Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

The New Improved Iraq

My essay about the so-called transfer of sovereignty in Iraq is now available online at In These Times. An excerpt:

The so-called transition to sovereignty for Iraq set for June 30 [actually held on June 28] has been trumpeted as a turning point by the Bush administration. It is hard to see, however, what exactly it changes. A symbolic act like a turnover of sovereignty cannot supply security, which is likely to deteriorate further as insurgents attempt to destabilize the new, weak government. The caretaker government, appointed by outsiders, does not represent the will of the Iraqi people. Some 138,000 U.S. troops remain in the country and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad will be the largest in the world, both of which bode ill for any exercise of genuine sovereignty by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

The caretaker government faces five key issues, any one of which could be destabilizing. It must jumpstart the creation of an Iraqi army that could hope to restore security. It must find a way to hold free and fair elections by next January, a difficult trick to pull off given the daily toll of bombings and assassinations. It must get hospitals, water treatment plants and other essential services back to acceptable levels. It must keep the country’s various factions from fighting one another or from pulling away in a separatist drive. And it must negotiate between religious and secularist political forces.

The issue of separatism already has arisen. The U.N. resolution that created the new government neglected to mention the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or temporary constitution passed by the Interim Governing Council under American auspices in February. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of most of Iraq’s majority Shiite population, had warned U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan against endorsing that document. The TAL calls for a secular legal code and gives the minority Kurds a veto over the permanent constitution, to be hammered out by an elected parliament in spring of 2005. Sistani objects to the Kurds’ veto. The major Kurdish leaders, for their part, worry that the United Nations and the Bush administration might go back on the promises made to the Kurds of semi-autonomy and special minority rights. Some angrily threatened to secede from Iraq if that should happen. The creation of the caretaker government, which was supposed to help resolve problems of instability, instead has provoked a major crisis with one major Iraqi ethnic group.

Early last January a member of the U.S.-appointed Interim Governing Council (IGC) in Iraq, Mahmoud Osman, gave a revealing interview to Al-Hayat of London. He said that officials of the Bush administration in Iraq had been “extremely offended” when the IGC called for U.N. involvement in the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. The administration, he explained, did not want any international actor to participate in this process; rather it wanted to reap the benefits in order to increase President Bush’s political stock in the months leading up to the November election. He added: “The fundamental issue for Iraqis is the return of sovereignty. The Americans are in a hurry for it, as well, though for their own interests. The important thing for the Americans is to ensure the reelection of George Bush. The achievement of a specific accomplishment in Iraq, such as the transfer of power, increases, in the eyes of the Republican Party, the chances that Bush will be reelected.”

In the end, Sistani and other Iraqi politicians forced Bush to involve the United Nations and to seek a Security Council resolution. He also was forced to give away far more actual sovereignty to the caretaker government than he would have liked in order to get the U.N. resolution he had not originally wanted. In particular, the U.S. military must now consult with the Iraqi government before undertaking major military actions.

But is the turnover really much of an accomplishment? All that has happened is that the Bush administration worked with special U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to appoint the four top officers of state and the cabinet ministers. This group of appointees will then be declared the sovereign government of Iraq.

Iraq already had the U.S.-appointed IGC, consisting of 25 Iraqi politicians, many of them longtime expatriates associated with significant Iraq parties or ethnic constituencies. They had in turn already appointed cabinet ministers. Why is a second appointed government better? Moreover, the overlap between the two is substantial. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a group of ex-Baath officers and officials who had fallen out with Saddam, was an influential member of the IGC. Allawi’s group engaged in terrorist actions against the Saddam regime with backing from the Central Intelligence Agency. Consequently, his emergence as prime minister is something of an embarrassment to both countries. And it was Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord that also provided false intelligence to the Bush administration and the Blair government about the dangers of Saddam’s regime.

Read the rest.
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Rashid Khalidi's talk at UCLA, "Government Attacks on Area Specialists Called Disservice to U.S. Middle East Policy," is absolutely essential reading. Khalidi covers the group-think at the Pentagon, the exclusion and intimidation of State Department Middle East experts, the willful disregard by the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith crew of Middle East expertise generally, and the recent attempt to muzzle academic Middle East specialists. Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University and the author of an important recent book,
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (Beacon Press, April 2004).
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3 US Marines Killed, 2 Injured; 2 Police Officers Killed in Continued Iraq Violence on Tuesday

The Associated Press reports:

Guerrillas killed three U.S. Marines and wounded two others with a roadside bomb in southeast Baghdad on Tuesday, damaging their Humvee.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US patrol in the upscale Sunni Azamiyah district. They appear not to have hurt any US soldiers, but they killed a civilian bystander, according to an anonymous source in the Iraqi ministry of the interior,

In Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a police station. They killed one police officer and one civilian, reciting verses from the Koran before firing small arms and rpgs at the police station. This detail suggests that the guerrillas are radical Salafi Sunnis. Salafis are Sunni Muslims dedicated to going back to the practice of the "pious ancestors" (al-salaf al-salih), sort of like Protestants in Christianity. They want to slough off medieval practices and commentaries. Most are peaceful, but some Salafis have turned radical and take up arms, just as there were violent Lutheran peasant rebellions in early modern Europe.

In Kirkuk, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a senior Kurdish policeman was passing. It killed one of his guards and wounded him. The police in Kirkuk are dominated by the Kurds, even though the city is 2/3s non-Kurdish (Turkmen and Arabs make up one third each of the city's population.

In better news, guerrillas released three Turkish captives on Tuesday, saying that they had done so "for the sake of their Muslim brothers." This phraseology reflects the anger among Muslims, Iraqi or otherwise, at the guerrillas in Iraq who have killed Muslims with bombings and attacks. Apparently these radical Islamist fighters feared that killing the Turks, as they had Americans and a Korean, would dry up support for them among the Muslim population. The current Turkish government is the second most pro-Islamic Turkey has had since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, though the army and most Turkish institutions remain dedicated to the secularist principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It appears to have succeeded in appealing to the guerrillas on the basis of Islamic fellow feeling.


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US Soldier Kept Hostage by Guerrillas is Killed

The killing of Spc. Keith Matthew Maupin by guerrillas in Iraq marks the potential beginning of a new tactic in the Iraq war. For the most part, it is hard for the guerrillas to wreak much real damage on US troops in the country, who are well armed and well protected. Ocassionally they manage to kill a US soldier with a roadside bomb or mortar or rpg fire. But these actions do not really wreak significant harm on the US war effort, though the accumulation of such deaths is beginning to alarm the US public.

Taking a soldier hostage, on the other hand, is much easier than killing large numbers of US troops. Since an individual hostage has a name and a face and family members, his story is much more affecting than is the report of a casualty statistic, even when a name is given. With the killing of Spc. Maupin, the guerrillas have initiated a new media campaign aimed at weakening the will of the US public to remain in Iraq. I fear guerrillas may increasingly deploy this tactic.

One thing I admire about John Kerry's approach to Iraq is that he never fails to keep in view the sacrifice of the American soldiers and the positive contributions they have made. The Bush administration has grossly mismanaged post-war Iraq, but that is not the fault of US troops, who are mostly dedicated young people thrust into an unfamiliar situation in which their lives are in danger. They did rid Iraq of a genocidal regime, and they have done a lot of behind the scenes community service work in Iraq. I hope Americans, as they increasingly turn against the Iraq war (with every reason in the world) will not repeat the error of some in the 1970s, who despised Vietnam vets along with the Vietnam war. One officer confessed to me last fall when things were obviously turning bad, "Dr. Cole, I'm in a business where if I'm ordered to shoot over there, I shoot over there." He clearly was unhappy with the policies pursued. But what could he do. The American public owes it to these troops to give them a civilian leadership who will do right by them.

[addendum: Some readers wrote to complain that the stories that Vietnam vets faced hostility from anti-war Americans was a black legend spread in the 1980s and did not reflect the reality. I'm not in a position at the moment to comment on this issue one way or another, but note the objection.]

Also captured, with his fate as yet unknown, is Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, a Lebanese-American Marine, His case underlines the service given to the United States by Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. In the wake of September 11, it is especially important that the US public constantly be reminded that Arab Americans are not aliens but a longstanding and essential thread in the great American tapestry. Lebanese began coming to the US in some numbers in the 1880s. That wave of immigration, which was greatly reduced from 1924, also brought the Italians and Eastern European Jews to this country. Although most Lebanese immigrants were Christian, it is estimated that about 10% were Muslim.

Many Arabs took up the peddling trade in the Midwest, trekking long hours to farm houses to supply basic supplies at a time before the Model T and the Sears and Roebuck catalogue made it easy to get them. When the automobile helped kill the peddling business, many Arab Americans flocked to Dearborn to work for Ford, so that ironically the very industry that ended their previous jobs provided them new ones. The "Syrians" were a key element all along in the Detroit automobile industry, and southeast Michigan came to have the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Arab world itself.

The red scare after WW I and the spread of anti-immigrant racism closed off most such immigration from 1924 until 1965, when the Civil Rights Movement impelled Congress to end the quota system installed in 1924 (which had set tiny quotas for Syria and Lebanon and large ones for Germany and Norway). A second wave of large-scale Arab immigration began from 1965 and continues until the present.

Comedian Danny Thomas and his daughter Marlo Thomas (who married Phil Donohue) are among the best-known Arab Americans. But they are legion. They include Dr. DeBakey, who did pioneering work on the artificial heart, Paula Abdul, and Ralph Nader (Arab newspapers most often refer to him as the Arab presidential candidate), among many others.

Cpl. Hassoun has risked his for the United States of America. He is not only a Marine, but an Arab-American Muslim. All Americans owe him and his family a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid. The next time any American looks askance at someone for having an Arabic accent or appearing Arab, they should remember Cpl. Hassoun. I only hope he can escape his captors so that we can remember his further exploits.

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Monday, June 28, 2004

Bremer Flees Iraq Two Days Early

Paul Bremer suddenly left Iraq on Monday, having "transferred sovereignty" to the caretaker Iraqi government two days early.

It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty. Since the US military is so weak in Iraq and appears to have poor intelligence on the guerrilla insurgency, the Bush administration could not take the chance that a major bombing or other attack would mar the ceremony.

The surprise move will throw off all the major news organizations, which were planning intensive coverage of the ceremonies originally planned for Wednesday.

This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to that effect). Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush show. That's what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations and manipulation of journalists. Let's see if they fall for it.

Allawi is not popular and was not elected by anyone in Iraq. The Kurds were sullen today. There were no public celebrations in Baghdad. When people in the Arab world are really happy, there is celebratory fire. They are willing to give Allawi a chance, but that is different from wholehearted support.

What has changed? The big change is that Allawi now controls the Iraqi government's $20 billion a year in income. About $10 bn. of that is oil revenues, and those may be hurt this year by extensive sabotage. To tell you the truth, I can't imagine where the other $10 bn. comes from. The government can't collect much in taxes. Some of it may be foreign aid, but not much of that has come in. The problem is that the Iraqi government probably needs $30 billion to run the government properly, and with only 2/3s of that or less, the government will be weak and somewhat ineffective.

Since Bremer was a congenital screw-up, just getting him and his CPA out of the country and out of control may be a good step forward. Allawi won't care about Polish style shock therapy for the economy. Allawi does not have any investment in keeping Iraq weak or preventing it from having a proper army. But how the Iraqi military, if brought back, can operate in a security environment where there are 160,000 foreign troops under US command is unclear.

So that some group of Iraqis now control the budget and can set key policy in some regards may be significant. But the caretaker government is hedged around by American power. Negroponte (the US ambassador to Baghdad who has just arrived in the country) will control $18 bn. in US AID to Iraq. Rumsfeld will go on controlling the US and coalition military. There isn't much space left for real Iraqi sovereignty in all that.

Another danger is that Allawi will overshoot and provide too much security. He is infatuated with reviving the Baath secret police or mukhabarat, and bringing back Saddam's domestic spies. Unlike the regular army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the secret police are dirty, and if they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter.

The guerrilla insurgency will continue, perhaps become more active. My wife Shahin, always a keen and canny observer, thinks the guerrillas will make their priority number one the assassination of Allawi.

See also the article by Michael Hill of the Baltimore Sun, where I and others are quoted.

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Fallujah

Nir Rosen's brave and essential reporting from Fallujah in the New Yorker is a must read. A taste:


' A young boy from Najaf wearing a pressed white shirt tucked neatly into bluejeans walked up to the lectern, and the microphone was lowered to accommodate him. The boy raised his right arm, pointing his index finger at the sky. “I came to praise the heroes of Falluja!” he shouted. His poem ended with calls to God—“Ya Allah! Ya allah!”—that he screamed out. Then he began to sob, and he was led away, wiping his tears. The men in the front row of plastic chairs embraced and kissed him, and he returned to the lectern and recited another poem. This time, he brandished a Kalashnikov that was as long as he was tall. '




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10 Killed in Iraq, including a US Soldier; One Marine Held Hostage

A US Marine was taken hostage in Iraq on June 21, and the group that kidnapped him is now threatening to kill Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun.

The fascist US pundits who keep intimating that Muslim-Americans or Arab Americans should be under suspicion after 9/11 should be doubly ashamed of themselves, given what Hassoun risked and what he is suffering for this country (he is Lebanese-American).

The Khaleej Times says, ' Meanwhile, at least 10 people - a US soldier, another American, two Iraqi children and six Iraqi National Guardsmen - were killed in separate attacks across Iraq. '

A US military casualty occurred when a C-130 transport plane came under fire and had to return to Baghdad airport. One soldier on board was killed, but the plane was largely unharmed.

Tarek Tablawi of AP reports that on Sunday, guerrillas launched a mortar attack on the party office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Mosul, killing a party member, and injuring nine others. Mosul also saw two drive-by shootings, in which a policeman was killed and a guard at an Iraqi army recruiting center.

Explosions were heard in Fallujah, possibly as a result of a mortar attack on US Marines.

In Baghdad, the Green Zone or American compound took mortar or rocket fire, but no casualties were sustained.

Guerrillas who captured three Turkish hostages threatened to kill them unless Turkey withdraws civlian contractors from Iraq. Turkish PM Erdogan refused. The Turkish hostage situation cast a pall over the NATO meeting in Istanbul, where the Iraq war was enormously unpopular and where Bush is deeply disliked. Some 40,000 Turks protested his visit over the weekend. See below for more on Bush in Istanbul.
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Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw Michael Moore's new film in Ann Arbor at the midnight show last Thursday, thinking I might say something about it over the weekend. But social commitments of a pleasant sort kept me away from the keyboard, and I don't know when I will get to posting extended comments.

The film is inspired polemic, and I enjoyed it (if that is the word--the second half was painful). It has some serious flaws of argumentation. I thought the best parts were where Moore just let the footage speak for itself.

It struck me during the second half how seldom one sees in mainstream US media any extended interviews with Iraqis who vehemently oppose the US occupation. Since these are probably by now a solid majority, according to polls, it is odd that we never hear from that point of view. There is an undertone of patriotism or even nationalism to national American news that is peculiar if one looks at the industrialized democracies in Europe, e.g.

The film has an affecting scene of a woman screaming that her innocent, civilian relatives had been killed, and calling down curses on the US (yikhrib buyuthum, may God demolish their houses). Given the thousands of Iraqis killed in the past 14 months, there must be a lot of persons who feel that way. Moore is the only one showing them to us, to my knowledge.

I thought the point that Bush spent a lot of time away from Washington in his first 8 months in office was well made, and dovetails with the revelations of former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke about Bush's unconcern with the terrorism threat. The way in which the Iraq war was a manipulated get-up job was also graphically and well portrayed. Likewise the cynical use of the "war on terror" to erode Americans' basic civil liberties is appropriately presented in canny and strident tones (James Madison would have been strident about this, too).

The interview with Michigan congressman John Conyers in which Conyers reveals that no one in Congress was allowed to read the Patriot Act before voting on it was breathtaking. I recently sat next to Conyers on a plane, and he explained to me that the final version of the bill, which had been very extensively changed, was delivered the night before the vote. He said it wasn't strange for a few minor changes to be made at such a late stage, but that it was his impression that virtually a new bill was dropped on the hapless Congress at the last moment. It is huge, and would have been impossible to read all the way through with attention under those circumstances.

The Patriot Act is so radical a departure from the American Civil Liberties tradition that if its most radical provisions are made permanent, as Bush desires, I think it would be legitimate to date from 2001 the Second American Republic. It is a much impoverished republic compared to the first, and ominously intertwined with Imperial themes. If Moore makes anyone angry about anything, I hope it is this.

I thought the bit connecting Bush to the Saudis was full of illogic. Wealthy people in the oil business are going to have relations with the Saudis, who at their best rates can produce 11 million of the 76 million barrels of oil pumped daily in the world. The Saudis can also get along with pumping 7 million barrels a day, so they are a pivotal swing producer and can affect the price deeply.

Another viewer asked me if it were true that the Saudis own 7% of the US economy, which was the impression the person brought away from the film. I'm not sure that is what Moore asserted, but it in any case cannot possibly be true. I think he said they had invested $700 billion in the US. Actually, total Saudi investments worldwide are about $700 bn., with about 60% in the US, or $420 bn. It is a nice chunk of change (and helps keep the US economy from collapsing from unwise US policies like running $500 bn. deficits--but note that one year of Bush deficits equals the whole value of all Saudi investment!). But even just the goods and services produced every year in the US amount to about $11 trillion. Moore seems to have started out by claiming that the Saudi investment equals 7% of the New York Stock Exchange. But NYSE investments amount to $15 trillion. My back of the envelope calculation is that Saudi investments are actually about 2.8 percent of that. Then Moore truncated that to "7% of the US economy." But the latter is not what he really meant to say. To get that, you'd have to know how much all existing property in the US is worth, and figure the proportion of it represented by $420 bn. The Saudis don't own more than a tiny proportion of the privately held wealth in the US. They are not even the major foreign investor in the US-- The British, Dutch, and Japanese top them.

Moreover, if it is true that the Saudis have so much invested in this country, then it makes no sense for wealthy Saudi entrepreneurs and governing figures to wish the US harm. Can you imagine the bath Saudi investments took here after 9/11? The Saudi royals and the Bin Ladens lounging about in places like Orlando, who were airlifted out lest they be massacred after the attacks, didn't know anything about the apocalyptic plots hatched in dusty Qandahar, and if they had they would have blown the whistle on them with the US so as to avoid losing everything they had.

The Saudi bashing in the Moore film makes no sense. It is true that some of the hijackers were Saudis, but that is only because Bin Laden hand-picked some Saudi muscle at the last minute to help the brains of the operation, who were Egyptians, Lebanese, Yemenis, etc. Bin Laden did that deliberately, in hopes of souring US/Saudi relations so that he could the better overthrow the Saudi government.

The implication one often hears from Democrats that the US should have invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after the Afghan war rather than Iraq is just another kind of warmongering and illogical. There is no evidence that either the Saudi or the Pakistani government was complicit in 9/11.

The story Moore tells about the Turkmenistan gas pipeline project through Afghanistan and Pakistan also makes no sense. First, why would it be bad for the Turkmenistanis to be able to export their natural gas? What is wicked about all that? It is true that some forces wanted the pipeline so badly that they even were willing to deal with the Taliban, but this was before Bin Laden started serious operations against the US from Afghan soil, beginning in 1998 with the East Africa embassy bombings.

In any case, if Bush had been supporting the Taliban, why did he then overthrow them? If it was because they turned out not to be a Mussolini type of government that made the trains run on time, but rather to be supporters of international terrorism, then wasn't it logical for Bush to turn against them? The mid-90s temptation to support the Taliban, who seemed to be bringing order to Afghanistan (albeit the order of the mass grave) was bipartisan. Moore says Afghan president Karzai had been involved in the earlier pipeline plan, and now is president. I still cannot understand why the pipeline is evil. Afghanistans would collect $2 bn. a year on tolls, and the Turkmen would be lifted out of poverty, and Pakistan and India might have a new reason to cooperate rather than fighting. I personally wish it could be built immediately. It doesn't explain the US Afghan war (one thing cannot explain both the temptation to coddle the Taliban and the determination to get rid of them). The US only intervened to overthrow the Taliban reluctantly, and because it was the only way to get at al-Qaeda, which needed to be rooted out.

So, I think the second half the the film, on Bush's Iraq policy, has virtues. He turns out to have been prescient about how fictitious the reasons for the war were. But some of the innuendo about the Saudis and Afghans just seems an attempt to damn by association, and seem to me to be based on faulty logic and innacurate assertions.

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$2 Billion Unaccounted for In CPA Handling of Iraq Finances

The BBC reports that of nearly $20 billion in Iraqi money that the Coalition Provisional Authority had authority over during the past year, some $2 billion is unaccounted for.

The report says, ' Helen Collinson, from Christian Aid, said: "For the entire year that the CPA has been in power in Iraq it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has been doing with Iraq's money." '
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Iraq Haunts Bush in Istanbul

Nabil al-Tikriti, who teaches history part-time at Loyola University New Orleans, writes Sunday from Istanbul:


' Hello:

There are 15 million people in Istanbul who [are extremely hostile to] Bush. So that he could get a private tour of Topkapi and the rest of Istanbul during this NATO summit, they have closed the following for THREE DAYS: coast road from the airport to Dolmabahce, Galata Bridge, Taksim Square, Besiktas stadium valley, Sirkeci ferry terminals, and the first Bosphorus bridge. Last night we couldn't cross the coast road to view the sunrise from the Marmara. Today we can't get to the islands, because the ferry terminals are closed. Surreal. I'm trying to figure out how to leave my Sultanahmet hotel to get over to Beyoglu for the next couple of days. They recommended before the summit that everyone just leave town, and yesterday everyone I tried to contact was on their way to their summer holiday on the beach. It was like Thanksgiving Wednesday in the US.

Anyone who knows Istanbul knows that such a closure literally turns the city into an open-air prison. There are snipers posted on the next building to our hotel, constant military helicopters buzzing around, and naval craft cruising offshore. If only for sacrificing three days of their life for Bush's secure comfort, people here are furious. The trend in the past couple of years has been to hold such summits in remote locations. What brainchild decided to hold this summit smack in the center of one of the world's largest cities, with hostility running so high?

The bilateral meeting between Bush and Turkish PM Erdogan this morning was a thing of beauty. Bush said: "our disagreements in the past year are behind us, it's time to look to the future." That was diplomatic code for "I'm sorry I called you names last year when you stopped us from sending 40,000 troops across your territory to invade your neighbor. Help, for God's sake!" The Turkish reaction was a rather smug and quiet sort of:

"You'll not be taking me for granted anytime soon. Good luck in Iraq, my friend. There's still that matter of billions of USD public debt you promised to forgive. Put up or shut up. Oh, and don't let the door hit you on your way out."

I just spent three days at a conference entitled "A Future for Our Past," which was the opening salvo of a group called "Istanbul Initiative." The goal of the group is to advocate for protection of cultural patrimonies worldwide, starting with Iraq. All the heavy-hitters concerning the Iraq artifacts issue were present: Donny George, McGuire Gibson, and several others. There was a delegation of Iraqis . . . joined by lawyers active in fighting the artifacts dealers, representatives of the British Museum, Yale, Chicago, Dutch military, Turkish Foreign Ministry, and several Turkish scholars.

At the end of the conference, we were asked to submit suggestions for a common declaration. When I suggested that there should be a call for restitution to the Iraqi state by the UK and US governments, as well as criminal prosecution of the individuals responsible for bringing about the conditions leading to the wholesale destruction of Iraq's cultural patrimony (archaeological sites, Baghdad Museum, manuscript collections, provincial museums -- all burned and/or looted), there was a largely positive reaction (although as it was not complete consensus, it probably won't make the final cut).

The Turks and Iraqis, none of whom had ever met, hit it off quite well -- a relationship that should continue well into the future. When the declaration is finalized, I'll forward it . . .

Cheers,
Nabil '

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Sunday, June 27, 2004

Clarke: Invasion of Iraq an Enormous Mistake

In a speech in Orlando, former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke said, according to AP:


' The invasion of Iraq was an ''enormous mistake'' that is costing untold lives, strengthening al-Qaida and breeding a new generation of terrorists, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said Saturday.

''We did exactly what al-Qaida said we would do invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country that wasn't threatening us in any way,'' Clarke said before giving the keynote address at the American Library Association's annual convention in Orlando. ''The hatred that has been engendered by this invasion will last for generations. . .'' '

''We won the Cold War by, yes, having good strong military forces but also by competing in the battle of ideas against the Communists,'' Clarke later told the librarians. ''We have to do that with the jihadists.''


He referred to the Abu Ghuraib prison scandal in this regard.


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Attacks Target Party Offices in Iraq

Al-Hayat: Guerrilla attacks on Saturday concentrated on party offices of parties allied with the United States. Gunmen attacked the HQ of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in Baqubah, killing 4 persons. Others blew up the HQ of the Iraqi National Accord, the party of caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. In the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, center of the Kurdish Democratic Party led by Massoud Barzani, a car bomb exploded, killing one person and wounding 40 others, including the Kurdish minister of culture, Mahmoud Muhammad.

In the southern Shiite city of Hilla, a car bomb exploded in the center of the city, killing at least 32 and wounding 42, according to AFP.

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Saturday, June 26, 2004

Should Cheney be Fined $275,000?

Vice President Dick Cheney shouted "go fuck yourself!" at inoffensive Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, at a photo opportunity on the Senate floor earlier this week. On Friday he told Fox Cable News, "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it."

Now, it seems to me that the Senate floor is public space, paid for by the public. And in this regard, there is no difference between it and the public airwaves, which the public also owns.

We know what the Republicans in the Senate think about the use of obscenities on the airwaves. The Federal Communications Commission under the chairmanship of Michael Powell, son of the secretary of state, has waged a campaign of harassment and persecution against broadcasters who use colorful language on the airwaves, especially Howard Stern. Clear Channel dropped Stern and had to pay $1.75 million in fines for his and other infractions. The Republican-controlled Senate even attached a rider to a defense bill (!) raising the fine for a single infraction from $27,500 to $275,000. What I take away from all this is that the Republicans in the Senate are against using the word "fuck" in public spaces of discourse, owned by the public.

Personally, I think people who don't want to hear Howard Stern should change the channel. The one thing Reagan was right about is that there are areas where we should get the Federal government off our backs. Speaking as we please is one of them, and Jefferson and Madison thought so, too. If the Powell FCC is going to take public ownership of the airwaves so seriously, then it should restore them to us and take them away from the corporations to whom it is has given them away for practically nothing. They used at least to offer us something like real news in return for this gift, worth trillions, but now some of them take our airwaves and use them to feed us propaganda by persons dressed like news anchors but who are actually professional spinmeisters.

Howard Stern no doubt feels better when he gets some blue language off his chest, too. So I propose that Mr. Cheney be made to pay $275,000 for fouling the air of the Senate in the way that he did. Should he feel the need to feel good again, he should be aware that the second offense in the Senate bill costs $500,000.

And, I propose that the fine go to vocational training for the disadvantaged people that Cheney has made a career of stomping all over.

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US Kills 20 in Fallujah Bombing
Muqtada condemns Thursday's Terrorism


The US air force bombed Fallujah again on Friday, hitting a safehouse of the al-Tawhid and al-Jihad organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and killing 20 fighters. Some reports, apparently based on aerial surveillance, suggested that they just missed Zarqawi. I'm not sure, though, how you tell that from the top of someone's head, and remain skeptical about these kinds of claims. We on the outside don't know where they come from or how reliable they are, and it is more convenient for the CPA to claim it almost got Zarqawi than to admit that they tried and missed (i.e failed). The US resort to bombing suggests how weak it is in Fallujah, since it means it could not commit troops to an attack on the safehouse. There is now a plan to set up a security perimeter around Fallujah to curb the activities of the jihadis based there. But I had read several weeks ago that such a security perimeter had already been implemented. Has it lapsed?

The American news media often phrased this bombing as an attack on "al-Qaeda." But these al-Tawhid fighters never pledged loyalty to Bin Laden, and most probably never fought in Afghanistan. Zarqawi, who did, was never part of al-Qaeda and when he was in Germany he refused to share al-Tawhid resources with al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda anyway is not a top-down organization with a flow chart and a CEO. But I think it is downright misleading to call al-Tawhid by that name. Al-Tawhid is al-Tawhid. The Bush administration no doubt likes this shorthand because it reinforces the dubious point that the war in Iraq has something to do with the war on terror.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq until June 30, issued arrest warrants for three radical Sunni clerics in Fallujah on Friday. They include Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi, the leader of the "Holy Warriors Front" in the city, Sheikh Zahir al-Ubaidi, and Sheikh Umar Hadid. All three have been accused of leading the resistance to occupation in Fallujah. Al-Janabi and al-Ubaidi in particular had been accused recently of being implicated in the murder of 6 Shiite truck drivers from the al-Rubai'ah tribe near Fallujah, and desecrating their bodies. They have denied the charge, which caused substantial Sunni-Shiite tension.

The Friday prayers leaders in Fallujah condemned the American forces for "engaging in acts of enmity toward the population" of the city.

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that preachers throughout Iraq have been giving anti-American sermons for the past few weeks. Here are some quotes from his important piece:


' "American soldiers are infidels," said Youssef Khodeir, a Sunni sheik and imam of Saad Bani Moaz mosque in Baqouba, scene of the heaviest fighting Thursday. "The blood that is being shed every day is because we are not closing our ranks. The source of all power comes from adhering to the Qur'an . . ."

[Speaking of America supposedly bringing freedom,]Mohammed Bashar, told worshipers in Mosul that what America really wanted was "the freedom to kill and arrest Iraqis . . ."

"Al-Zarqawi is a myth created by America," sheik Aous al-Khafaji told hundreds of worshipers in Sadr City, where U.S. troops and al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army have clashed for 2½ months . . .

"We hope that after June 30 Iraqis will be united, loyal to their nation and not allow foreigners to interfere in their affairs," Sunni cleric Niema Hassan told a congregation at the Grand Mosque in Basra.


He also quotes a number of mosque preachers who condemned the killing of Iraqis by the bombings on Thursday (this is a critique of the foreign jihadis), and some who expressed hopes about the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi. (Recent polling in Iraq suggests that Iraqis are largely willing to give the caretaker government a chance, and want it to succeed in restoring security.)

Edward Cody of the Washington Post reports that Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants joined in the condemnations. Muqtada ' ordered his followers to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi police in Sadr City to "deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness. ' The Mahdi Army distributed a pamphlet that said, ' We know the Mahdi Army is ready to cooperate actively and positively with honest elements from among the Iraqi police and other patriotic forces, to partake in safeguarding government buildings and facilities, such as hospitals, electricity plants, water, fuel and oil refineries, and any other site that might be a target for terrorist attacks."

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Muqtada's spokesman in East Baghdad, Aws al-Khafaji, affirmed that the Mahdi Army would not attack the US if the US did not attack it. In Najaf, followers of Muqtada prevented Friday prayers from being held for a second week in a row. The conflict has become a little bit bizarre and hard to follow. Earlier, the Sadrists had complained that the sermon was being given by Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, local leader of their rival, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But someone replaced al-Qubanji with Khalid al-Numani. A Sadr spokesman said that he talked to the son of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who insisted that Sistani still backed Qubanji for the job and had not appointed al-Numani. The Sadrists then demonstrated against al-Numani on the grounds that he had not been appointed by Sistani. (But they had also not let Sistani's appointee, al-Qubanji, lead the prayers last week!) As with many reports from Iraq that make no sense on the surfance, it is certain that some complex back story has been omitted. (Do the Sadrists suspect that al-Numani has been placed in Najaf as an agent of the Americans?)

The WP also gives a more detailed overview of the attack in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad. It is still unclear who exactly launched the attack. The WP report says that the US troops counted it as a major victory that they killed a local leader of the Buhriz resistance, Husain Ali Sibti, last week. That is an indisputably Shiite name, which brought me up short. Diyala, where Baquba is located, is a mixed Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish region. If Sibti was leading the fighting in Buhriz, it was a local Shiite uprising of some sort. (But what sort? The Sadrists have largely stood down. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is strong in Baqubah,but it is allied for the moment with the Americans. It must be a local Shiite group with local grievances).

If in fact foreign jihadis allied with Zarqawi played a role in Thursday's attacks in Baqubah itself, it means that the action was unconnected to the Shiite uprising in Buhriz. The Sunni jihadis hate the guts of Shiites. Al-Sharq al-Awsat/AFP report that local Fallujans are annoyed by the attacks--mainly on the police--and blame it on foreign Arabs. An eyewitness, Abdul Salam, said "The armed persons who attacked my house and burned it, and who entered it, were Arab terrorists, one of them Egyptian and another Lebanese, and there were Arabs among them of other nationalities . . . The problem is that there are people from among the inhabitants of the city who help and support them and give them refuge in their homes. If it weren't for that, it would be difficult for them to continue with their work."
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Jack Ryan Withdraws from Race

Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan withdrew from the race on Friday. It had become increasingly clear to him that the allegations he pressured his then wife, actress Jeri Ryan, to attend sex clubs in the 1990s, would dominate the campaign if he tried to remain in it.

Former senator from Illinois, Republican Peter Fitzgerald, had encouraged Ryan to stay in the race. He said, apparently without a trace of embarrassment,

' "I think the public stoning of Jack Ryan is one of the most grotesque things I've seen in politics," the senator said Friday. He said the party's bigwigs pushed Ryan out: "It was like piranhas. They smelled blood in the water and they just devoured him." '

Can Fitzgerald say, "Bill Clinton's impeachment"?
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Friday, June 25, 2004

Jaafari: Iraqis Must be in Control
Emergency Laws a Possibility


Interim Vice President of Iraq, Ibrahim Jaafari, said Friday that emergency laws might be implemented if the security situation demanded it. Jaafari is a leader of the extremely powerful but under-reported al-Dawa Party, a covert Shiite organization organized by cells. AP's Tarek El-Tablawy is to be congratulated for getting an interview with him, because he could well emerge as prime minister in elections in January. Quotes:


' "Announcing emergency laws or martial law depends on the nature of the situation. In normal situations, there is clearly no need for that . . . But in cases of excess challenges, emergency laws have their place,'' he said, adding that any such laws would fall within a ''democratic framework that respects the rights of Iraqis.'' . . . Al-Jaafari expressed optimism that cooperation with multinational forces following the handover could mitigate the need for emergency laws. ''What we need is support for the security operations,'' he said. But ''under sovereignty, the relevant Iraqi authorities are the ones who would consider such steps.'' . . . Hardline Shiites, who had initially welcomed the toppling of Saddam's government, are increasingly concerned that the new government will be little more than a lackey of the West . . . Al-Jaafari said the United States, and other countries who continue to maintain a military presence following the handover, must ''respect'' Iraq's sovereignty and limit themselves to support and advisory roles that avoid giving the impression of a reversion to the pre-handover occupational stage. ''Security is a paramount concern,'' he said. ''But there must be a balance between achieving sovereignty, on the one hand, and (being aided) by non-Iraqi forces, to back up the security operation, on the other. . . There must be a clear understanding of this by any force that wants to join the Iraqi security forces (in aiding the country). We ask them to respect our sovereignty,'' al-Jaafari said. '


It worries me that Jaafari is talking about imposition of emergency laws (i.e. something like martial law, but the US has high-handedly told the Iraqi government it can't use that terminology.) The al-Da`wa, like most US allies in Iraq aside from the Kurds, does not actually have a history of commitment to democracy. Note also that he is underlining that there must be a perceived Iraqi control over the security situation-- i.e., the US military can't unilaterally go about the country staging operations without Allawi's permission. I predict that there are going to be big clashes between the caretaker Iraqi government and CENTCOM over these issues in coming months.

Radio Sawa in Iraq is reporting that interim Minister of Defense, Hazem al-Shaalan, has drawn up an emergency plan to deal with the "disturbances" (i.e. bombings and guerrilla attacks) in Baghdad. He is looking into the possiblity of imposing a state of emergency there and in other parts of Iraq. (N.B.: governments most often implement extra security in the capital, because government officials are located there). He said that a state of emergency would be declared in any area where there was a sufficient security threat. He emphasized that the authorities had not taken any final decision, and that the state of emergency might cover a limited territory or small stretches of territory. He made the remarks at a joint press conference with Interior Minister Fallah al-Naqib. He said that the measures now being studied enter into the framework of Iraqi law and that any steps taken will involve coordination between the ministries of Justice, Interior and Defense.

I'd say the ongoing guerrilla insurgency in Iraq has made all those nice rights announced in the Transitional Administrative Law late last winter a dead letter. Allawi and his whole crew seem to envisage the caretaker government declaring an emergency, imposing curfews, curbing individual rights of movement, and basically using authoritarian means in hopes of addressing the insurgency. The worst case scenario is that the impose press censorship and deprive people of all kinds of new-found rights, but still fail to stop the ongoing violence.

Hannah Allam on government factions in post-June 30 Iraq and the difficulty the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi will have in dealing with them. Allam covers Sistani (who will play along with Allawi as long as there is clear movement toward elections), Muqtada al-Sadr (who remains a radical wild card), and the Kurds, who want Kirkuk and its oil but face vehement objections from the 2/3s of the city that is Turkmen and Arab.

For a good overview of the Iraqi Shiites, see Janine di Giovanni's "Reaching for Power" in the National Geographic.

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107 Killed, Including 3 US Soldiers:
321 Hurt in 6 Iraqi Cities


Edmund Sanders of the LA Times and AP report that within a six-hour period, guerrillas launched bombings, ambushes and small arms fire in six cities in the Sunni heartland. Three US soldiers were killed, along with 104 others, and 321 were wounded. Those hurt were mostly bystanders at bombings in the northern city of Mosul.

Al-Hayat says Iraqis are calling it "Black Thursday."

Although these attacks have been viewed as "coordinated," I am not sure they really were, or at least that all of them were. There has been serious fighting around the northeastern city of Baquba for the past week, so the violence there has been ongoing and is not the result of a region-wide campaign. Attacks took place, as well, in Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mahaweel and Baghdad. Again, the fighting in Fallujah has a local history. The al-Tawhid organization of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took responsibility for all of them on its web site, but this is grandstanding. Former Saddam Fedayeen seem likely to be the actual responsible party in Ramadi, e.g., as interim PM Iyad Allawi noted. He blamed Zarqawi for the huge carbombs in Mosul. Many of Thursday's attacks were aimed at police stations. Presumably this disruption of policing was aimed at undermining the caretaker government due to take power on June 30.

The violence first broke out in Baquba early Thursday morning, with an ambush on a US patrol. Two soldiers were killed and seven wounded. Guerrillas then attacked the city's municipal building, a police station and Iraqi police. They killed 20 or so Iraqi policeman. Al-Hayat says the US called in airstrikes on the guerrillas. Wire services reported eyewitnesses saying that the guerillas' headbands were inscribed with the words, "Battalions of Monotheism and Holy War." If this were true, it would suggest that Islamists are leading the Baquba insurrection, but Allawi seems to discount it. The group gave out pamphlets saying, "The flesh of those working with the Americans is more delicious than American flesh itself," one read. Guerrillas in Baquba burned down the home of the police chief, who had been attempting to organize a response to their attacks.

The fighting in Fallujah was a breakdown in the truce with the Marines. The mosques of Fallujah called for calm, and a semblance of order returned. The guerrillas in Fallujah are a mix of ex-Baathists and Islamists. From several press accounts, it appears that Islamists now control the city and it is being run after the manner of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Police in Mosul announced a curfew in the wake of the horrible car bombing there.

Sanders reported that many Iraqis, fearful of violence, have fled to Jordan or Syria for the time being. US military in Iraq are apparently being kept from going out much until after the so-called transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

It is truly amazing that Iraqis are now fleeing their country again. That so many had been chased out, and that so many Iraqis had been killed under the Saddam regime, were among the justifications for the war. But we seem to be back to the beginning. These attacks are part of a long-term on-going guerrilla insurgency. They may want to make a statement, what with a new prime minister coming in, that the attempt to cause the pro-American government in Iraq ot collapse will not cease with the "transfer" of "sovereignty."


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Thursday, June 24, 2004

Iraq



Allawi Threatened; Attacks at Ramadi
Sadr Refuses to Attend National Congress


Guerrillas targeted police stations all around Iraq on Wednesday and early Thursday, killing and wounding tens of Iraqis. Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi threatened to assassinate caretaker Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, calling him an "American agent."

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced Wednesday that he would not agree to serve on a preparatory committee that will call a national congress of 1000 delegates in late July. Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani said that Muqtada had studied the invitation for 3 days, but had found huge problems with it. He added (al-Hayat) "There are enormous movements such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Al-Da`wa Party and the Sadrists, and each of them has only been given one seat [on the preparatory committee]. Then there are ordinary people who only represent themselves, who also have a seat . . . For this reason, we rejected the invitation."

Meanwhile, US troops began pulling out of the holy Shiite shrine city of Karbala earlier this week. Likely the US military knows very well that any Iraqi government will ask it to please leave Karbala, so it is beating them to the punch.

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Religion and Ethics


7 of 9 and the Paris Orgy

Science fiction is in the real-world news big time these days. The actress Jeri Ryan, former wife (1990-1998) of currently embattled Republican senate candidate Jack Ryan of Illinois, played the Borg babe 7 of 9 in Star Trek Voyager. For the uninitiated, the plot of Star Trek Voyager is that Captain Kathryn Janeway's space vessel, Voyager, is accidentally thrown to the wrong side of the galaxy, and the crew spends seven years trying to get back to earth (Star Trek is based on the premise that somehow we will find a real-time way around Einstein's finding that things with mass cannot go faster than the speed of light; this premise is unlikely). Among the species the Federation troops battle out there is the Borg, who are cyborgs or hybrids of human and machine. They have a collective mind and lack individuality, and are dedicated to incorporating forcibly all individuals they encounter from other species into their collective. This incorporation appears to be painful and unpleasant, and to involve high-powered buzz saws. When people come out of it they are robotic, lack individuality, and have chrome various places on their bodies.

The Star Trek Voyager creative team hit on the idea of casting Jeri Ryan as a former Borg who has somewhat reverted to being human (she had been born Annika Hansen; the Borg killed her parents). She is therefore the ultimate ice princess, though in hoary science fiction tradition (the genre after all appeals disproportionately to adolescent males), she was made to wear extemely revealing spandex. Viacom (owner of UPN and Paramount Pictures), Jack Ryan, everyone wanted her in leather or spandex or something that left little to the imagination.

Incredibly, Seven of Nine could help throw the Senate to the Democrats. Jeri Ryan was married to multi-millionnaire investment banker turned teacher Jack Ryan, but filed for divorce four years ago. In her filing, she alleged

On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent [Jack Ryan] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways. ... The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. ... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and that he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system. Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.


The unsealing of this filing, which Ryan fought, has created a huge political scandal in Illinois and has given a big boost to Ryan's Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Most Republicans, who have increasingly tied their political fortunes to an alliance with the evangelical Christians, are defending Ryan, usually by implying that Jeri's charges are untrue and are part of the junk that comes out in any divorce proceeding. Ryan admits, however, to having taken her to the Paris club. Some Republicans have said snippy things like that it was she who committed adultery, not he. The Phyllis Schlaflys should give up this implicit attack on Jeri's credibility. Jeri is popular with the public, more of whom probably know her from a subsequent turn on David Kelly's series about teaching in an urban high school, "Boston Public," than through the niche Star Trek franchise. Ironically, Kelly may have modeled Jeri's BP character, a lawyer who gives up practicing in order to teach, on Jack Ryan, who left Goldman Sachs (having gotten rich when the firm went public in the late 1990s), to teach school.

Obama has taken the high road, and is refusing to attack Jack Ryan on the sex clubs issue. Many Democrats, still boiling mad over what the hypocritical Republicans did to Bill Clinton, seem intent on making an object lesson of him.

Another irony is that Ryan pulled the stunt early in the campaign of having a cameraman follow Obama around everywhere, documenting all his moves. Obama could not even speak to his wife on his cellphone in privacy. Ryan tried to create what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a "panopticon," as a way of intimidating his opponent. This move was despicable, an invasion of privacy, and a form of stalking, and should be illegal. (I think it would be in California, which has proper privacy laws). Now Jack Ryan is going to be the one followed around by cameras, into whose private life strangers are going to poke relentlessly. In that sense, the whole thing serves him right.

But I think Obama is making the right choice in letting the tabloids and the schlock television shows run with this story and keeping it out of his own campaign, which is about issues. For instance, Obama wants to give more tax breaks to companies that keep jobs in Illinois.

The lesson for the Republicans of all this is that the wages of Puritanism are hypocrisy. Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, and many other Republicans who tried to nail Clinton had also tried to nail women not their spouses and were no better than Clinton morally. In fact, no one is better morally than anyone else as a matter of ontology or being. Some deeds are better than others, and some people achieve better deeds more often than others. Some people are capable of higher ethical standards than others. But human beings are not in the nature of the case morally perfect beings. Since that is so, it is crazy for the American public to want its politicians to be saints (they aren't), and the desire merely produces hypocrisy, which in turn corrodes ideals and the moral order.

I therefore agree with Jack Ryan that the visits to those clubs should not in themselves disqualify him from public office. Why should we care where he takes his wife? Note that business travelers who stay in nice hotels are known to rent enormous amounts of porn. The travelers, the hotels, and the cable companies involved are all heavily Republican. What is the difference between watching it on celluloid and watching it at a club in Paris? Isn't this the same public that yawned at Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and complained it was only shocking to a 1950s sensibility? Are we going to get to the point where every guy who has ever been to a strip club is disqualified from public service? Are we doomed to have the French and other Europeans laugh at us hysterically yet again?

Journalists keep asking me if the US can prevent Iraq from becoming a "theocracy." Why are the Americans so worried about Iraqis insisting on strict religious standards in their politics, if in fact that is the public platform of the dominant Republican Party in the United States? I think politicians should be permitted wide lattitude in their private lives, as long as they are good at their jobs-- i.e. use their positions to empower the people, to create jobs and wealth, and improve their states or districts. Jack Kennedy did lots of things that make a married couple's visits to some clubs rather tame in comparison. No one I know holds it against him.

The troubling issue here seems to be that Jeri alleges that Jack tricked her into going to the clubs, so this was a compulsion he had that she did not share. (Star Trek fans will not forgive him for this, especially for making her weep. Everyone remembers how brittle 7 of 9 was about sex and romance, what with being a former automaton and all. Starfleet Ensign Harry Kim tried to romance her, and found he had to go very slow.). If Jack Ryan would trick her that way, he might trick the public. So if what she alleged is true (and the Borg are incapable of subterfuge, it should be remembered), that would be the key issue. On the other hand, this all happened some years ago; he clearly had some sort of sex addiction at the time, which he may have kicked by now, and addictions compel people to do things they would not otherwise do. People change.

The one counter-indication I know of is the dirty trick Jack Ryan pulled of having Obama followed around by cameramen. That sounds coercive and manipulative, and falls within his earlier pattern of enjoying forcing others to exhibit themselves (the postmodernists might call it sado-alter-exhibitionism). In essence, he treated Obama just the way he treated Jeri. That is not a good sign.

Bottom line, the question for the good people of Illinois should not be whether Ryan is kinkier than Obama, but a) whether Ryan still uses people instrumentally to get his rocks off and b) whether Ryan could accomplish something for their state that Obama cannot. Even before the club scandal broke, the increasingly Democratic-leaning Illinois voters had seemed to discount Ryan, who after all doesn't exactly have a thick portfolio to be senator. The club scandal probably finishes off his candidacy (perhaps for the wrong reasons), but he was unlikely to have won anyway.

If Bush gets reelected but does not have the Senate, the Democratic Senators will finally be in a position to establish some investigatory commissions into Bush administration actions of questionable probity. If that happens, the country will have Jeri Ryan, ex-cyborg, to thank for it.


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Wednesday, June 23, 2004

2 US Troops Killed; Airstrike on Fallujah;
Korean Hostage Killed


The Associated Press reports that guerrillas attacked a US military convoy near Balad north of Baghdad, killing two US troops and wounding another.

After the body of a Korean hostage was found, the US air force launched yet another air attack, allegedly on a safe house for the al-Tawhid group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. AP reports, ' Fallujah residents said the strike hit a parking lot. Three people were killed and nine wounded, said Dr. Loai Ali Zeidan at Fallujah Hospital. ' An airstrike on Saturday killed 22, including some children and a woman, according to local residents. The US military maintained that the dead were radical Islamists and that the house went on exploding for a while because of the explosives stored there.

Guerrillas holding a Korean hostage killed him when the Korean government declined to withdraw its forces from Iraq (it is planning to send 3,000 more, dedicated to reconstruction and medical tasks, not to peace enforcement).

I don't think a lot of press attention should be given to the capture and killing of a single hostage, since the whole point of the captors is to generate such attention. I think the big stories on Tuesday were the killing of 2 more US troops near Balad and the airstrike on Fallujah. The beheading creates a lurid interest, but it doesn't matter to a dead person how he was killed. And, no, beheading has nothing special to do with Islam, it is just grisly and a good tool for terrorists.

The South Korean government is unlikely to back off its commitments because of this one murder. However, the killings of hostages have caused large numbers of civilian contractors to flee Iraq, according to al-Jazeerah. And, a group of Korean parliamentarians condemned their government for throwing in with what they saw as Bush's unprovoked war in Iraq. The Washington Post contrasts the lively and divisive debate over Iraq in South Korea with the way in which Italians generally closed ranks over killings of their troops and of a hostage in Iraq.

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British Sailors Held by Iran

The Scotsman reports "Foreign Office fury" at Iran's capture of 8 British sailors when they strayed over to the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab. The Shatt is a mile-wide body of water created by the union of the Tigris and Euphrates, which then flows into the Persian Gulf. The border between Iran and Iraq lies precisely in the middle of the Shatt al-Arab, which has caused trouble between the two countries for a long time. Control of the Shatt was one of the motives for Saddam Hussein's 8-year war against Iran in the 1980s.

The capture of the Western sailors and the issuing of a videotape of them blindfolded hearken back to the hostage crisis of 1979-1981, when Iranian activists took US embassy personnel hostage.

It is possible that the British did stray a bit over onto the Iranian side of the Shatt. But it is likely that the hardliners in Tehran have engaged in these theatrics for domestic political purposes. The committed Shiites in Iran had been absolutely infuriated by the US troops' desecration of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in April and May, which provoked demonstrations in Tehran against the British Embassy. The problem is that the Iranian regime did nothing practical about this outrage to Shiite sensibilities, and did not want to tangle with the US army. Taking these British sailors hostage for a few days is a symbolic act of retribution by Khamenei's government that shores up his support from the Iranian hard right. It seems likely that Iran will release them before too long.

The incident may also be intended to punish the UK for pressing Iran on the issue of nuclear weapons development, most recently in concert with the European Union.

It seems to me very likely that Iran will get a nuclear weapon. Any ruling elite in the global south with bad relations with the US can look at the difference between how the Bush administration dealt with Saddam and how it has dealt with North Korea. The difference seems mainly to be that North Korea already had a couple of nukes, whereas Iraq was not anywhere close. So Khamenei would look at that and decide that his government needs a couple of nukes to avoid being overthrown by the US, especially since Bush telegraphed his intention to do just that. I don't see how it could be stopped militarily; the US is overstretched and in no position to attack and occupy Iran.

This is the point that Senator Edward M. Kennedy made on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But I would emphasize the ways in which Bush's aggressiveness have probably actually ramped up any Iranian nuclear weapons program, out of which the Iranians might have been argued under different circumstances.

Of course, when one's neighbors, such as Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India and (de facto) the United States all have nukes, that is a pretty powerful incentive to get them, in any case.

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US Has Lost War for Hearts and Minds in Iraq

Guy Dinmore and Alex Barker of the Financial Times report that some military analysts believe that the US has lost the wider war for hearts and minds in Iraq, and that the complex Sunni Muslim insurgency is defeating efforts by the relatively small US military force in Iraq to defeat it. The authors refer specifically to Ahmed Hashim of the Naval War College, Rhode Island, who has advised the US military on counter-insurgency. The authors say that Hashem

' described an "Islamo-nationalist fusion", a binding together of minority Sunnis now out of power and fearing their identity to be under threat. Their infrastructure is the mosques. Tribal elements play a role, as well as Islamist extremists from outside Iraq. Insurgents are growing more proficient and their tactics and techniques more lethal. They lack military resources but they have one key element that the US does not: time. '


Dinmore and Barker add:
Andrew Krepinevich, a veteran military analyst and formerly of the Pentagon, says that the insurgency, being primarily urban, has a "lower probability of success" than rural campaigns, as in China, Vietnam and Laos. But their focus will be to defeat the will of the US, he told the FT. '


Krepinevich is making the wrong analogy. From the point of view of social history, contemporary Iraq is not like China, Vietnam and Laos. It is like Iran in the 1970s. An urban insurgency/ revolution can in fact win, and win quite decisively, as the urban crowds won out over the shah. The shah tried everything to put down the urban crowds. He had them spied on. He had them shot at. Nothing worked. The urban crowds just got bigger and bigger.

The guerrillas in Iraq are hoping to provoke big, frequent demonstrations by the urban crowd. If elections are not held in January, or if they are widely felt to be unfair or stage-managed-- and if US troops overstay their welcome, we could well see the big crowds start coming out. The big threat for the US is if dissatisfaction with the situation and with the US presence becomes generalized in both the Shiite and the Sunni communities. If Grand Ayatollah Sistani and Sunni cleric Hareth al-Dhari both call for the crowds to come out, you could have hundreds of thousands in the streets.

Big, frequent urban demonstrations, in Mosul, Baghdad, Najaf, Basra, etc., would be a trump card. The US and the UK would just have to leave. You can't take the crowds out and shoot them. If you do shoot at the demonstrators, you just grow the crowds the next time. The shah made this mistake with Black Friday (Sept. 8, 1978), when his troops fired into the crowd. It just infuriated everyone.

This worst case scenario will very possibly come to pass if 1) the US troops overstay their welcome and continue to act heavy-handedly (a repeat of April's twin sieges of Fallujah and Najaf would be fatal), if 2) the January elections are postponed or perceived as deeply flawed, and if 3) both Sunni and Shiite leaders beyond the small circle of the guerrillas call for massive demonstrations.

I'd give 50/50 odds of this kind of urban crowd revolution happening in Iraq sometime in the next two years. It would be a huge disaster if the US were tossed out of Iraq by such a phenomenon. Leaving voluntarily and in a phased manner would be far more preferable.

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Neocons can't Spell

A reader asked me to comment on the controversy over whether an Iraqi intelligence agent was detailed to al-Qaeda in Kuala Lumpur to be the guy that picked people up at the airport. It was covered by the Washington Post after the allegation was made by 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy.

The al-Qaeda employee in Malaysia is named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi.

The Iraqi intelligence agent is named Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad.

Political Scientist Christopher Carney, who was brought in to look at documents by Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans so as to second-guess trained analysts at the CIA who actually know Arabic, first made the mistake of identifying the two. Carney is an Americanist at Penn State and had no business butting in.

The family name (here, nisba) of the al-Qaeda guy in Malaysia is Azzawi.

The family name of the guy in Iraqi intelligence is Ahmad.

Do you notice how they are not the same?

The personal or first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad.

The personal or first name of the Iraqi intelligence agent is Hikmat.

Do you notice how it is not the same?

So, Ahmad Azzawi is not Hikmat Ahmad. See how easy that is?

Mr. Ahmad Azzawi has a couple of middle names, to wit, Hikmat Shakir. Having a couple of middle names is common in the Arab world.

Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad just has one middle name, Shakir. This is the only place at which there is any overlap between them at all. They share a middle name. And, o.k., one of Azzawi's middle names is the same as Lt. Col. Ahmad's first name.

This would be like having someone named Mark Walter Paul Johnson who is a chauffeur for Holiday Inn.

And then you have a CIA agent named Walter Paul Mark.

Obviously, it is the same guy, right? Natch.

Azzawi is a nisbah, a form of last name having to do with a place or occupation or tribe. I'm not sure, but an `azzaw might be someone who specialized in consoling family members over the death of a loved one. It is being used as a family name.

Lt. Col. Ahmad's last name could also be used as a first name. It may well be his father's first name. Some Arab families use a system like that in Scandinavia. Thus, the father is Thor Odinsson and the son is Loki Thorsson. There isn't a stable family name in that case. In the old style, he might be Hikmat ibn Ahmad or the son of Ahmad, but a lot of people drop the ibn nowadays. Most families either have a nisba type family name or they don't. If a guy's last name is Azzawi, that would certainly be in the government records. Lt. Col. Ahmad did not have Azzawi as a family name.

The first name or personal name is called "ism". In this case, the first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad. This means "the most praised" and is an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad.

The ism or personal name of the intelligence officer is Hikmat. Hikmah in Arabic means "wisdom." Hikmat with a long 't' at the end shows Ottoman influence, which in turn suggests an upper class Sunni background.

There isn't actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Isn't it a shame that we have these key people doing important things who are either incompetent ignoramuses or dumb as posts?

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show Monday, by the way, peddling his book, which is full of similar nonsense, and at one point Stewart actually told him he thought the book was a load of crap. Stewart's Daily Show is among the best sources of news analysis on television.

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Tuesday, June 22, 2004

6 US Servicemen Reported Dead in Iraq, 11 Iraqis

Monday's toll (still incomplete but more complete than any one article I saw in any one language):

Guerrillas sent a videotape to Associated Press with views of four US Marines lying dead in a walled compound in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The bodies appear to have been looted. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt confirmed the deaths.

Regarding these four Marines killed in Ramadi, according to the US military spokesman, "Four US Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed on the 21st of June in the Al-Anbar province conducting security and stability operations."

In Baghdad, guerrillas launched a mortar attack that killed one US soldier and wounded 7 others, according to AP.

At 9:35 am in al-Qayyara near Mosul in the north, a roadside bomb killed 5 Iraqi contractors who were apparently with a US military convoy at the time.

Also in the north, just south of Kirkuk, Arab and Turkmen militias fought a half-hour gunbattle with one another, leaving one dead on each side, at Majma` al-Nahrawan. (This according to al-Hayat. Most Arabs in that area had been settled there by Saddam Hussein in an attempt to Arabize the north, and to marginalize the Kurds and Turkmen who predominated there. Now the latter are returning to their homes and taking back their property, and 10,000 Arabs are said to have been expelled. The local police chief confirmed that the fight was over land occupied by immigrant Arabs, the original ownership of which the Turkmen claim. The incident is more evidence that the Kirkuk region, with its Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab populations, is highly volatile. Arabs and Kurds have clashed. Shiite Turkmen and Sunni Kurds have clashed. And now Arabs and Turkmen are fighting. So far only the Christians and Yazidis haven't fielded militias, and even the Christians are demanding a semi-autonomous zone in Ninevah province.

A huge gang of 50 masked Iraqi guerrillas, among the largest paramilitary forces that has operated in the Sunni areas aside from the siege of Fallujah, blew up a police station at Jurf al-Sakar, south of Baghdad. Kimmitt reported, "Approximately 50 armed insurgents wearing black masks dismounted their vehicle by the Iraqi police station in Djor Askar. . . When coalition and Iraqi security forces approached the station, they saw five vehicles matching the description of the attackers. Forces engaged and destroyed one of the vehicles and pursued another vehicle to a residence, where they found a wounded attacker, an AK-47 shotgun and blueprints of the police station."

In Samawah in the south, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a Coalition base, wounding one person, and four guerrillas were killed by return fire. Guerrillas that far south are likely to be either Mahdi Army, Marsh Arab Hizbullah, or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

A US soldier wounded at Buhriz near Baquba on Friday died and his death was reported on Monday.

Corrected 6/22 at 9:33 pm; sorry I misread the al-Anbar report as distinct from the Ramadi one and so double-counted.

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Iraq War not Worth it: 52% of Americans

A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows that a majority of Americans now feels that the Iraq War was not worth it. It cost too many US lives, according to 70% of them, and 51% thought that it had not made Americans any safer. Not only has President Bush's approval rating on the war on terror fallen to 50%, but the public now prefers Kerry to handle terrorism, 48% to 47% (Bush has lost 20% on this issue since March). Three-fourths of Americans say the war has damaged America's image in the world.

A majority of Americans disapproves of Bush's job performance over-all at 51%, while 47% approve. Kerry would win the election if held now by the same margin, even factoring in the Nader vote, the poll found.

Why has Bush lost so much confidence with regard to handling the war on terror? The fall in numbers is precipitate. As late as April, he led Kerry on it by 20 points.

I wish the pollsters had asked "why?" But what makes sense is that Bush hit the trifecta: Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghuraib. His brutal siege of a whole city, with some 600 Iraqis killed is one element. His decision to go after Muqtada al-Sadr and the obvious unpreparedness of the US military and the Bush-appointed CPA for the Shiite backlash is another. The revelation of the prisoner torture at Abu Ghuraib and the obvious revulsion it produced throughout the world, including the Muslim world, is the third.

The American public is not so foolish that it cannot see that the Bush administration is infuriating the Muslim world at the US gratuitously. If people thought it had been necessary to take that risk in order to stop Saddam from having weapons of mass destruction, or in order to stop him from colluding with al-Qaeda, they might have soldiered on. But it has become increasingly clear to them that the pretexts for the war were false. And therefore all the subsequent scandals and chaos were both unnecessary and reckless.

These numbers show that Bush has lost a significant number of independents. When his approval rating had sunk to 42% not so long ago, it suggested that he had begun to lose committed Republicans.

After all, a lot of Republicans could not be at all happy to see the US Department of Defense become the major purveyor of sensational internet pornography to the world. And, many Republicans may feel as Gen. Zinni does, that it was unwise to go after Fallujah and Muqtada al-Sadr, but going after them and then backing off made the administration look feeble and invited attack. The trifecta not only hurt Bush with independents, but the way he handled it probably hurt him with hardcore Republicans.

This brings us to the issue of Bush's flip-flops. He tried to hang the charge of flip-flopping on Kerry. But Bush said he wanted heads to roll at Fallujah, and then had to bring in the Baath to run the city. Bush said he wanted Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive, and now Muqtada is set to be a prominent parliamentarian. Bush said he would bring decency to the White House, and now his DoD is purveying pictures of Arab men being made to masturbate in front of prancing servicewomen.

The American public knows flip-flops when they see them. It is Bush that is engaging in them.
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Najaf Calming; Police to be Trained in Urban Warfare

Al-Hayat reports that previous disputes between Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and junior cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have now been completely resolved. One last step has been the appointment of a new prayer leader at the mosque connected to the shrine of Ali, who would be neither a follower of al-Sadr nor a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The new incumbent is Sayyid Muhammad Rida al-Ghurayfi, a seminary professor close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. In summer of 2003 the Sadrists and SCIRI had fought for control of the shrine in Najaf, and SCIRI won. In the past month, the preaching there of Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of SCIRI has caused turmoil with the Sadrists in the congregation, producing at least one major riot at the mosque. On one occasion about three weeks ago, al-Qubanji criticized Iran in his sermon for not condemning Muqtada and his militiamen for fighting at the shrine with the Americans and so desecrating it, and was not allowed to continue. Afterwards shots were fired in his direction. More recently there was a big altercation between SCIRI and Sadr supporters that prevented Friday prayers from being held at all.

An al-Sadr spokesman said Muqtada is considering a proposal that he attend the national congress slated for the end of July. An Iraqi official clarified that no one has yet been invited to the actual congress, where 1000 notables will elect 100 persons to an advisory council to advise Prime Minister Allawi. (This congress was Lakhdar Brahimi's idea--he felt it would give a wide swathe of Iraqi political society a sense of participation in the caretaker government). But there is a preparatory committee planning the congress, and Ali Sumaysim of the al-Sadr movement has been invited to serve on this committee, according to organizer Fuad Masum.

Australian Broadcasting reports that a hard core of Mahdi Army militiamen still holds the shrine of Ali in Najaf, but that the US military has decided against trying to go in and sweep them out. (Good move.) The young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his militiamen to leave Najaf, and substantial numbers have, but the US military fears that some may form sectarian groups and defy Muqtada. (This possibility is real; the Sadrists who follow Muqtada's father already have several sects or parties among them). The hard core Mahdi Army fighters have nothing but contempt for the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, seeing it as a tool of Washington. In response to continued insecurity in Najaf, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus (the one certified hero to come out of the higher ranks of US officers in Iraq) is committing to giving Najaf police training in urban warfare and to providing them with rocket propelled grenades and flack jackets.

Al-Hayat says that Shaikh Ahmad Shaibani, a spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr, gave the newspaper the following statement: "Sayyid Muqtada will not form a mobile political party, and will not join any of the parties now existing on the Iraqi scene at the present time, nor will he throw his support behind any of them." He rejected the idea of folding the Army of the Mahdi into the Iraqi army, emphasizing that "The Mahdi Army is not an organized army, but rather popular groups that resist the occupation. Its members will return to the pursuit of their daily, natural lives when the Occupation ends." He said he was prepared "to help the forces of the police and army to keep order in Najaf and other Iraqi cities." He said that "The decree dissolving the militias was stillborn" and said he thought it was unlikely that it would be implemented at the present time. Mssrs. Bremer and Allawi have attempted on more than one occasion to dissolve the militias in the country, but with no success.

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Monday, June 21, 2004

US Marine Killed; 23 Iraqis Killed in Separate Attacks;
US Helicopters mistakenly Kill 5 Policemen at Samarra'


Wire services report several violent incidents on Sunday.

Anbar province: Guerrillas fighting US troops in Anbar Province, which covers Ramadi and Fallujah, killed a US Marine on Sunday. The Marines killed 4 of the guerrillas.

Baghdad: Guerrillas ambushed a convoy of American and Iraqi troops on the road to the Baghdad airport, killing two Iraqi soldiers of them and wounding 11. (The Americans had already passed when the bomb went off). In an attack launched near the central bank in downtown Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round that injured 6 police officers and killed 4 Iraqi civilians, including two bank employees, a bank guard, and a passer-by [-az-Zaman]. The attack occurred at al-Rashid Street, an area with lots of shops. Meanwhile, behind the Palestine Hotel, downtown, shots rang out and hotel security returned fire. No casualties were reported. A lot of Westerners stay at the Palestine Hotel.

Samarra': Something happened in this mixed Sunni-Shiite city north of Baghdad,but the reports are very mixed and it is hard to know what. The US military maintains that its base near Samarra' took mortar fire, and that it replied with helicopter gunships to the source, killing at least 4 Iraqi guerrillas. The Bahrain Times says that the mortar fire went into a "residential neighborhood," not a US base. Az-Zaman maintains that the US forces mistakenly targeted Iraqi police guarding the home of interim Interior Minister Faleh al-Naqib, killing 5 of them. Earlier, the US helicopter gunships had destroyed the Samarra' police station. Iraqi police told the newspaper they did not rule out friendly fire on the part of the US. I have no idea which of these stories is correct. Will advise when I can sort it all out.

Tikrit: Assassins killed Sheikh Izzuddin al-Bayati, a leader of the al-Bayat tribe and a member of the provincial governing council for Salahuddin. This killing stands in a line of assassinations of mid-level government officials in the past two weeks. Al-Bayati had been a Baath official in Najaf. His tribe has both Turkmen and Arab branches (which demonstrates once again that a "tribe" is often based on fictive kinship and is a little like a political party, which can be joined or left over time). In Tikrit, a poster was distributed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, threatening death to officials who collaborate with the occupying authorities and singling out Jasim Jabbarah, an Iraqi official in Salahuddin working with police intelligence against the insurgents.

Baquba: Guerrillas fired mortar shells into a residential neighborhood. They hit a civilian home and killed a husband and wife.

Fallujah: Residents of Fallujah continue to maintain that the US bombs fell on a popular neighborhood in Saturday's F-16 attack, not on a terrorist safe house. Rescue workers digging through the rubble report glimpsing bodies of women and children below. The Mayor of Fallujah promised residents of the neighborhood that he would cut off relations with the US over the incident. In contrast, Newsday reports that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi gave his blessings to the strike:

"We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit," Allawi said. "We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq." His comments are likely to generate anger among Iraqis, who already are suspicious of Allawi because of his close ties to the CIA and British intelligence during the more than 20 years he spent in exile.


Sy Hersh is reporting that hundreds of Israeli intelligence agents are operating in and from Iraqi Kurdistan, gathering information on Iran's nuclear program and stirring up Syrian Kurds to make trouble for Bashar al-Asad in Syria. I have talked about the likelihood of such a presence here in the past. The nexus of disinformation about the Saddam government and about terrorist activity in Iraq may lie in tales fed to Mossad by the Kurds, who in turn passed it to Washington. The Kurds have steadily and implausibly alleged a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection.

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National Congress Planned; Muqtada Invited
Chalabi mediates with Kurds


Al-Hayat: On Sunday, the preparatory board met to begin planning a national congress of 1000 notables, politicians, religious leaders and tribal sheikhs to be held in July. It will involve twenty members of the old Interim Governing Council, including Sheikh Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, against whom an arrest warrant has been issued in an alleged murder case. An invitation has also been issued to the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who observers thought might well be elected to the advisory council. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi called on Muqtada to come to the congress.

Iyad Allawi had dispatched Ahmad Chalabi to mediate between him and the Kurdish leadership in the north. Despite Allawi's attempt to dissolve the militias, the Peshmerga or Kurdish militias are refusing to be put under central Baghdad control. Chalabi met with Jalal Talabani. Al-Hayat reports a rumor that the Coalition Provisional Authority had an arrest warrant issued for Chalabi.

The American attempt to destroy Chalabi politically, and to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr physically, has so far failed miserably. Allawi is clearly eager to do business with both, and to pull them into his orbit. Both are now poised to gain seats in the proto-parliament, the national advisory council, and they have made an improbable and wholly cynical alliance with one another, according to an informed Iraqi observer. The two of them could well show up in the government to be formed in January, 2005.

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Thousands of Indian Shiites Protest US Policies in Iraq

Thousands of Indian Shiites came out into the streets of New Delhi Sunday to protest harsh US policies in Iraq and to demand that the United Nations take the leading role in putting the country back on its feet. They were supported by Hindu friends. The Indian Shiites were angered at the US because of its desecration of the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Indian Shiites have in recent decades been moderate and politically timid, but this issue has clearly galvanized them. Among the many stupid actions undertaken by Mssrs. Bremer and Sanchez (i.e. by Mr. Bush), having US troops fire tank shells and call in air strikes in the vicinity of the shrines of Ali and Husayn has to be right up there at the top.

The Shiite International has turned anti-US, and we will see trouble out of it.
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