Miller as Chalabi Stenographer

Franklin Foer's profile of Judith Miller of the NYT and the way in which her over-dependence on the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmad Chalabi besmirched her journalistic career asks an implicit question. It is, "How could she have avoided this disaster?"

I think the problem came about because she started doing a different type of reporting. There is a difference between getting a story about bureaucratic infighting in Washington and getting a story about Iraq's weapons programs. In the first sort of story, you can rely on principals to some extent, who are actually doing the fighting. You have to take into account that they are principals, of course, and seek some balance by talking to people on the other side. But the principals do have a fight going on, and are eager to put a good light on their role in it, to get out their side of the story. And if the story is their side of the story, then you've got it if you have the right people in the rollodex.

But Iraqi weapons programs or internal politics were a different type of story altogether. Miller had no access to the Iraqi principals. And the INC and the US Department of Defense were interested parties and outsiders, who were alleging things not in evidence. It wasn't like Washington infighting.

Miller's mistake could have been avoided by going outside the INC circle to other Iraqi experts. For instance, there were Iraqi nuclear scientists in the West unconnected to INC and Chalabi who were disgusted at the propaganda and said openly that the nuclear program was dismantled after the Gulf War. These were insiders of a sort. Miller did not seek them out or listen to them. Imad Khadduri [scroll down after clicking] was such a source, and I wrote about his account at length in February of 2003 before the war. (I.e. I was right and Miller was wrong).

Miller could also have asked around in the Iraq Middle East Studies establishment for academic views outside the beltway. Although some academics are themselves policy advocates, very large numbers are actually trying to see the world as it is, and often offer a good corrective to more self-interested accounts.

Foer does not make much of the fact that Miller co-authored her book about Saddam with Laurie Mylroie, a major purveyor of disinformation to the Washington power elite. Mylroie's assertions are so bizarre that they in my view raise the question of whether someone somewhere is actually paying her to say these weird things. That Miller has some kind of close association with her raises other questions. The book that Miller and Mylroie co-authored, by the way, at one point professes puzzlement as to why in the world Eisenhower grew angry and made Israel give back the Sinai after the 1956 war. Inability to understand that an American president would be unhappy about a secret neocolonial plot against Egypt sprung suddenly in late October just before an American election points to an ideological hard edge that may explain why Miller got so many things so wrong.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kufa Fighting Flares; Bombs in Baghdad

Fighting flared again Sunday and Monday between Mahdi Army militiamen and US troops, who are apparently trying to reconquer the police stations in the city. Fierce fighting continued late Monday. 2 US troops and dozens of Mahdi Army fighters are dead. CNN reports that local US military commanders insist that Muqtada either disavow the Kufa fighters for breaking the ceasefire, or he will be held accountable for the attacks on US troops (no mention of gradual US military encroachment on key points in the city).

Taking the police stations as "anchors" of the Shiite urban communities was a widespread tactic of the Mahdi Army when the insurgency broke out in early April. One US counter-strategy, little reported on in a systematic way, has been gradually to take back these anchor points. The problem for the US is that the real power centers of the Mahdi Army are the slum tenements where the armed youth live and organize, and which are impenetrable to the US military (and they were relatively impenetrable to Saddam's secret police, too.)

The drum of violence beat on: a big bomb also went off near the Green Zone; two US troops were killed in separate incidents; British civilian contractors were ambushed Sunday; and a woman and her child were killed by a mortar round on Sunday in Mosul.

Bill Safire in his New York Times column today begins with a litany of unreported good news. One item is that attacks on US troops were half in May what they had been in April. This sort of statistic is profoundly dishonest. In April, the US launched assualts on both Fallujah and the Shiite south with specific goals in mind. In both cases, the US military failed for political reasons and had to back off. May saw instead negotiation and background military maneuver, including increased dependence on local proxy fighters. Of course the attacks on US troops were many fewer in May. But that datum is useless in a vacuum. April had seen the greatest violence since the end of the war in April of 2003. Safire's way of putting makes it seem as though there were a linear, secular improvement of the security situation. There is no such thing (see above), and it is a form of lying to imply that there is.

The Financial Times reported last week that Iraqi petroleum exports were down by 1 million barrels a day in May, much more than initially estimated. Bombings at a facility in the south and of the Kirkuk line in the north have been devastating. The bombings wiped out the entire OPEC increase in production quotas and are part of a new phenomenon in which insecurity is driving prices higher through speculation. (About $10 a barrel of the current $40 a barrel price is estimated to be owing to speculation). The Khobar terrorist incident in Saudi Arabia on Sunday will likewise probably drive prices higher.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Portrait of a Rebellion

In These Times has made my analysis of the Shiite rebellion of the past two months available online. It came out about a week ago and so before the recent "truce," but is still valuable for a narrative of the background.

In these Times
May 24, 2004
"Portrait of a Rebellion
Shiite insurgency in Iraq bedevils U.S."

By Juan Cole


The Great Uprising of early April 2004 boiled along into May, leaving Iraq in continued turmoil. The Bush administration unwisely provoked rebellions in both Fallujah and Najaf (and other southern Shiite towns) by deciding to put down small symbolic acts of defiance with massive force. In Fallujah, Geroge W. Bush ordered the American military to retreat from that Sunni Arab city and to rehabilitate the Baathist forces once associated with Saddam Hussein to help restore order. Yet in Najaf, Bush has been unyielding in his determination to arrest or kill the young radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and destroy his militia. That determination could tip the Shiite south into long-term instability.

Given the drumbeat of bombings and assassinations, most recently of Izzedine Salim, president of the interim government of Iraq, the country cannot take much more instability. The transfer of sovereignty scheduled for June 30 is not in doubt, since it simply requires some appointments and paperwork. But endowing the new government with any popular support and political reality will be difficult if the country is in flames. By mid-May, the Najaf home of the preeminent mainstream Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was being sprayed by machine gun fire from unknown assailants. This raises the specter of his loss to assassination, as well, which could further radicalize the Shiites.

Al-Sadr, 30, inherited a large and active Shiite dissident movement from his father, who, under the nose of Saddam Hussein, had established it in the Shiite slums of the southern cities. The Baath Party found it difficult to penetrate and control the teeming ghetto of East Baghdad, allowing the Sadrist organization to flourish there. In 1999, Saddam had Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada’s father, killed along with Muqtada’s two older brothers. Muqtada Al-Sadr went underground and emerged over the next four years as a new, sectarian leader of Iraq’s dispossessed, guided by an ideology that differed little from that of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, his father’s teacher.

Read the rest here.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wrangling over President delays Announcement

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the WP summarizes the deadlock on the new prime minister among the Iraqi Governing Council, Paul Bremer, and special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. The Council opposes the naming of Adnan Pachachi as transitional president, because he is perceived as too complaisant toward the US. It wants Shaikh Ghazi al-Yawer of the Sunni Shammar tribe. Al-Hayat said that Bremer had compromised by giving the Council a choice of 4 outsiders.

The US is clearly maneuvering here, to have the Iraqi government that it can deal with after the June 30 transition. Al-Yawer is known to be nationalistic, and was especially vocal about the siege of Fallujah.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sites of the Day

Veteran journalist Helena Cobban's Just World News site is worth checking out. She writes frequently on the Middle East and knows it well.

Abbas Kadhim, Calling it Like it Is. Viewpoint of an Iraqi Shiite philosopher at UC Berkeley on current affairs and the Iraq crisis.

Joshua Landis has begun a web log on Syria that is very much worth checking out. If David Wurmser, now on Cheney´s staff, gets his way, that one will be our problem, too.

TomDispatch.com always has cogent and fascinating discussions of left politics, and often of Iraq issues.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Misses Friday Prayers; More Violence Near Najaf

Reuters reports Friday that a day after an apparent agreement between the Interim Governing Council and Muqtada al Sadr, his followers were disappointed to find that he did not appear for Friday prayers in Kufa (he has been hiding out in nearby Najaf). Some 5,000 followers had gathered to hear him, and were disappointed and angry, blaming the US for his inability to appear. They chanted, "yes, yes to jihad!" Meanwhile, the US military, which had largely withdrawn to a base outside the city, came under fire on Friday. Although the US had welcomed Muqtada´s truce offer, they had threatened to come back if there was more violence. There seems to be a contradiction in the press reporting, with some saying that the US accepted a provision that the arrest warrant against Muqtada be suspended for the time being, while this Reuters report seems to suggest that the U.S. would still very much like to apprehend him. If the latter is true, it would help explain his reluctance to come out in public at a time when he has agreed to dissolve his militia in the holy cities, and when his fighters in Kufa, in any case, have taken heavy casualties.

Ash Sharq al Awsat/Reuters report that Muqtada was convinced to remove his militia from Najaf by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and that the final negotiations actually took place in Sistani´s house. Sistani had condemned both the Mahdi Army and the US military for fighting in the holy city. He was convinced that a major US military push into Najaf was not far away, and that it was urgent for Muqtada to back down. Sistani has a great fear of social disorder, and was well aware that the Bush administration was capable of risking massive Shiite riots by fighting into Najaf in a frontal assault if that were the only way to get Muqtada. He also knew that Muqtada´s troops would not shrink from themselves using rpg´s and other potentially damaging weapons in the holy city.

Meanwhile, Salama Khafaji, a Shiite woman who has served in the Interim Governing Council, barely escaped assassination on Thursday as she returned to Baghdad after taking part in the negotiations with the Sadrists that produced the truce. She is all right, but one of her bodyguards is dead, another severely wounded, and her son, Ahmad Fadel, is still missing (he dove into the river to avoid the machine gun fire directed at their car). It is incredible that members of the IGC are not safe; if they aren´t, it is likely that nobody is. Khafaji replaced Aqila al Hashemi, another Shiite woman, who was assassinated last September. Khafaji has been among the most effective and outspoken of the women on the IGC. She followed Rajaa al-Khuzai's lead in helping reverse the plan of the clerics on the IGC to implement Islamic personal status law in the place of civil law. And, she had been active in the negotiations with the Sadrists.

Friday had been declared a day of mourning in Iran for the desecration of the holy city of Najaf by the fighting in it (which Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei blamed on the U.S.) and the consequent damage to the shrine of Ali.

Guerrillas killed two Japanese journalists as they were returning from Samawah, where the Japenese Self Defense Forces are stationed, to Baghdad.

Hussain Shahristani, the favored candidate for post of prime minister by special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, withdrew because he could not gain the support of powerful Iraqi politicians who had been expatriates and who now want the job for themselves, according to the WP. Ali Allawi of the Iraqi National Congress (a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi), Ibrahim Jaafari of the al Da´wa Party, and Adel Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq all want the job themselves. Al Da´wa has the biggest grass roots, and Jaafari is the third most popular political-religious figure in Iraq, according to a recent poll (behind Sistani and Muqtada). But Brahimi does not want the PM to come from a party with grass roots, lest he use the advantages of incumbency to stay in power.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wedding Party Bombing Controversy

The controversy on the US bombing of what appears to have been a wedding party near Syria continues to boil, with this al Jazeerah editorial taking the con side to the story, while Gen. Kimmit sticks to his guns. I thought readers might be interested in an assessment by an academic with long experience in the region.

McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago writes:

As someone who has worked for more than 35 years in Iraq, and for several years in Syria, right up against the Iraqi border, I can add some information on the situation there. All along both sides of the border are small settlements of people, who make their living by herding. Any village or encampment on either side will have in it a mixture of people who were born on the other. Many women from villages in Iraq marry relatives who live in Syria, and vice versa. In fact, in the village of Hamoukar where I was digging from 1999 until 2001, probably half of the families have close relatives in Iraq or were born there. The border is relatively undefended and unfenced, and in the past people could cross, but they took risks in doing so. There was a certain
amount of smuggling, usually consumer goods, and I would be very greatly surprised if there has not been a greatly enhanced degree of trading across the border, given the demand for products that exists in Iraq now. A few years ago, Iraq and Syria both thawed relations and allowed visits, and a lot of villagers in Syria went to Iraq to see relatives whom they had not seen in years, and some Iraqis were allowed to visit Syrian relatives. Iraqi taxi cabs, easily identifiable by their orange and white colors, were numerous on the roads of Syria in the past five years. In the current situation, with the Iraqi secret police no longer getting reports from agents among the populace, the visits by Syrians would have been greatly increased. As far as I have been able to find out, there were some attempts to control the border points at Tell Kochek,Abu Kemal and on the superhighways to Syria and Jordan, but I would be surprised if the long desert border has been much controlled. That there were men from Syria in the Iraqi village that was attacked would not be at all surprising, given the fact that there was a wedding
and that there was and is commerce across the border. The arrival of the guests might have looked very suspicious on satellite images That there should be foreign money is also not surprising. There is a lot of foreign money in Iraq and there has been for years.

Everything you have been saying about the Shia also rings true. I have worked most of my career in the south of Iraq, at Nippur (near Afak, Diwaniyah area). What I know to be the case is that most people would have preferred a secular government, that the Shia do not want to split the country up, and that the US and British blunders in the south have been based on no information, outdated WW I concepts, or distorted information from self-serving people who have been outside the country for many years. The Occupation authority has made it almost impossible to have a political base other than religion or ethnic community, and we are thus creating splits and tension between Iraqis that have not been very noticeable in the past.

McGuire Gibson
Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

They Even Changed its Name?

Nathan Brown, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, writes:

"With little fanfare, the name of Iraq seems to have been changed.

In light of all that is happening, this is hardly the most significant issue facing Iraq at the moment. But in view of the brief flap engendered by the Governing Council's decision to adopt a new flag, I thought the name change might still be of some minor interest.

The country's official name in 1920 was the "State of Iraq." Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, the name was changed to the "Republic of Iraq" (or, more literally, the "Iraqi Republic.")

At some point last year, the older name--the "State of Iraq"--was restored. I do not know precisely who did this and why, but it seems to have been done by the CPA some time last year. CPA legal documents are now issued for the "State of Iraq." UN Security Council Resolution 1511 (passed last October) uses the restored term, and the transitional Administrative Law--signed in March 2004 but named (as far as I know) for
the first time in November 2003--is formally the "Law of Administration of the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period." (However, some internal Iraqi documents still refer to it as a republic.)

Since the current Iraqi political order could hardly be described as a republic, there is some honesty in the new title. But it seems odd that an interim administration would feel comfortable changing the name of the country.

Nathan J. Brown
http://home/gwu.edu/~nbrown

Site of the Day

Christopher Allbritton is back in Iraq, doing independent journalism.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Abuse of Women Detainees

Iraqi women were also abused at Abu Ghuraib, according to the Taguba report and reports of photographs seen by the US Congress. As this Islamist PakNews story notes, most of the reporting on torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghuraib has focused on men. It is clear, however, that Iraqi women were also made to strip naked, were photographed in that compromising position, and it is alleged that some were raped by US military personnel. Although, of course, the soldiers who behaved this way and the officers who authorized or allowed it were not "crusaders," as the article alleges, the abuse of women was designed to take advantage of Muslim and Arab ideas concerning female honor.

A scandal that has not yet broken in the press is the story of how many women ended up in US prisons. The fact is, few were suspected of having themselves committed a crime or an act of insurgency. Rather, they were taken as hostages or potential informants because their husbands or sons were wanted by the US military. This kind of arrest, however, is a form of collective punishment and not permitted under the Fouth Geneva Convention governing military occupations of civilian populations. The sexual abuse of these women is therefore a double crime.

Eventually these photographs of abused or tortured Muslim women are likely to leak, and the reaction in the Muslim world will be explosive. One shakes one´s head in bewilderment as to what the Bush administration thought they were doing. William Polk´s guest editorial today is all the more a propos in light of these revelations.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Thoughts on Torture

Guest Editorial

By William R. Polk

Displays of naked Iraqi prisoners being humiliated in American military prisons have shocked not only Arabs and Europeans but also most Americans. They need not have been surprised – torture is not new.

Widely practiced by the Germans during World War II, it was standard French procedure during the Algerian war. One of the most influential books on that war, written by Colonel Roger Trinquier, a French paratrooper, argued that torture is to “modern war” what the machinegun was to World War I. Horrified by what they learned was happening, French critics called torture the “cancer of democracy.” Using it, the French not only destroyed their claim to legitimacy in Algeria but also nearly destroyed French civil life.

If there was a lesson to be learned by the Algerian experience, it certainly was not heeded.

Influenced by the French – Trinquier’s book was translated and made available by the CIA -- American soldiers and “special forces” used torture in Vietnam. Israeli troops and security forces have employed it for years against the Palestinians. Routinely, almost casually, it is employed in prison systems throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is more common in Europe than most would admit. From Greece, under the regime of the colonels, came a macabre episode: the men employed to torture prisoners, complaining of long hours at low pay, went on strike.

Studies of torture raise two questions that lie behind the horrifying images in the press in recent days: “does torture work?” and “why do governments do it?”

If the objective of torture is to get information, as is usually said, the answer to the first question is “sometimes.” The French in Algeria found that they could “break” a prisoner and find out where his colleagues were hiding or what kind of an operation was being planned. Often, of course, the person being tortured would just say what he thought his tormentors wanted to hear – anything to get them to stop. He knew that he was likely to be killed after he had been “debriefed.” But they had ways to check what he said and, keeping him alive, increased his pain if he lied.

Even if torture often failed to get the sought-after information, it was still an attractive option. Why? I think there are two answers: first, security officers think it might work and they have few other options. Much more important, I believe, is the second reason. Some circumstances almost demand brutality.

A century of careful medical and psychiatric studies tell us that the juxtaposition of absolute weakness and absolute power provokes violence. The bound and hooded Iraqi prisoners lying naked on the floor of Abu Ghraib prison invited attack.

So shocking is such a statement that few of us have wanted even to consider it. To deal with its implications requires us to reexamine our very concept of our humanity. So to get around that inhibition, some scientists, like the Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, posed “our” problem to animals. What he found was that those animals that have “weapons systems,” like the lion with its claws and fangs, have evolved to practice restraints. Had they not done so, their species might not have survived. So the winner in a fight among lions will make ferocious noises but will usually stop short of killing the lion he has just knocked down. In contrast, those creatures, like that symbol of peace, the dove, that do not have lethal weapons have not evolved to practice restraint. They did not need to. Lorenz observed a dove actually torturing another to death.

Our evolution, students of violence assert, has made us more like doves than lions. True we have massive weapons systems but they are external; our ancestors were not forced to incorporate them into our behavior. So, when we see in the pictures of the Iraqi prisoners cowering on the floor, bound, hooded and defenseless we notice that the upright, armed and dominant guards do not show compassion. Rather, they feel stimulated to attack.

Surely, we say, these are aberrations. Normal people do not do such things. Alas, there is much evidence to the contrary.

Cultural, religious, ethnic and age ethnic differences do not seem to influence the willingness of human beings to torture others. Torture has been reported almost everywhere among peoples of all religions and historical experiences. It does have a racial or cultural dimension, however: men are more likely to torture people of a different color or culture than their own kind. Setting them apart is often easy. In Vietnam, American soldiers derided “gooks” and in Iraq “ragheads;” Germans despised untermenschen; Israelis treat Palestinians as subhuman and so on. Regarding the victim as unimportant makes it easier to attack him. Remember the phrase, “Asians feel no pain.”

Can ways be found to prevent these horrors?

One that we have found is generally ineffective is education. The Germans of the 1930s were certainly among the most educated people in the world; yet they set up the concentration camps. The French of the 1950s were a model for the rest of the world in their dedication to reason and intellect; yet some of their most cultured people were implicated in their sordid policies. Even more surprising, some Frenchmen who had fought in the underground against the Nazis to preserve French freedom went on to do to the Algerians what the Nazis had been doing to them. They too built concentration camps. Clean-cut, decent American college graduates who felt strongly about civil liberties were prepared to do to Vietnamese what they abhorred in America. We have only to look at photographs of the crowd of White American participants at a lynching to see how thin is the veneer of civilization. So I think that the best we can say is that education is necessary but not sufficient.

Two actions offer some hope to those who wish to stop torture.

The first is to demand “transparency” in whatever prison systems are believed to be necessary everywhere. This means that we cannot close our eyes and ears to abuses as we naturally would prefer to do. Nor can we accept any justification for torture. Those who do it and those who authorize it must both know for certain that they will be held responsible for a crime against humanity. That is, to be clear, a crime against both the humanity of the victims and against us as those whose humanity they thus debase.

The second is much more important because more likely to work. It is that we must make as a major goal of national policy solution of situations that promote the use of torture. An obvious first step is to work toward a world which recognizes that the basic political right is that of self-determination. Unless or until this is at least approached, we can expect others to fight for it with every means at their disposal and that those who oppose them will similarly use the means at their disposal: guerrilla warfare/terrorism will be met with various forms of suppression including torture. Only when it is no longer “needed” will torture be put aside.

We can draw many historical proofs that it then will be put aside. Take just one example. After centuries of severe repression including torture of prisoners, England finally granted Irish independence. Torture then stopped because it was not longer useful.

A policy embodying the quest for self determination will not be easy to implement. Nor will the benefits appear quickly. There will be shortfalls and setbacks. But in evaluating such difficult actions as will be required, we must bear in mind that, however much some people will wish to try the shortcuts that torture will seem to offer to avoid attacks or break terrorist cells, doing so not only will impact upon the victims but also brutalize those who employ or sanction it. That was the real lesson of Algeria. It should also be a lesson of Iraq. That is what the pictures from Iraq show us – not just the anguished faces of the prisoners but the gloating smirks of the torturers. Lest those looks appear in our own mirrors, we simply and finally cannot “afford” torture.

© William R. Polk, May 6, 2004

William R. Polk is senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, he taught Middle Eastern politics and history and the Arabic language at Harvard University until President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. He was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Later he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his many books are The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; and Polk’s Folly, An American Family History. His books The Birth of America and Iraq: Out of the past toward an Uncertain Future will be published in New York in the spring of 2005.

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America's Incompetent Colonialism

Guest Editorial
by Keith Watenpaugh

America’s Incompetent Colonialism: The Failures of the US Administration of Iraq

A year ago, word began to filter out of Baghdad that in addition to the National Museum, the Iraqi National Library and Archive had also been looted, and burned, not once, but twice. Like the current scandal of systematic abuses of human rights by members of the US military, the CIA and its sub-contractors, the burning evoked a host of emotions most notably shame, revulsion and anger. The anger was primarily directed against the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense who failed to heed the near-unanimous warnings of the probability of post-war instability and the vulnerability of Iraq’s cultural heritage and take appropriate preventative measures. Their failure to fully grasp the reality of the situation in Iraq was among the earliest examples of continuing gross and criminal ineptitude of which the gruesome images from Abu Ghuraib are the most recent manifestations.

The destruction so enraged an international group of junior historians of the Arab Middle East, that we organized an assessment visit to the country last June to find out what had happened at Baghdad’s library and archives. What we also sought to do was record the needs of Iraq’s academic and intellectual community as it rebuilds itself in the face of a generation of brutish rule by Saddam Hussein, a decade of debilitating UN sanctions, a brief and humiliating war, and an open-ended American-led military occupation. All of us spoke Arabic, had lived in the region and conducted research in Iraq or in its neighboring countries before. The report of our findings is available for free download from the H-Net (http://www.h-net.org/about/press/opening_doors/) website. Downloaded several thousand times in the last year, our report is still among the only independent assessments of cultural and intellectual conditions in Iraq. Current status of the libraries and museums can be also be accessed from the following: IFLA-Blue Shield (http://www.ifla.org/VI/4/admin/icbs-iraq.htm), Iraq Crisis (https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/iraqcrisis) SAFE (http://www.savingantiquities.org/k-safe-resources.htm).

Conducting research for the report required us to meet with civilian and military administrators of the CPA in the Green Zone. Aside from discovering that when American men are overseas they all - including me - wear khaki slacks and blue button-down shirts, I experienced what could only be termed “de ja vue all over again.” My own area of expertise is the interwar Middle East when France and Britain controlled the several states of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean as League of Nation’s Mandates. And while the League imposed humanitarian requirements on both, the Mandates were merely colonialism in drag. Sitting across the table from CPA administrators I listened to the same language of democratization and development being employed as part of a broader, concerted plan to turn Iraq into a dependent and docile American client; and key features of Iraqi society, including higher education, media, culture, and the arts would be subordinated to that program.

What also struck me about those conversations - and the events of the intervening year have confirmed my suspicions - is that the CPA, and here I mean not just the American diplomats and bureaucrats seconded to the DOD and the token representatives of “Coalition Partners,” but also the vast array of civilian contractors and subcontractors, have been infected by the pathologies of colonialism. As I have discussed in an earlier essay for Middle East Report, (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer228/228_watenpaugh.html)
the civilian and military administrators of Iraq have grown contemptuous of Iraq and Iraqis and have convinced themselves of their hosts’ essential incompetence. Blaming the victim has always proved an effective strategy in justifying colonialism.

The CPA’s colonial culture has limited its effectiveness on behalf of the Iraqi people and thus the US taxpayer is not getting a good value for its billions of dollars. And while unique elements of the CPA have made significant contributions to the rebuilding of Iraqi society, here I note especially the work of John Russell in the recovery of Iraq’s ancient heritage, those successes are not balanced by the abuses, corruption, cronyism and incompetence on the other side of the ledger. In part this has been caused by the exportation of domestic US politics to the Green Zone and the appointment of individuals whose sense of Iraqi, Arab, and Islamic cultures (if they have any at all) is shaped by a narrow partisan, cultural or religious agenda - and in some cases the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This was reinforced recently by the discovery that the CPA’s massive press/propaganda office is peopled primarily by Republican Party activists, lead by Dan Senor, himself a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) intern, as well.

An exemplary token of this phenomenon is the civilian contractor John Agresto, appointed last year as senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education. Senior advisors play a paternalistic role in the CPA akin to colonial administrators of the inter-war French and British Mandates and exert a tremendous amount of power over Iraqi institutions and agencies through the control of budgets, security and as gatekeepers to the upper echelons of the Department of Defense. Prior to going to Iraq, Agresto was briefly the president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an institution known for its Eurocentric “Great Books” curriculum and he now runs his own educational consulting firm, Agresto Consultants. Agresto has no training in Middle Eastern society or culture and no experience in the region. He served briefly as interim chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to which he was appointed by Ronald Reagan. Along with William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current Vice President Dick Cheney, Agresto was one of the leading right-wing figures in the “culture wars” of the 1980s.

More problematic for the future of higher education in Iraq, the ostensible reason he is there, is that his appointment signaled that the CPA was intent on peopling its bureaucracy with politically loyal agents, rather than those most objectively qualified to assist Iraq. The clearly political nature of Agresto’s position sent a chilling signal to those academic institutions interested in working in Iraq that their efforts - regardless of how disinterested, or how much they believe that they could change the system from within - would be part and parcel of the administration’s current policy objectives and cronyism. And in the short-term, while these programs have the potential to aid Iraqis as they rebuild their educational structures, in the long run they will tar all American educational initiatives and American academics with the same neo-colonialist brush. Being perceived as, or in fact being, allied to the military occupation of Iraq or as agents of American domination will hinder the creation of permanent, collegial and productive relations between the US and Iraqi academic communities as equals. The ultimate cost of failing to create viable and permanent relationships and of confusing what appears to be voluntary cooperation with a strategy to survive is that the core values of open exchange, freedom of inquiry, women’s participation in higher education and faculty self-management may all be dismissed as “American” values and moreover as anti-Muslim despite our assertion of their inherent universality.

While the CPA is supposed to go out of business on June 30, what elements of it will persist in the next iteration of the American role in the civil administration of Iraq is unclear. Dan Senor recently used the euphemistic construction “close partnership” to describe that relationship as he dismissed the possibility that an independent Iraqi government might ask us to leave. Fear of being asked to leave may be the leading factor in the administrations rejection of the technocratic solution suggested by the UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi. While US diplomats will in all likelihood occupy a role similar to that played by current administrators, what I suspect will also be the case is that a significant portion of American policy in Iraq will be implemented by contractors. At this juncture, Congress should exercise due diligence and mount an independent audit and investigation of the CPA; it should also introduce legislation that would hold contractors liable to US and Iraqi law and moreover give the FBI enforcement powers and responsibilities. In other words, US citizens should enjoy no extraterritorial rights in Iraq, nor should the contractors simply be allowed to police themselves.

As a rule historians should avoid the use of history to predicate the future. Yet, in an essay I wrote shortly before the war for Logos, I opined that thinking about the exit strategies of the various interwar colonial powers could shed light on what the US would do in Iraq. At the time, I argued that the way the British left Iraq – install a loyal client leadership backed by a strong military, gain basing rights and oil concessions – would be repeated. I was convinced that the US would not leave Iraq like the British left Palestine in 1948: merely abandoning it to the UN and laying the groundwork for a half century of ongoing and unremitting war and suffering. I think I was wrong.

------------------
Keith Watenpaugh is Assistant Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at Le Moyne College; he also serves as the college’s Associate Director of Peace and Global Studies. In the Fall he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is the third generation of his family to have lived and worked in the Middle East. He speaks and reads Arabic and Modern Turkish. Dr. Watenpaugh has written extensively on Arab intellectual history, the formation of the Baath and urban and communal violence. His book Being Modern in the Middle East: Colonialism, Modernity and the Middle Class will be published by Princeton University Press.


In June of 2003 he led a multinational team of Middle Eastern historians to Iraq to assess the conditions of Baghdad’s libraries, archives and universities * and more broadly observe the emergence of civil society and intellectual life in Iraq. The group’s findings are included in the report Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-war Iraq. Copies are available at h-net.org. The report is the first comprehensive account of Iraq’s intellectual and cultural scene after the war and provides the most detailed study of Iraq’s university system as it begins to rebuild in the wake of the war.


Dr. Watenpaugh has spoken on humanitarian issues confronting Iraq at Harvard, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, the University of Utah, as well as the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the Middle East Studies Association and the College Art Association. His work has been covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, The Syracuse Post-Standard and National Public Radio.



Keith D. Watenpaugh
Associate Director
Peace and Global Studies


Assistant Professor
Eastern Mediterranean and Islamic History
Department of History
Le Moyne College
Syracuse NY 13214


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zinni on What Went Wrong

In the wake of Gen. Anthony Zinni's 60 Minutes appearance, it is worth looking in detail at his recent essay on what went wrong.

The Center for Defense Information has put up a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush administration Iraq policy by Gen. Zinni has presented a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. A summary by way of excerpts (I've omitted ellipses, but these grafs are not continuous with one another):

"And I think that will be the first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn't work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union, has worked with North Korea and others.

"The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed. I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.

"The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. The books were cooked, in my mind.

"We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.

"I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task . . . You are about to go into a problem that you don't know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.

"The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous "Gucci Guerillas" from London. We bought into their intelligence reports.

"The seventh problem has been the lack of planning . . . And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.

"The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground. There were a lot more troops in my military plan for operations in Iraq.

"The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there. No one can tell me the Coalition Provisional Authority had any planning for its structure.

"And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that's a series of bad decisions on the ground. De-Baathifying down to a point where you've alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don't have blood on their hands, but know how to make the trains run on time . . .

"Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it's not Mark Thompson it's somebody else, and says "What would you do now?" You know, there's a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it's time to just pull out, cut your losses. I'm not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we've come pretty close to that.

"I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that UN resolution. That's been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need."

Other Zinni links:

Before the war: 'What Planet are They Living On? - Salon.com".

September 2003 - Lehrer News Hour

May 15, 2004 - Abu Ghraib and other issues.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Continued Fallout of War of Holy Cities

Even though Karbala has fallen quiet, there were clashes on other fronts. 20 people were killed and 50 wounded in clashes between the US and the Mahdi Army militia in Kufa, the stronghold of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

In the fourth such incident in a week, angry Islamist students in Tehran attempted to attack the British embassy in protest over the fighting in the holy cities of Iraq. They clashed with riot police and were eventually forced back.

Iran also demanded formally that the United States withdraw altogether from Iraq, and expressed its anguish over the desecration of the holy cities. The BBC reports that sympathy may be growing among Iran´s hardliners for Muqtada.

Even the chief ally in Iraq of the US, the United Kingdom, produced an internal memo harshly critical of US heavy handedness in Iraq, instancing the prison torture scandal, Fallujah, and Najaf.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A Shiite International?

There was more heavy fighting in Karbala early on Friday, after which the city fell eerily quiet. By Friday night into early Saturday morning, Mahdi Army militiamen had mysteriously ceased fighting, and the US had withdrawn from sites like Mukhayyam mosque near the shrine of Imam Husain. Meanwhile, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on his followers to continue to fight even if he is killed.

There were big demonstrations Friday throughout the Shiite world, including Lebanon, Bahrain, Iran and Pakistan, against continued US fighting in Karbala, a key holy city for Shiite Muslims.

Geo-strategically, this entire episode is a huge disaster. Some Americans may feel it is unfair of Shiites to blame only the US for the fighting, when it is Muqtada's militia that is firing from the shrines. But life is unfair. People always mind what foreigners do to the symbols of their native identity more than they mind what their own radicals do.

Al-Qaeda's declaration of war on the US was a ploy to turn Sunni Muslims, especially hard liners like Wahhabis and Salafis, against America and recruit them as foot soldiers. In 2002 and 2003, the Pentagon replied in part by seeking Shiite allies. These included the Hazaras, who were part of the Northern Alliance that defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. They also included the Iraqi Shiites, which the Department of Defense wooed as allies against Saddam and the Baathists. In his unwise decision to try to get Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive and to send GIs into Shiite holy places with heavy firepower, Bush is in the process of turning the Shiite world decisively against the US and perhaps creating new centers of anti-American paramilitary action.

The demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, was small, but there were anti-American sermons in Shiite mosques throughout the country. Pakistan's population is 140 million or so, and I estimate Shiites at 15%. If I'm right, that's 21 million angry South Asians. Pakistani Shiites are afraid of al-Qaeda and its allies, like the radical Sunni group, Sipah-i Sahabah (Army of the Prophet's Companions), who assassinate Shiites for sport. They had been a support for Gen. Musharraf's policy of turning against the Taliban and allying with the US. Now Bush's attacks on Karbala and Najaf have begun deeply alienating them from the US. Someone give Bush a copy of "How to Make Friends and Influence People," quick!

I have commented on the demonstration, 5000-strong, in Manama, Bahrain, below. It produced a political casualty. The king fired the Interior Minister and declared his opposition to what the Americans are doing in Karbala and Najaf, as well as what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. ' "We share the anger of our people over the oppression and aggression taking place in Palestine and in the holy shrines (in Iraq). People had a right to peaceful protests. We are investigating," the agency quoted the king as saying. ' This is a formal, non-NATO American ally speaking! Bush is even pushing his closest friends into dissociating themselves from him, at least rhetorically.

The biggest demonstration was in Lebanon, called by the Hizbullah, perhaps numbering in the tens of thousands. Lebanon's population is only 3 or 4 million, about 40% Shiite. I figure ten percent of Lebanese Shiites may have come out for this rally!

The irony for me here is that I often give the Shiites of Lebanon as an example of how radical Shiites can evolve into democratic, moderate ones. The AMAL party was more or less a terrorist organization from an American point of view in the early 1980s, but in the 1990s it became a middle class parliamentary party and gave up its paramilitary. Its rival, Hizbullah, tended to appeal to poor Shiites in the slums or peasant villagers in the South, and it retained 5000 fighters in its paramilitary. It remained militant in order to get the Israelis back out of Lebanon, in which it finally succeeded in 2000 (once Sharon steals your land, it isn´t easy to get it back). Hizbullah seemed on the way to evolving into a parliamentary party, as well (it hasn't been involved in international terrorism for many years to my knowledge).

There is some danger of joint US and Israeli policies re-radicalizing Lebanese Shiites, and making the more militant Hizbullah more popular than the sedate AMAL. All you have to do is fire helicopter gunship missiles into civilian crowds in Gaza and then bombard Karbala, and somehow it mysteriously angers a lot of Lebanese Shiites.

In Iran, as well, of course US military action in the holy shrine cities is a gift to the hardliners. The latter have long tried to paint the reformists who want more democracy as traitors in cahoots with America to destroy Shiite Islam and Iranian culture.

I said the other day I thought Bush was pushing Europe to the left with his policies. I think he is at the same time pushing the Shiite world to the radical Right, and I fear my grandchildren will still be reaping the whirlwind that George W. Bush is sowing in the city of Imam Husain. I concluded in early April that Bush had lost Iraq. He has by now lost the entire Muslim world.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorials

I'm going to be doing some traveling this coming week. I will be posting more guest editorials than usual, and may not be able to comment as often on hard news. Back to normal by May 31. In the meantime, the guest editorials are first rate, and it will be worth checking in for them.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Demonstrations in Bahrain

Violent demonstrations broke out in Bahrain protesting the US fighting in Karbala.

"Violence broke out on Friday after police fired tear gas to disperse thousands of mainly Shia Muslim demonstrators demanding the withdrawal of US forces from the southern Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala. One police car was set on fire. "Death to America...death to Israel," chanted the protesters in the pro-Western Gulf Arab state, home to the US Navy's Fifth Fleet."

You wonder whether, when Bush gave the order to get Muqtada "dead or alive", initially to the Spanish and then to the US military, whether he even knew that a majority of the population in Bahrain, where the US has a major naval base, is Shiite or that they would mind if the US army demolished much of the Mukhayyam Mosque in Karbala trying to get at Muqtada's militiamen.

In all probability? No.

Could these dmonstrations in Bahrain be significant? Yes. Bahrain has a Sunni monarchy. Lately it has taken baby steps toward democracy and more open elections, but these did not benefit the Shiites because they wanted even more open elections, and boycotted them. Therefore, the Sunni fundamentalists largely won the seats (and the Sunni fundamentalists don't even represent most Bahraini Sunnis much less the Shiites). So the situation there is potentially volatile. The US is doing nothing to make it less so, and everything to exacerbate it.

The other shoe? Will the Shiites of al-Hasa in Eastern Arabia, where the oil is and where there are 5,000 Americans at Dhahran, be the next to riot?

It is most unwise for the US miitary to fight in downtown Najaf and Karbala near the shrines. I say it again.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Heavy Fighting in Holy Cities

The Associated Press reports that

"American tanks and AC-130 gunships pounded insurgent positions near two shrines in the center of the holy city of Karbala early Friday, and the U.S. military said it killed 18 fighters loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The fighting began after insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. tanks patrolling Karbala's so-called ''Old City,'' said U.S. Army Col. Pete Mansoor of the 1st Armored Division. The tanks returned fire, and more than two hours of heavy fighting followed. Smoke billowed from burning buildings. A rebel weapons cache was hit, the military said. Much of the fighting was near the city's Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas shrines, which U.S. forces allege are being used by militiamen as firing positions or protective cover. Mansoor said the shrines were not damaged."

Even if the shrines were not damaged, you can't imagine how much Shiites don't want to hear phrases like "American tanks and AC-130 gunships pounded insurgent positions near two shrines in the center of the holy city of Karbala early Friday . . . " I cringed when I saw it. I don't see how Iraqi Shiites are going to forgive us for this. Ever.

There was also more fighting in the other holy city, Najaf. Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada al-Sadr met with local tribal chieftains from Najaf and its environs, who gave him a letter asking his forces to vacate the holy places of Najaf. The letter threatened that if he did not do so voluntarily, the tribes are strong enough to kick him out.

See Omayma Abdel Latif in al-Ahram for analysis of Shiite politics at the moment. The threat, mentioned at the end, that Sistani might give up his quietism seemed chilling.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Chalabi Raid

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Chalabi aides said that 10 computers and lots of files were carted away from Chalabi's house, which they turned upside down. His nephew, Defence Minister Ali Allawi, who lives with Chalabi (the two stay in the house without their families) was at home, and was holding a meeting with the Foreign Minister (Hoshyar Zebari). An Iraqi National Congress spokesperson told the London newspaper that this was not the first time Coalition troops had come into the house, but it was the first time such an incident was made public. The troops said they wanted to arrest two members of the INC, but Chalabi told them they were not present in the house."

Chalabi told the newspaper that he believed the raid took place because he had been outspoken recently, and the Americans do not like it when a person speaks his mind.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sullivan on Iraq War, Sept. 1, 2002

There has been no accountability for all the war hysteria whipped up by media pundits and politicians about Iraq in the year before the U.S. invaded. Although it is true that Doug Feith's various special offices in the Pentagon, and VP Dick Cheney's politburo of Scooter Libby and John Hannah, along with Ahmad Chalabi and others fed false and misleading information to the government and the press, many talking heads were pitifully gullible.

Let's start with Andrew Sullivan, who, at the beginning of the September before the war, published in the London Times a vicious tongue-lashing of the New York Time's Howell Raines for not being on board with the program. I present excerpts below:

Sunday Times (London), September 1, 2002
The liberal cheerleader getting a bad name

Andrew Sullivan

"At the beginning, few readers noticed any change. The new executive editor of The New York Times, Howell Raines, took over last September and was immediately embroiled in the biggest New York story in decades. The coverage of the 9/11 massacre was superb, detailed and thorough - exactly what the American elite demands of its paper of record.

"And then the rot set in. The New York Times has gone from being America's most reliable (if sometimes PC) compendium of news to being one of the most suspect media entities around . . .

"Why on earth should anyone care? The answer is, in fact, a critical one in assessing the current American debate about war against Iraq. Since September 11, polls have shown that a hefty majority of Americans favour a military effort to prevent weapons of mass destruction being used by Saddam and his allies against American allies and the homeland itself . . .

"Beginning in July, [Raines] used America's most authoritative front page to run inflammatory non-stories about the impending conflict. On July 30, the Times detailed how war "could profoundly affect the American economy". Duh.

Cole: Note that Sullivan dismisses the argument that the war could have a deep impact on the US economy as a commonplace. But in fact, Bush administration officials consistently low-balled the American public about the cost. It was to be $60 billion. Iraq's oil would pay for reconstruction. There would be no long-term impact on oil prices. Raines was right and the Bush administration officials were wrong. Sullivan here calls the prediction that the war would have a big impact on the US economy an "inflammatory non-story" (which by the way is a meaningless phrase and therefore bad writing. A non-story cannot be inflammatory. What he presumably means is that Raines ran inflammatory stories about the economic impact that were inaccurate. But they almost certainly underestimated the economic impact of the Iraq war, the full dimensions of which we can now only begin to guess.)

"After the first day of Senate hearings on Iraq, the headline was: "Experts warn of high risk for American invasion of Iraq". In fact, the hearings had been dominated by defectors' tales of Saddam's imminent nuclear capacity. Every other major outlet led with that troubling news. The Times buried it."

Cole: Sullivan here castigates Raines for not swallowing the crock of shit that Saddam had an imminent nuclear weapons capacity. No serious analyst thought Iraq had an imminent such capacity. At this point in time, Ambassador Joe Wilson had already demonstrated to the CIA and Cheney that Iraq had not bought yellowcake uranium from Niger. The defectors' tales were fairy tales. Sullivan not only swallowed this crock whole, he licked his lips, asked for more, and beat up on Raines for not wanting any.

"It was slowly becoming clear that Raines was intoxicated with the power of his position - and you can see the temptation. The Times has influence beyond its reach as a paper for the most influential people in the most powerful country on earth . . ."

Cole: Not content to question Raines's journalistic judgment, Sullivan now goes for the jugular of character. What is the explanation for Raines's puzzling reticence about the case for an Iraq war? Why isn't he buying the stories of a menacing Saddam, sitting atop massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and within a year or two of having a nuke, plotting to strike the United States? Is it possible that Raines just can't see reliable sources for such tales, corroborated by other, unconnected reliable sources? Is it possible that there is an honest difference of opinion here? No, Raines must be a megalomaniac, drunk on power.

Whenever a writer replies to an argument with an attack on his opponent's character, calling him "immoral" or "unscrupulous" or "full of pride," you are in the presence of propaganda. The reasoned response to an argument is a counter-argument. It is not always inappropriate to call someone unscrupulous. I have long felt that the unscrupulous deserve the epithet. But an argument made by an unscrupulous person can nevertheless be correct, and would need to be refuted on its own merits even after one was done with the name calling.

"Why would the Times risk its reputation as a liberal but fair paper of record to lurch to the left of The Guardian? Since Raines won't speak to the general press, it's hard to know for sure. Part of it, perhaps, is to do with his generation of liberals. Scarred by Vietnam, they see every war as a replay of that hell and assume war critics always have the moral edge over war supporters. Raines is also a white liberal from Alabama, eager to prove that he isn't a Southern bigot. He won a Pulitzer for a guilt-ridden memoir of his black nanny when he was a child. So he overshoots."

The lessons progressives drew from the Vietnam War were that it is unwise for the US to become embroiled in an Asian land war, that Asian nationalism is a potent force that Washington consistently underestimates, that wars cost innocent lives and brutalize those who prosecute them, and that you should not go into a war without an exit strategy. The chief post-Vietnam strategic thinker on these issues was Colin Powell, by whose guidelines the Iraq war should not have been fought. How Raines's alleged white liberal guilt could possibly have an impact on this argument is beyond me, but I guess when you are libelling someone mercilessly, you may as well throw in the kitchen sink.

"But there is also a paranoid hatred of the president among the paper's chief columnists. Almost universally, they hate Bush in the way that some extreme conservatives once hated Clinton. Payback, perhaps. These major voices are not simply anti-Bush for good, defensible reasons. They have entered the realm of conspiracy theories, knee-jerk suspicion and profound cynicism about an administration thrust into one of the most dangerous national security crises in decades . . ."

Cole: Yes, it was quite wrong of Raines to be in any way suspicious of the Bush administration. Why, it would not try to scare us with a reference to nuclear purchases in a State of the Union address that the CIA refused to validate, now would it? It wouldn't keep dropping hints about Saddam and al-Qaeda that were wholly unsubstantiated by the president's own admission, would it? It would not keep things secret from the American public, would not violate the Geneva Conventions on a massive scale, would it?

In actual fact, most Democrats gave the Bush administration far too much credit for sincerity, and allowed themselves to be duped into confusing the addled, weak Saddam with Dr. Strangelove.

"More conservative voices have been purged. After criticising the new direction of the Times, I was told that Raines had barred me from contributing to the paper. That's his prerogative, of course, But it helps reveal the closed mind running the most influential paper on the planet."

I just am too embarrassed to comment on this paragraph.

"Recently, there have been signs of improvement. Two weeks ago, the man who lost out to Raines in the race to be editor, Bill Keller, penned an op-ed all but chastising his boss. "The three Republican foreign policy luminaries who have been identified in the press as sceptics - Mr (Brent) Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger - spend much of their time courting well-paying clients who would rather not rock boats in the Middle East," wrote Keller."

Cole: It is true that Kissinger was misunderstood by the Times's reporter. But Scowcroft and Eagleburger had legitimate cautions about the rush to war that now seem quite prophetic, if insufficiently pessimistic in retrospect. Keller turns out to have been wrong and Raines was right. But here Sullivan slams Raines (and Scowcroft and Eagleburger).

"The real opponents of the war in America, therefore, are outside the elected political branch and are threefold: The New York Times, the men who left Saddam Hussein in power in 1990 and are thus partly responsible for the current crisis (Scowcroft, Colin Powell), and gun-shy military brass, who also opposed the first Gulf war. The three have worked together during the dog days of August to prevent a war. And they have made great headway, as polls have shown a slow decline in public support. But so far this has been a phoney war - between newspaper ideologues and security has-beens defending their own complicity in Saddam's survival."

Cole: Note that Sullivan again resorts to character assassination to undermine Scowcroft, Powell and others. They are not sincere, he says, and he does not even bother to recapitulate their arguments or try to refute them. Since they are abject human beings, he implies, he does not have to engage them at that level. In other words, he uses propaganda. Powell (who was later bamboozled into presenting false intelligence to the UN) had actually fought in a war. I suspect Sullivan has not, nor has he in all likelihood even lived in a war zone for any extended period of time. He had no standing to launch a vicious attack on the officer corps of the United States Army and Marines, accusing them of cowardice (I take it that is the meaning of "gun-shy.")

"Soon, the real debate will take place. The president will speak. Congress will vote. And the war, despite Raines's hysteria, will, barring unforeseen events, almost certainly follow."

Cole: An accurate prediction, even though actual debate was forestalled by a campaign of misinformation and intimidation. However, the blame for "hysteria" is placed on entirely the wrong party. It was ol' "Yellowcake Bush" who played chicken little.

Ironically, the NYT later acquiesced in the hysteria, and alowed Judith Miller to act as stenographer for Ahmad Chalabi's lies on the front page. That is grounds for slamming the New York Times. Sullivan's rant was wrong-headed from beginning to end.

By the way, I think that despite this particular shocking instance of lack of elementary journalistic judgement and knowledge of Middle Eastern society, Andrew Sullivan can't simply be dismissed as "unreliable" or "hopelessly biased." I find his arguments for gay rights cogent and persuasive, for instance. You can refute and dismiss an argument. It is harder to dismiss an entire human being.

Muslim mystics attribute to the Imam Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, the saying that "And you think that you are a but a tiny body, while in fact an entire universe is enfolded within you." That's true of each of us.

Truth in advertising: Sullivan attacked me on his weblog Thursday as having lost all "moral compass" because I dared to point out that the US Department of Defense and its allies are now killing Marsh Arabs around Kut, Amara and Majar al-Kabir--the very Marsh Arabs Mr. Wolfowitz said he was invading Iraq to protect from Saddam, who also used to kill them. In those days they were called the Iraqi Hizbullah. Many of them now are allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. There is an enormous difference in scale between what Saddam did to them and what the Coalition has done since the beginning of April. But it is early days, after all. And in issues of ethics and hypocrisy, scale is less important than principle.

I take it as a compliment that the Right is so afraid of this observation (the recent fate of the Marsh Arabs is not being discussed anyplace but the much-maligned Guardian) that they feel it necessary to resort to character assassination ("unreliable," "no moral compass") in my regard, in hopes of marginalizing me quick before the observation gains traction.

"Saving" the Iraqi Shiites was maybe the last rationale for their war that hadn't been discredited. Since April 2 they haven't been saving them any more. They have been killing them.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Martin and Malcolm, Chalabi and Muqtada

An informed Iraqi Shiite writes:

" 1.Chalabi is setting himself up to be Martin Luther King to Muqtada's Malcolm X. I predict he will head to Najaf soon to mediate.

"2. You are absolutely right: Muqtada has won, and alive or dead the movement he has sponsored will keep fighting the American forces until they leave. I think the likelihood of theocracy in Iraq has skyrocketed. What is the United States to do? Install Ayatollah Sistani as the anti-theocracy voice of secularism? Preposterous isn't it. History will record the Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr was the first hero of the Islamic Revoloution in Iraq. Iran's islamic republic has taken over 20 years and still hasn't evolved into a "real" democracy. I hope it won't take that long in Iraq. The war against the Americans will likely be followed by a civil war to oust whoever the Americans install as dictator. Then the Islamic Republic will be established and hopefully eventually evolve into a democracy, but that could take 50 years. I am not optimistic.

"3. I get your point with the analogy, but please do not compare Muqtada to David Koresh. I think a better analogy is that Ayatolah Sistani is the grandfather or patriarch of the family, and Muqtada is a teenager with issues. Like the kid who says "I hate you Dad!" but doesn't really mean it, or acts out anger or frustration. At the end of the day Muqtada has respect for Sistani (he has offered to disband his militia and leave Najaf if Sistani commands him to.) and Sistani considers Muqtada one of his own and will not critisize him by name publicly (i.e. outside the family).

"4. Your warnings to other Shia groups are right on target, anyone seen as siding with the US against Muqtada is politically doomed. The issue is not Muqtada's popularity vs. Sistani's the issue is Muqtada's popularity vs. Paul Bremer's. Six months ago most Iraqis would have prefered Bremer, now it is Al-Sadr by a landslide. Chalabi's attempts to distance himself from the US highlight that point.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi's House Raided; He is Suspended from the Interim Governing Council

Ahmad Chalabi's house was raided in Baghdad by US troops on orders of an Iraqi judge. He is said to have been suspended from the Interim Governing Council, though he maintains that Ghazi al-Yawer, the current president of the IGC, has called him to a meeting on Friday afternoon at 4 pm Baghdad time.

Rumors are swirling in Baghdad that Chalabi had been taking a percentage of some contracts or that he had been trying to transfer government assets to the Iraqi National Congress before the transfer of sovereignty on June 30. There are also rumors that his militia, which Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had flown into Iraq last year on a Pentagon aircraft, has engaged in coercive or extortionate activities. The problem is that these sorts of rumors have been swirling in Baghdad for many months. So why did the US move now?

Chalabi is charging that the crackdown on him is an attempt by the United Nations to squelch investigations into the bribes Saddam had paid UN officials under the oil for food program, and on which Chalabi had information. The Pentagon had quite outrageously turned over to the Iraqi National Congress the intelligence files of the old Saddam government, which Chalabi has threatened to use to blackmail officials of neighboring governments. Chalabi's charge is implausible and he is just trying to waft some smoke into the public's eyes.

Lakhdar Brahimi, the special UN envoy, had made it clear over a month ago that he would not appoint Chalabi to the caretaker government. In response, Chalabi has become increasingly critical of the US. He complained that rehabilitating the Baathists after the siege of Fallujah failed was tantamount to putting Nazis in power. He has recently loudly complained about the crackdown on the militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, saying that it has cost 1500 Iraqi lives, more than should be spent to arrest a single man.

Chalabi came on television on Thursday and said his message to the US was "Let my people go!" He is now playing an Iraqi Martin Luther King! He says he wants an immediate turn-over of all authority in Iraq to the Iraqis. I.e. he now has adopted the Dennis Kucinich position. Assuming that he manages to stay out of jail, Chalabi will run for political office in January, 2005, and will probably represent himself as an anti-Occupation Iraqi nationalist. You know, the wily old chameleon could still come out ahead.

Chalabi was for long a darling of the Department of Defense and VP Dick Cheney, and their initial plan had been to turn Iraq over to him. The State Department, the CIA and (I am told) Tony Blair all intervened in April 2003 to stop DoD from simply handing the country over to him. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress supplied to the US government and to Judith Miller of the New York Times false and misleading "intelligence" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear weapons program, and was connected to al-Qaeda. Chalabi later all but admitted that these allegations had been false, and said they didn't matter because Saddam had been overthrown.

The State Department and the CIA became increasingly less enamored of Chalabi in the course of the 1990s. In part, he could not account for the money they gave him. In part, his harebrained schemes to overthrow Saddam went awry. He retained strong supporters in Neoconservative circles, however, especially Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld and Cheney were also big boosters, at least until recently. The CIA and State Department appear to have leaked to Newsweek a couple of weeks ago intelligence that Chalabi had been sharing sensitive information with Iran, and was tilting toward Iran. Some Neocons have felt betrayed by Chalabi's inability to get Iraq to recognize Israel or provide it with petroleum, as he appears to have pledged to them.

One problem with the way the US has been behaving in Iraq, whatever the merits of this case, is that it is alienating all major political forces in the country. First its radical debaathification (so that a high school teacher out in Ramadi who had joined the Baath party but never done anything criminal was fired and excluded from civil society) alienated the Sunnis. They have not been mollified by recent steps belatedly to reverse this policy. Then the US came after Muqtada al-Sadr and began alienating a lot more Shiites. Now it has turned the Iraqi National Congress against it. The INC, whatever one thinks of it, has strong Kurdish and Shiite allies. What happens to a ruler without strong allies? Can you say Louis XVI?

Andrew Cockburn is worth reading on all this. But 1) I think calling what Chalabi had in mind a "coup" is exaggerated; 2) I think the idea that the Sadrists would follow a multi-millionnaire dapper expatriate is implausible and 3) the issue of Chalabi's nepotism and financial irregularities cannot be underestimated as an impetus for the raid. Brahimi and Bush in some sense need now to get back the Iraqi government from Chalabi's carefully planted nephews, sons-in-law and long-time associates, who control key ministries. In some senses, it is the CPA that made the coup.

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Rockets Fired at Italian Base

News from Italy about Iraq via a kind reader there:

Drawing on ANSA News agency (Rome): "Two rockets (NB: Italian journalists aren't very precise with military terminology, you never know what really was fired) exploded today at dawn inside the "Tallil" base near Nassiriya, where most of the Italian contingent live. No injuries. Ansa got the information from local military sources. It's the first time that the super-protected base of Tallil has come under fire; besides Italians there are military people from other countries.

' "We saw where the explosions came down. We're now investigating to figure out where they came from," said Colonel Giuseppe Perrone, speaker for the Italian commander, without explaining exactly where the rockets landed. In any case, he said, there were "no consequences." Most of the Italian "Antica Babilonia" contingent has recently transferred to the Tallil base. There's Camp Mittica, with the brigade headquarters, the ROA (Autonomous Operating Group) of the Italian Air Force, the MSU of the Carabinieri and other groups. There are also Portuguese and Romanian military included in the Italian contingent, Korean soldiers, Americans and people from other countries.

==========

"Radio Popolare this morning described Berlusconi's conversation with Bush (carried on TV during the night, so nobody saw it) as being really hi-there-buddy-good-to-see-ya-again with no mention being made (in public) about the political difficulties here. Berlusconi declared (ansa carried this) that most Italians support the Antica Babilonia mission.

"On Bruno Vespa's important talk show "Porta a Porta" ("Door to door) last evening, Gianni De Michelis, leader of the resurrected Socialist Party, came out firmly in favor of staying, with only Fausto Bertinotti, of Rifondazione Comunista, loudly insisting for withdrawal. Marco Pannella of the Radical Party also favors staying. The argument for staying is fear of what would happen if the Coalition abandoned Iraq, and even fear of leaving the US alone with the problem. Not present on the program were the political leaders (on the left) who have to support Italy's contribution to world affairs but whose potential voters include a large number of no-global, anti-capitalist, and crypto-anarchist organizations, screw-the-public transport unions, knee-jerk anti-americans, peace-at-any-price flag-wavers and nostalgic Catholics, whose attitude is "screw Bush at any price." These leaders are in trouble.

So Berlusconi's "support" should be read as "most Italians realize that the Coalition is stuck with the problem and has to finish the job." "

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Wolfowitz and the Marsh Arabs

Mickey Kaus responds to my explanation (below) of my view of the relative authority of Muqtada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He says, however, that I compared Wolfowitz to Saddam and that I was in his view too "shrill" to be "completely reliable" as a result. But this is what I said:

When I say Muqtada has won politically . . . I mean that he has made the US look like an oppressive tyrant. Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.

I did not "compare Wolfowitz to Saddam." I compared the killing of dozens of Marsh Arab fighters in Kut and Amara by the US Department of Defense to the killing of dozens of Marsh Arab fighters by Saddam. I said that Muqtada has maneuvered the US into looking to the Marsh Arabs as though it is behaving like Saddam.

As for my reliability, well that depends on a record. Go back and read the Web Log over the past year and show me where I've been unreliable.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US War Planes Kill 40 Iraqis Near the Syrian Border

The NYT report on the US helicopter gunship attack that killed 40 Iraqis, including 15 children and 10 women is typical of reporting on this incident in showing puzzlement at what actually happened. The US military claims that they were hitting arms smugglers coming across the border from Syria, and have good evidence in the form of captured materials that that is what they did hit. Local people told reporters that the US had hit a wedding party. My suspicion is that the US military mistook the wedding party, which included celebratory fire, for combatants. They did this once before, in Afghanistan. And I wish the US military spokesmen could be more gracious about such errors. They seemed to deny having hit civilians, and insisted it was a righteous strike, even as all the reports were coming on the Arab satellite channels about the dead at the wedding party.

Can't they just say that they are deeply sorry for the Iraqis' loss, and that they are not sure what went wrong, and will investigate? If they did kill so many women and children, surely that is a mistake no matter how you parse it, and they may as well admit it. It is this arrogance and instistence that the US is always right that has caused almost 90% of the Iraqis to come to view the Americans as occupiers rather than liberators.

Update 5/20: I just saw Gen. Kimmit on television denying that US forces saw any children at the site that was hit. But video and Arab television and press reports clearly show women and children casualties! This way lies a further erosion of the credibility of the US military in Iraq.

A reader writes:

As someone who has spent 8 years in the Middle East, mostly in Saudi Arabia, I just had to shake my head when I read the following quote;

"Ten miles from Syrian border and 80 miles from nearest city and a wedding party? Don't be naive," said Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis in Fallujah. "Plus they had 30 males of military age with them. How many people go to the middle of the desert to have a wedding party?"

This guy obviously doesn’t know Arabs or Arab culture. On many occasions, Saudis I know spent the weekend “in the desert” for a wedding or other celebration. On one occasion, a Saudi that I worked with . . . asked me if we could trade cars for the weekend so he could attend a relatives wedding being held “in the desert”. I had great fun driving his Mercedes around Riyadh that weekend while he had great fun driving my jeep to and from the desert. And his “30 males of military age” comment? That’s truly ridiculous. I’ve been to LOTS of weddings that had “30 males of military age with them”. That comment was just plain stupid."

Cole here: I concur. In my trips to the Gulf I was always taken to the desert late at night by my hosts for a kind of extended picnic, with lots of (gender segregated) festivities, poetry, singing.
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Sistani and al-Sadr: Demonstrations and Counter-Demonstrations

Mainstream Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the young sectarian leader Muqtada al-Sadr are now locked in a battle of wills, according to az-Zaman.

Several hundred Sistani supporters braved the dangerous streets of Karbala Wednesday to protest the continued battles near the shrine of Imam Husain and demanding that all combatants leave Karbala with their arms. Sistani had called for such demonstrations. Later in the day in Karbala, at least 7 Iraqis were killed and 13 were wounded on Tuesday night through Wednesday in clashes between the US and al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.. One of those killed was journalist Bassam al-Azzawi, who was covering the events there. Tanks spread through the city. It was deserted except for the one demonstration mentioned above.

Scheherezade Faramarzi of AP reports of Karbala: "Elsewhere in Iraq, U.S. military officials yesterday accused fighters loyal to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr of firing on American forces from one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines. Sheik al-Sadr's militia was operating from the Imam Hussein shrine in the center of Karbala, said Capt. Noel Gorospe, spokesman for the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. "They use mainly the windows of the second floor of the shrine [to fire at troops]," Capt. Gorospe said at Camp Lima, a coalition base on the outskirts of Karbala. Insurgents were using small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, and their use of the shrine was more noticeable in the past three days, he said. Witnesses said American troops and militiamen fought yesterday near a militia checkpoint 100 yards from another holy site in Karbala, the Imam Abbas shrine."

About 300 supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, on the other hand (many of them apparently from elsewhere in Iraq and newly arrived) staged a rally in the center of Najaf protesting Sistani's call for an end to armed hostilities in the holy city. AP reports that fighting started back up in Najaf, as well.

"In Najaf, about 50 miles south of Karbala, strong explosions could be heard late Wednesday along with the rattle of machine gun fire. Fighters from al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army were seen on the streets despite a call Tuesday by the premier Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, for both the Americans and the militia to vacate the city."

az-Zaman says it was told by informed sources that the elders of the Sadrist movement begun by Muqtada's father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, oppose Muqtada's policies and his resort to armed violence. They are remaining silent, however, for fear of being killed by his partisans. The newspaper also received a communique signed by major clerics of Najaf condemning the gathering of extremists in the city and accusing Muqtada of having ordered that Sistani's house be sprayed by machine gun fire.

Al-Hayat is reporting a breaking development, saying that US Coalition leaders have backed off their hard line toward Muqtada al-Sadr and are offering him a truce and direct negotiations. I'm not sure this overture is actually a backing off of Coalition demands that Muqtada surrender himself to Abu Ghuraib prison, something he obviously will never do. (Would you?)

Meanwhile, a US military commander in Kut is hiring members of the Mahdi Army who will put down their weapons to help rebuild an old and now rusted amusement park. They figure the men would rather earn a living than fight in a militia.

' "Call it 'Six Flags Over Al Kut,' " quipped Col. Brad May, the regiment's commander. '

Give that man a medal.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Poll: Muqtada Second Most Popular Politician in Iraq

Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times reports the results of a poll of 1600 Iraqis from all major ethnic groups.

The results confirm that radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is holed up in Najaf as his militiamen fight the Americans, has emerged as among the more popular politicians in Iraq, already suggested by a poll done in late March and reported in the Washington Post.

"Respondents saw Mr Sadr as the second most influential figure in Iraq, next only to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most senior Shia cleric. Some 32 per cent of respondents said they strongly supported Mr Sadr and another 36 per cent said they somewhat supported him. Ibrahim Jaafari, the head of the Shia Islamist Daawa party and a member of the governing council, came next on the list."

Nearly 90 percent of Iraqis surveyed saw the US troops as occupiers, not liberators. This is up from 20 percent in October of 2003 and 47 percent in January, 2004. Not a good curve for the US. Over half want US troops out now. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll done in late March had found that 56 percent of Iraqis wanted the US troops to depart immediately.

This poll was done before the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal broke, so I suspect the negative numbers for the US have increased.

Mickey Kaus at Slate.com contrasts my views on Muqtada al-Sadr to those of Amir Taheri, says that one or the other of us is dead wrong, and complains that is is hard for non-experts to know which it is.

In blogging Shiism in Iraq, I am trying to convey very complex social and intellectual realities from another society as I read them, to a wider audience. It is really tough material to get across. Journalism is quite rightly about trying to boil complex things down to something relatively simple and digestible. Academics are about understanding complex things in all their complexity. I confess to favoring the second, even as I realize that some simplification is necessary to communicate information.

I say this because I don't see a stark contradiction between what I have been saying and what Taheri wrote. The reason Mr. Kaus thinks there is a contradiction is that he is seeing religious authority as a zero-sum game. This is a game where there is one pie, and two or more pieces, such that if one person gets a bigger piece, the other person's piece must shrink. If Sistani has more authority, he reasons, Muqtada must have less. Thus, Taheri is saying Sistani has more; I am saying Muqtada is gaining more; and therefore one of us must be wrong or the pie comes out to 150 percent.

But religious authority in Shiism is not a zero-sum game. It is overlapping and nested. Shiites can follow both Sistani and Muqtada. They overlap. The poll cited above proves my point. Sistani gets approval ratings in the 70s or 80s, and Muqtada gets them in the 60s. This result is impossible in a zero sum game. But it is possible if we have an altogether different sort of game, where you throw different-sized blankets on top of a bed to see which covers it best. No blanket covers 100 percent of the bed, but some blankets can cover 66 percent and others can cover 80 percent without either detracting from the size of the other.

I don't contest Taheri's estimation of Sistani's enormous moral authority. What I do insist on is that Muqtada al-Sadr is very widely admired; that he is very strongly supported by about a third of Iraqis (I have been saying this for a year), and that he has fanatical followers and cadres in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The polling, the military and popular movements, all of the primary sources I read in Arabic, confirm these points over and over again.

When I say Muqtada has won politically, I mean that he has stood up to the US for a month and a half, has survived, is continuing to defy it, and his forces still occasionally show an ability to surprise the coalition (as when they briefly tossed the Italians off their base near Nasiriyah earlier this week). I mean that he has enhanced his popularity nationally. I mean that he has made the US look like an oppressive tyrant. Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons. Muqtada may well be doomed, but his movement is not going to go away, and his doom will just make him a national martyr and cause all sorts of new problems for the US. If Sistani comes out strongly against Muqtada, that will make the game more like a zero-sum one, but a lot of Shiites will try to avoid choosing sides, even as the strong partisans of each come into starker conflict.

If Taheri underestimates Muqtada, he is not alone. Most Western observers do, including George W. Bush. But what he says about Sistani can be true even if I am right.

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All Bush Wants to do is Dance

It seems clear that the weird Bush policy of doing the most destructive thing possible is likely to continue in Iraq until the Apocalypse. (See below.) In view of today's news (see below) I now formally propose an anthem for the Bush endeavor in Iraq. The Drudge story that Bush once got naked when drunk (he was apparently mostly drunk for about 20 years) and danced on a bar top is probably untrue. But I can only imagine there has been a lot of drunken dancing of one kind or another in his past. Reminds me of the Hindu God Siva and his Nataraja dance of destruction. Anyway, this one is dedicated to George's Yale partying days, and with apologies to Don Henley (sung to the tune of the Eagles' "All She wants to Do is Dance"):

All Bush wants to Do Is Dance

They're pickin' up the prisoners and puttin'
'em in the pen
And all Bush wants to do is dance, dance
Rebels been rebels since I don't know when
And all Bush wants to do is dance
Molotov cocktail-the local drink
And all Bush wants to do is dance, dance, dance
They mix 'em up right in the kitchen sink
And all Bush wants to do is dance
Crazy people walkin' round
with blood in their eyes
And all Bush wants to do is dance, dance
Wild-eyed pistol wavers
who ain't afraid to die
And all Bush wants to do is-
And all Bush wants to do is dance
and make romance
Bush can't feel the heat comin' off the street
Bush wants to party (oooo)
Bush wants to get down (oooo)
And all Bush wants to do is-
And all Bush wants to do is dance

For "cont'd" postings, click here.