mosul Blast

AP is reporting that "A roadside bomb exploded Wednesday near the northern city of Mosul, wounding three U.S. soldiers and seven other people, the military and local police said. The explosion occurred as three American vehicles were passing, but the force of the blast hit two civilian cars behind, said a witness, Alaa Mohammed Hanash."

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5000 Sadrists March in Baghdad

The Financial Times reported that the demonstrations in Baghdad on Tuesday were smaller than the approximately 100,000 who came out on Monday, and that they were also poorer. That is; they seem to have been mainly followers of Muqtada al Sadr. They not only marched in favor of free and open elections, but also against plans put forward by the Kurds for a very loose federalism and a consolidated Kurdish ethnic province. Crowds also came out in Karbala; Najaf, qnd Basra. The Australian press is reporting that the British have been convinced of the case for open elections, and that the United States is close to accepting it, as well.

The Sadrists also called for the execution of Saddam Hussein and complained about the Pentagon classifying him as a prisoner of war, according to Anthony Shadid of the Washinton Post.

I have long argued that were the Iraqis to mount really large urban demonstrations, it would be trump card for the occupying authorities. Either you let them alone, in which case they occupy that political space; or you shoot unarmed demonstrators, which would just cause more trouble.

It is alarming that Muqtada is using the demonstrations to confront the Kurds. Once crowd mobilization gets going, it can be put to lots of purposes. Can Sistani remain in control of the phenomenon he has unleashed?

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Monday, January 19, 2004

The Independent reports that 100,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad on Monday, as part of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani s bid to put pressure on Kofi Annan and the United Nations to certify that free and fair elections can be held: This situation reminds me more and more of Algeria; where mass protests played a similar role in involving the UN.
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British Say Open Elections Feasible

The Financial Times is reporting that British authorities in Basra now believe that there are no procedural obstacles to holding open elections in Basra of the sort that Grand Ayatollah Sistani has called for: Whether this is true or not, it is hard to see the British announcement as anything but payback for the way the CPA has ordered them about like lackeys since the fall of Saddam. The statement puts Mr. Bremer in a very difficult situation.

The British may in part been driven to this announcement by pure fear. The demonstrations in Basra last Thursday were huge.
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Sunday, January 18, 2004

Gone Fishin'

Just a warning to regular readers that for personal reasons I may find it difficult to post regularly the week of Jan. 19-25. It is possible I am exaggerating the difficulties, so do check in. But it is also possible the site will be less active this week. It will certainly be back to normal the following week.
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US and UN: Caught between Shiites and Sunnis

Two parallel reports from Baghdad, one from Alissa Rubin of the LA Times and one from Hamza Hendawi of AP, point to the increasing difficulties the US is having in satisfying the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites in Iraq.

Rubin [reg. req.] emphasizes the dissatisfaction of the Sunni Arabs, and the ways in which the UN might step in to mollify the Shiites. I am quoted expressing pessimism about Sistani's flexibility.

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports from Najaf that an anonymous administration official told him that "there will be no new plan" on Iraqi elections. He says, however, that the present plan will be tinkered with in hopes that will make it acceptable to Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

Hendawi, who quotes me on Sistani, reports enormous anger among Sunni Arabs about the prospect of Shiite rule. But that is what any sort of democracy would produce.

What I don't understand is why they don't just have elections for two houses of parliament. Go back to the old Saddam scheme of 19 provinces (he had created an extra one for Sunnis) and give each province 2 senators. Such a senate would slightly over-represent Sunnis and might help mollify them and convince them that the Shiite-dominated lower house would not be able to excercise a tyranny of the majority. Another benefit of such a province-based senate is that it would give Kurds an incentive to want several provinces instead of just one.

I am hearing rumors, purportedly coming out of Najaf, that there will be big Shiite demonstrations throughout Iraq this coming Friday. One reason I am pessimistic that Sistani will back down is precisely that he has gone to the streets. He must have known that crowds will be hard to rein in if some basic modicum of his demands are not met, even if he himself is willing to compromise.


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Bomb Blast Rocks Shrine City of Karbala; 13 Injured

AFP is reporting that guerrillas left a bomb in a package in the center of the Shiite holy city of Karbala, near the shrine of Abbas, the brother of Imam Husayn. They detonated it around 10 pm Sunday night, injuring 13.

The largely Sunni Baath remnants have been extremely frustrated at the rise of Shiite power and have often targeted Shiite leaders and shrines. In addition to attempting to demoralize the Shiites, they may also hope to turn Shiite anger about such incidents toward the Coalition.

Karbala is under Polish command, and local troops are Bulgarians. The city was the site of a wave of mortar attacks Dec. 27 that killed 19 persons.

Given the political mobilization of Shiites by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, demanding free and fair elections, this sort of incident weakens the US hand. The Shiite leaders can say that present US arrangements do not even protect the holy shrines.
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23 Killed (2 Americans), 130 Injured (including 6 Americans) in Baghdad Car Bombing

AFP has raised the casualty count to as many as 23-25 killed and 130 wounded in the Baghdad car bombing of the US headquarters there.

"The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into a battlefield inferno but the headquarters buildings inside the heavily-fortified area known as the Green Zone were unaffected. The blast came the day before Iraqi and US officials, including US civilian administrator Paul Bremer, are to meet with a wary UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a future UN role in Iraq. "At least 20 people have lost their lives and almost 60 were injured," US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told reporters. "It would appear from all the indicators this was a suicide bomb. We have confirmation some of those killed were US citizens, US contractors. We believe the current number is two. We are waiting for final confirmation," Kimmitt said. Another five people were reported dead and 71 wounded at Baghdad hospitals. Witnesses claimed US soldiers opened fire in panic on Iraqis moments after the blast, but a military spokesman denied this."

Earlier AP had reported,

Officials said more than 60 people, including six Americans, were injured in the blast on a mist-shrouded morning near the north entrance -- known as the "Assassin's Gate'' -- to Saddam's former Republican Palace complex, now used by the U.S.-led occupation authority for headquarters.

I'd say there is increasing evidence that the US is not in control in Iraq, and that the place may well be headed toward being a failed state for the near term. When, 9 or 10 months after an army conquers a place, its HQ is not safe from attack, this is always a bad sign. For those who keep making Germany and Japan analogies, I ask you if MacArthur's HQ was getting blown up in Tokyo in April of 1946.
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Whistle-Blower on US Dirty Tricks at UN to be Tried in UK

The Guardian reports that Britain's Katherine Gunn may face two years in prison for whistleblowing on American dirty tricks at the United Nations. She made public a memo that reveals US intentions to spy on the UN delegations of the six "swing vote" nations in the run-up to a vote on the Iraq war.

Apparently her disclosure itself, which apears to have come last spring, may have dissuaded some of the swing vote nations from further considering an Iraq war resolution.

"The leaked memorandum - dated 31 January 2003 - from Frank Koza, chief of staff of the NSA's Regional Targets section, requested British intelligence help to discover the voting intentions of the key 'swing six' nations at the UN. Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Chile, Mexico and Pakistan were under intense pressure to vote for a second resolution authorising war in Iraq. The disclosure of the 'dirty tricks' memo caused serious diplomatic difficulties for the countries involved and in particular the socialist government in Chile, which demanded an immediate explanation from Britain and America. The Chilean public is deeply sensitive to dirty tricks by the American intelligence services, which are still held responsible for the 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the days that followed the disclosure, the Chilean delegation in New York distanced itself from the draft second resolution, scuppering plans to go down the UN route."

Chile can't catch a break from Republican administrations, can it? First Nixon and Kissinger overthrew an elected president and instituted a reign of terror that involved the disappearance, killing and torture of thousands. And then W. was having someone spy on their ambassador to the UN in hopes of finding ways to influence his vote at the Security Council.

(Kissinger used to protest the inexplicable bad press military dictator and mass murderer Gen. Augusto Pinochet got, attributing it to mere anti-Americanism. Is he really so much worse than other Latin American rulers? he kept demanding of his staff at State. Their answer: Yes).

As for the UK, I love you guys, but it really is time to get yourselves a First Amendment. This Official Secrets Act business is very ancien regime.

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Benny Morris on the Arabs

There is an interesting discussion going on over at H-Mideast-Politics about a recent interview given by Israeli "New Historian" Benny Morris, who is increasingly a neoconservative.

See especially the comment of Alan Fisher, professor of Middle East History at Michigan State University.
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3 US Soldiers Killed North of Baghdad

Guerillas in the cane fields north of Baghdad detonated an enormous bomb on Saturday as a US military convoy went by, turning a 30 ton vehicle upside down and killing 3 US soldiers. Their deaths took the death total to over 500.

The press has concentrated on the significance passing the 500 mark (346 from hostile fire) with regard to deaths. But in this war, the injuries that have been survived have been horrific. Thousands of US soldiers are coming home with their faces blown off, or missing limbs, facing a lifetime in a wheel chair. The military medicine is good, and swift, and saves more lives. But the result is large numbers of permanently maimed vets. These have largely been hidden away from public view, and they haven't even always been treated very well on their return by the military.

The other complaint I have is the fetish about daily number of attacks (down to 18, the military says, from a high of 50 a few months ago). But the rise to 15 attacks a day had once seemed intolerable, in the aftermath of the military victory. And the "reduction" to 18 a day appears to have been achieved over and over again. The important statistic is the number of our guys getting killed or wounded. That isn't down appreciably in the past month, so fewer attacks that are more deadly seem to me to be just as bad as more attacks that are less efective.

[Several readers wrote in to point out that Newsweek says the number of US military sorties was cut to 500 in December from 1500 in November, and that the reduction in numbers of daily attacks may just mean the US soldiers are in their barracks and not so exposed to attack. Given the instability in the country, however, such a hunkered down posture may not be sustainable. If sorties were so drastically cut, this is surely for US domestic political purposes, since the casualties are unpopular and that means something in an election year.]

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Latest Tomgram on Chalmers and the US Military

Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch.com at the Nation Institute is always entertaining and insightful. For anyone interested in the debate on the new American empire (which actually doesn't seem to be going very well, since it is being overruled by Kurdish militiamen and grand ayatollahs), his comments and quotation of Chalmers Johnson are key reading.
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Cobban on CPA Laws and Transition to new Iraqi Government

Veteran journalist and blogger Helena Cobban wrote in with further remarks on the issue of whether Coalition Provisional Authority regulations in Iraq are likely to survive the transition to an Iraqi government. I quote her below with kind permission.

"Nathan Brown says this:

"My impression is that such regulations [as those already enacted by the CPA] are likely to survive the CPA. In the closest local precedents we have, the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] actually retained almost all legal enactments issued by the Israeli militarygovernment and civil administration (though it was loathe to admit that it had done so)."

I would suggest that actually this is not at all a "close precedent", since the PA was only ever regarded by the Israelis as a transitional body, and never as the sovereign government of an independent state. Israeli government lawyers argued at the time--with complete justification under international law-- that despite the creation of the PA, Israel still exercized broader authority over ALL of the areas of the West Bank and Gaza by virtue of their position as occupying power. Hence, for example, when they went back into the areas of "Area A", that was NOT under international law an aggression against Palestinian sovereign territory; and their relentless recent campaign against Arafat's regime and the organs of PA power like police, security forces, etc., have NOT constituted aggression against a sovereign power.

Obviously, what we all want to see in Iraq in the long term (and preferably as soon as possible) is not a feeble "transitional" body like the PA (or indeed, the IGC) but rather an independent government exercizing real national sovereignty. Such a government should, ideally, follow its people's wishes in all acts of choice regarding what constitutional basis it adopts and which precedents from past administrations of the country it chooses to keep, and which to reject. The problem, right now, bviously is how such a truly self-governing leadership is to be formed. CoDeSa in S. Africa provides one model (took two years or more). The UN transitional arrangements in East Timor and Namibia provide much more closely analogous precedents--transitions from rule by foreign occupying forces to rule by a democratically constituted independent national government... But Israel's very partial and in practice aborted quasi-'transition' to the PNA doesn't provide a precedent at all.

(I'm just writing about Namibia and East Timor for Hayat-- I may put something up on the blog, too.)"


-----------

Chris S. kindly recommended this link for informed legal/military commentary on the trial of Saddam and the implications of his POW status.




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Saturday, January 17, 2004

Bomb in Baghdad Kills 1, Wounds 3

AP reports, "The bloodshed persisted in Baghdad Friday, as a roadside bomb missed American troops but killed one Iraqi boy and wounded three others as they played soccer along a busy street. The U.S. command also announced an investigation into alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners."
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Shiite Preachers throughout Iraq support Sistani, Slam US Plans as "Colonialism."

al-Hayat reported that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's representative in Karbala, Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, warned that the coming days will witness demonstrations and strikes, and possibly confrontations with the occupation [Coalition] forces if they insist on "their colonialist plot and in designing the politics of this country in ways that serve their interests." Al-Karbala'i called everyone in his Friday sermon before hundreds of worshippers "to support the religious leadership," affirming that "the Shiite leadership in Najaf takes a great interest in the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people through general elections."

He added that it would "never henceforth allow the rights of the Iraqi people and the oppressed religious community [the Shiites] to be stolen from them, and would never compromise on their rights." He said that "The religious leadership is intent proceeding with this battle until the end. What is asked of you now is not to abandon [Grand Ayatollah Sistani] to himself, since leaving him in the lurch would expose us to the wrath of God and the curses of history." He asked the worshippers to "forget your disputes and to unite for the sake of the greater cause," pointing out that "apathy and negligence will lead to more long years of repression." He warned of enemies of the Shiites who were meeting behind closed doors to plot the political future of the Iraqi people.

In Basra, Hujjat al-Islam Ali Abd al-Hakim al-Safi [al-Musawi], the representative of Sistani in that city, called for the holding of general elections in Iraq on the basis of ration card rolls drawn up by the former regime. Support for the idea of free and open elections also came from Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah of Lebanon.

Charles Clover in Najaf for the Financial Times reports that Shiite clergymen throughout Iraq, including the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala and the slums of East Baghdad (Sadr City) mounted their pulpits on Friday and asked their congregants to support Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's call for general elections in May. It is interesting that many of these clergymen in East Baghdad are probably followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, and are supporting Sistani's position. The issue of open, one person one vote elections, serves to unite Shiites across the board, even bitter rivals like the Sadrists and the mainstream followers of Sistani. That seems to me bad news for the Coalition Provisional Authority and its plans to have the new government elected by hand-picked provincial councils.
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Democratic Candidates in Iowa Differ on Iraq, and it Probably Doesn't Matter

I think the Iraq War as an issue has probably been overblown as a factor in the US elections, and don't personally think much will turn on it barring a major social revolution or major hostage-taking or something dramatic in fall of 2004.

Journalist John Wagner gives a good thumbnail sketch of the basic positions of the leading Democratic candidates on the Iraq war. They play this way:

Hawk: Dick Gephardt - wholeheartedly supported war and $87 bn. appropriation.

Dismayed Hawks: John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the war, but don't like how Bush went in unilaterally and don't like the mishandling of the aftermath. Voted against the $87 bn. Want to get UN involved.

Dovish Hawk: Wesley Clark admitted that Saddam was a problem; but felt the US had some time before Iraq became a front-burner issue; he celebrated the US victory in Iraq but says that the war was a detour from the effort against terrorism. Rather than focusing on the UN, Clark wants to involve NATO so as to bring some US troops home. (Controversies have swirled around Clark's positions on Iraq since Matt Drudge manipulated texts to manufacture false impressions of Clark's statements; the best place to find them unravelled is Josh Marshall's superb Talking Points Memo.

Dove: Howard Dean opposed the Iraq War altogether; says Saddam's capture has made the US no safer, and wants to internationalize the rebuilding effort so as to bring half of the 130,000 US troops in Iraq home on a short timetable.

Super-Dove: Dennis Kucinich holds that the war was wrong and US troops should be withdrawn in 90 days, and replaced with 130,000 UN peace keepers. (This position seems to me wildly unrealistic; if the UN member nations don't come forward, would he still just bring the troops home? Wouldn't that risk chaos in Iraq?)

The polling I've seen suggests that right now Iraq is not a burning issue for Iowans or most Americans who do not have direct family serving over there. Pro-Administration US television reporting has often obscured the difficulties in the post-war aftermath. So most US voters think things are going really well, when in fact the CPA is piloting between Scylla and Charybdis. So I very much doubt that much hangs on the stance toward Iraq of the candidates, though it could become an issue in the general campaign.

The central issues are domestic politics--jobs, health insurance, etc., where classic Democratic liberals like Kerry and Gephardt (both, ironically, probably to the left of Dean with regard to their actual domestic records) have an advantage, which is showing up in the 4-way split in Iowa. That is, despite being the most hawkish on the war, Kerry and Gephardt are doing very well in the Iowa polls, so that issue isn't driving that primary.

What must be worrisome for Dean is that he hasn't been able decisively to break out of the pack according to the polls, so that Kerry and Gephardt, and maybe even Edwards remain in play (indeed, Kerry is surging according to Zogby). If Dean can't establish himself as the frontrunner in Iowa and New Hampshire, he will face difficulties when the race turns to the south, where Clark and Edwards will run well.

Being from Virginia originally, I can't imagine Dean carrying any Southern states, and a Democratic candidate typically needs 5 of them to win in national elections. Kerry is handicapped in this regard, as well, though his being a Vet might help him there a little bit. This is the February schedule after New Hampshire:

February 3
Arizona
Delaware
Missouri
New Mexico
North Dakota
Oklahoma
South Carolina

February 7
Michigan
Washington
February 8
Maine
February 10
Tennessee
Virginia
February 14
District of Columbia
Nevada
February 17
Wisconsin
February 24
Hawaii
Idaho
Utah

As I think about it, I surprise myself by concluding that if Kerry can win Iowa and get momentum into a first or second place in New Hampshire, and can come in second behind Clark or Edwards in the South and the West, he could survive Feb. 3 to go on to do well in Michigan, Washington and Maine. It will quickly become apparent whether Clark or Edwards is going to get most of the southern and western votes, and my suspicion is that through February there will really be two Democratic primaries running concurrently, an urban one and a rural one. (I am not counting out Dean, at all, simply speculating about the viability of a Kerry run).

A Kerry/Clark or Clark/Kerry ticket could be pretty powerful. You'd have two military men who could call Bush on his politicization of intelligence and the military, and on the way the administration has fallen down in the struggle against al-Qaeda because of the Iraq imbroglio. But more important, they might by virtue of their social policies be able to hold on to the progressives mobilized, ironically enough, by Dean, and nevertheless pull from undecided centrists (which is where the election will be decided).

It's just speculation, and may be outmoded by Monday.

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The Paul O'Neill Controversy: Smith on the Iraq War Planning and the PNAC

The allegation by Paul O'Neill that Bush wanted people to get him a
justification for an Iraq war already in January of 2001 has provoked a
lot of controversy about the origins of the war. ("?It was all about
finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it . . . The President saying, ?
Go find me a way to do this.?
) Bush denies he determined
to go to war so early, though note that as late as November of 2002 he was
saying he had not made up his mind on whether to go to war, which was
an out-and-out lie. So if he was lying then, we can't be sure he isn't lying
now.

My friend and colleague Charles Smith, a Mideast expert and historian at
the University of Arizona, recently sent out what I think is a remarkably clear
account of the main figures involved in getting up the Iraq war, and he
graciously allowed me to share it, below.

Smith:
"It is not clear just what the Clinton administration actually intended for
Iraq beyond the intensified air strikes from late 1998, but I can
contribute to the record for what subsequent administration appointees
intended from the same period.

First we can recall
"Clean Break" and its vision of Saddam's overthrow
as
the precursor to ensuring Israel's strategic dominance in the region,
coupled with the undermining of the Oslo process - all discussed here
previously. Then there were two letters sent to Clinton, in February and
May 1998 (in advance of his stepped-up military approach to Saddam). Both
called for an attack on Iraq and Saddam's overthrow. Both referred to the
dangers of Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I want to mention each letter and list the signatories in order to suggest
that Paul O'Neill may be right about plans being underway to go after
Saddam very soon after Bush took office. To put it another way, if such
plans didn't really start until after 9/11, what were some of these people
doing for nine months after Bush took office?

1. The first letter, 2/19/98, was an "Open Letter to the President." It
mentions the Iraq National Congress and calls for a "comprehensive
political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime"
as in "the vital national interests of our country."

Richard Perle, author of "Clean Break," co-authored the first letter
with former congresman Stephen Solarz.. Signatories were, as listed,
Elliott Abrams, Richard V. Allen, Richard Armitage, Jeffrey Bergner, John
Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Richard Burt, Frank Carlucci, William Clark, Paula
Dobriansky, Douglas Feith (Clean Break signer), Frank Gaffney, Jeffrey
Gedmin, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan (Project for New American Century), Zalmay
Khalilzad, Sven Kramer, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis
(more on him later), Rear Admiral retired Frederick Lewis, Maj General
Jarvis Lynch, retired, Robert McFarlane, Joshua Muravchik, Robert Pastor,
Martin Peretz, Roger Robinson, Peter Rodman, Peter Rosenblatt, Donald
Rumsfeld (**), Gary Schmitt (Project for New American Century), Max
Singer, Helmut Sonnenfeldt (ID'd as tied to Perle on suspicion of spying
in 1970s by Seymour Hersh), Casper Weinberger, Leon Wienseltier, Paul
Wolfowitz(**), David Wurmser (Clean Break signer and author of second memo
to Netanyahu in 1996), and Dov Zakheim.

Bernard Lewis's presence here causes me to wonder if his book "What Went
Wrong" which has gained so much attention might have been written with
some eye to the view of many of his co-signers on this list to be the ones
to make things right in the Middle East.

2. The second letter, 5/29/98, was addressed to Newt Gingrich and Trent
Lott as Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader respectively. It
repeated the arguments of the first letter but stressed that failure to
overthrow Saddam would greatly harm U.S. leadership and credibility
because we would have failed to limit the spread of weapons of mass
destruction. This in turn could "make Saddam the driving force of Middle
East politics, including on such important matters as the Middle East
peace process." (This statement is very interesting in light of the goals
of "Clean Break"). The signers called on Gingrich and Lott to insist that
the U.S. make the removal of Saddam's regime and its replacement by a
"peaceful and democratic Iraq" an "explicit goal." There is no indication
of authorship as in the February letter but the signers as listed are:
Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula
Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama (I thought the "end of history" had already
happened!), Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Peter Rodman,
Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R.
James Woolsey, Robert Zoellick.

There are many notable repeats here from the first letter, Abrams,
Bolton, Perle, Dobransky, Kagan, Khalilzad, Kristol, Rodman, Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz. Quite a lineup of those high up in DoD (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
and Feith from first letter make up the top three posts), State Dept
(Bolton, and Armitage from first letter), NSC Middle East head (Abrams),
Defense Policy Board (Perle and Woolsey), plus the pundits such as
Kristol.

So do we think these people twiddled their thumbs about Iraq until 9/11
woke them up? Or does O'Neill's statement seem more plausible?"

Charles Smith
University of Arizona

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