5 US Troops Killed, 18 Wounded

I take today's New York Times/ AP report on Iraq as a very bad sign.

For one thing, it says

"On Monday, the military reported five new U.S. deaths: Two American soldiers from Task Force Baghdad were killed and three wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in northwestern Baghdad. One American soldier died and two were injured in a vehicle accident 30 miles northwest of the town of Kut in eastern Iraq, the military said. In addition, two U.S. Marines were killed in a weekend bombing south of the capital. The military also reported 13 Marines were wounded Monday in a mortar attack south of Baghdad."

That is a large one-day toll. 16 injured from direct guerrilla attack, another two in a vehicle accident that may or may not have been produced by the war. And 5 deaths, though two of those were from the weekend, and one from a vehicle collision. It doesn't look like things are miraculously settling down in the aftermath of Fallujah.

Indeed, November was the second-deadliest month for US troops since the invasion itself. That isn't the kind of trend line you would like to see for a successful venture.

Then the rest of the article talks about how inadequate has been the performance of the Iraqi police and national guards, who face intimidation, threats, and even murder at the hands of the guerrillas.

Guerrillas used a car bomb to kill 7 or 8 national guards in Baghdadi, a small town west of the capital.


Worse and worse.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Fallujah Report and the Liberal/Conservative Divide

The "Fallujah Report" prepared by the Marines concerning their enemies in the most recent big campaign is now up on the Web in HTML rather than powerpoint, and so easier to download. One thing that leaped out at me was the small number of foreign fighters it reports. The guerrillas in the city were mostly Iraqi.

I was provoked to the following observations by a journalist's question.

The big divide between liberals and conservatives in regard to Fallujah is that most liberals do not believe that force can be used to solve problems. They may believe that force is sometimes necessary. But they think it most often just causes new problems. They tend to see the world as complex, not in black and white terms, so that an unalloyed "bad guy" is rare (Bin Laden managed to make himself an exception). Liberals also see military force in the context of the whole society, so that they worry about what happens to children and grandmothers when it is deployed. It is liberals who remember that the Vietnam war killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants. And, they find US military deaths unacceptable.

So from a liberal point of view, Fallujah was terrible. It involved displacing hundreds of thousands of people, subjecting civilians to bombardment and crossfire, and resulted in over 2000 deaths, including over 50 US troops. The icon of Fallujah for the liberals was the little boy with the shard of grenade shrapnel lodged near his liver, or the old woman bewailing her dead relatives.

Conservatives do believe that force can be used to solve problems. They think in terms of good guys and bad guys, and it seems obvious to them that if you kill the bad guys, then you have solved the problem. Getting at the bad guys may be disruptive to civilian populations, and may cause some collateral damage, and may incur some troop casualties, and all that is bad, but it is necessary and worth it. You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.

Many bloggers are complaining from a liberal point of view about the downsides of the use of force. They are completely uninterested in the activities of the Baathist and radical Sunni guerrillas holed up in Fallujah. They are uninterested in whether these guerrillas terrorized the local population. All they can see is the vast destruction caused by the US assault, and the innocent lives damaged. From their point of view, the whole operation against the city is a form of collective punishment.

The US military powerpoint slides are classical conservatism. They identify the bad guys, who are the problem. They lay out their crimes. And they document the way the good guys went in to kill or capture them and so solve the problem.

The US military seems strangely unaware of the realities of insurgencies. It seems to think there are a limited number of "bad guys," who can all be killed or captured. The possibility that virtually all able-bodied men in Fallujah supported the insurgency, and that many are weekend warriors, does not seem to occur to them. In fact, as Mao noted, guerrillas swim in a sea of supportive civilians. The US military slides suggest that now that the bad guys have been taken care of, the civilians can be won over. That this outcome is highly unlikely does not seem to occur to them.

The thing that strikes me about the military powerpoint slides is that they don't make the argument to the general public. Because they just assume the conservative view of the use of military force, they concentrate on the crimes of the guerrillas but do not successfully defend the need to deal with them by assaulting the whole city.

Whatever the military rights or wrongs, the political judgment on the Fallujah campaign is easy. It was supposed to make holding elections possible in the Sunni Arab heartland. Instead, it has certainly further alienated the Sunni Arabs and made it more likely that they will boycott the elections en masse. If the Sunni Arabs remain angry and sullen in this way, Fallujah will have been a political failure.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish Nationalism

Kurdish writer Sabah Salih has an interesting piece on the way the image of the Kurds has changed among European leftists from that of victim to that of collaborator with American imperialism. He suggests that European sympathy for Kurdish nationalism has correspondingly declined.

He says that I oppose the creation of a Kurdistan and advocate keeping the current 18 provinces, which is a position that obviously angers him deeply.

Actually, I don't feel so strongly about the issue to deserve such a passionate response, and I'm not sure where I wrote something that Dr. Salih took to be so dogmatic.

It is true that I think multi-ethnic states with large numbers of provinces are more likely to remain stable than those with small numbers of provinces. A five-province state where each province is organized by a different ethnic group is open to being torn apart by subnationalist feeling. So for a stable Iraq, I suspect the 18 provinces are a better solution.

The old pre 1971 Pakistan is a case in point-- East Bengal seceded to form Bangladesh. And India faced a separatist movement among the Sikhs of its east Punjab.

Plus, the creation of a Kurdistan province would involve a good deal of ethnic cleansing. The Turkmen and Chaldeans won't live under it, and would flee. Substantial turmoil could wrack Kirkuk. Ethnic hatreds can rise suddenly and spin out of control, as we saw in Serbia and Bosnia.

All that said, it is not as if I have a big stake in the issue. If the Iraqi parliament can be elected, and if it creates a Kurdistan and perhaps some other large provinces for Sunni Arabs and Shiites, so that the country had 5 or 6, it would be fine with me. (This plan was put forward by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie). I suspect the Turkmen will demand an Iraqi Turkmenistan, as well, for their 700,000 or so members. And maybe, like post-1971 Pakistan, an Iraq with 5 or 6 ethnic provinces could hold together. But it could also collapse, as Lebanon did, or as Nigeria did in the late 1960s.

I was at a Kurdish panel in San Francisco at the Middle East Studies Association, and came away really frightened. The attitudes of extreme grievance and nationalist demands typical of the Salih piece were much in evidence in the statements of participants. One lady seemed to me to be looking for big revenge on the Arabs for Halabja. There was absolute rage in the room. Some of it was coming from non-Kurdish ethnic groups who share the Iraqi north with them.

Lakhdar Brahimi's wise warning of last winter should be heeded. No one starts out to create a civil war; countries fall into them through inattention to key flashpoints. The Iraqi Kurds will not be well served by a large-scale outbreak of communal violence.

As for the subtext here, which is that many expatriate Iraqi Kurds want an independent country of Kurdistan, I think that attempting to create such a thing will provoke big bloodbaths and heavy intervention by Turkey and Iran.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fresh Wave of Violence in Iraq
5 US troops Killed

The relentless guerrilla war continued apace in Iraq on Sunday. AFP reported that guerrillas killed two Marines in clashes on Sunday. Also, in Anbar province, guerrillas killed three US servicemen on Sunday, and two had died there on Friday. A bomb exploded on the road to the airport. Al-Zaman says that the US campaign in Babil province faces difficulties. This is a broad area in which a million persons live, and had been a prime recruiting ground for Saddam’s Republican Guards. At least a hundred very wealthy families are supporting the guerrilla war there.

The interim Iraqi National Council added its voice on Sunday to the chorus demanding that elections be held on January 30. One of four deputy speakers, Jawad Maliki, a Shiite activist, said that the Temporary Administrative Law does not allow any space for postponing the elections, and it must govern the process. He also said that recent security developments were a reason for optimism. (-al-Hayat). The unrealistic hopes that the Shiite parties are placing in operations like Fallujah and Babil shines through in his words, which took me aback. I had listened to angry Sunni Iraqis calling into al-Jazeerah all afternoon to complain bitterly about "our brethren, the Shiites" and about the American military actions in the Sunni Arab areas.

For those who weren't reading the site over the weekend, I laid out the reasons for which commentators like Charles Krauthammer are wrong, and the elections are heading for a potential train wreck if the Sunni Arabs boycott them. (Click on the link or just scroll down).


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books

Amid the unwarranted outbreak of optimism about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death, Henry Siegman's essay in the New York Review of Books on Ariel Sharon's true plans comes as a breath of fresh air.

Sharon is giving lip service to things like the road map and the eventual goal of a Palestinian state, but his real goal is to permanently forestall such a state. The end game for him is the division of the West Bank Palestinians into three Bantustans completely surrounded by Israeli forces or settlements, and the maintainance of Gaza as a permanent slum that advertises Palestinians as wretched and dangerous. Sharon is dedicated to annexing probably 45% of the West Bank, which would not leave enough territory for a viable Palestinian state, anyway.

The horrible implications for the state of Israel is its descent into a permanent Apartheid state. If the Palestinians don't have a state, they will remain stateless. The rump "Palestinian Authority" will not be able to keep internal order any better in the future than it has recently. The Israeli army will inevitably keep being drawn into re-occupying Palestinians.

A temporary and de facto Apartheid state, such as the Likud Party is now running, is bad enough. But a permanent one will spell the end of Israel in the long term. No European country is going to want to continue to cooperate with it under those circumstances, nor most countries in the global south. Most Israelis themselves do not want to keep another people in the slave-like condition of statelessness, or to interact with them only through brutal military raids. And, an ever-growing Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank without any nationality of their own may eventually successfully claim Israeli identity (opinion polling shows about a third of them are already open to this possibility).

The Palestinian uprising has had a profound impact on Israel. Retention of immigrants is down to only 50%, a historic low. Over a million Israelis are below the poverty line. If Russia's economy begins improving substantially, substantial back-migration of many of the Soviet immigrants (about half of them not actually Jews) could take place. Despite Ariel Sharon's dreams of ingathering the French Jews, that seems a highly unlikely scenario.

So, when we hear that Sharon is willing to meet with the new Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, we have to ask, "for what purpose?" Most likely, it is to take his measure and see if he capable of policing the Bantustans for the Likud.

For a troubling discussion of the kind of self-examination being forced on Israelis by Sharon's tactics, see The Guardian on Monday. It notes that the image of an Israeli checkpoint guard making a Palestinian play the violin has repulsed the Israeli public in a way that few other recent events have.

Omar Barghouti makes a shrewd suggestion as to why this image was so objectionable-- it parallels the scene in the film, The Pianist, where German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shock of the Week: Liberals in Liberal Arts

George Will's column this week is unusually unreflective. I don't often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is "only a theory" (a theory is a robust explanation well grounded in the evidence); and he knows that the Iraq war has been a disaster from beginning to end.

So it is surprising to see him parroting the ridiculous and pernicious line about major universities having few political conservatives in them.

There are all sorts of social-science problems with this allegation. First, what is the population that is being studied? Is it all tenure-track teachers in all universities in all schools and departments? Are we including two-year colleges? Four-year ones? Are we including Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools, Engineering schools?

If that were the pool, then academics probably mirror the general American society pretty closely. There are about 1.1 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools everywhere are. So it simply is not true that "universities" are bastions of the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe.

If what is being alleged is that the professors of History, English, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. at the top 25 universities in the US are disproportionately liberals, then that also raises questions. What is a "liberal?" If he means they vote Democrat, then so did, until recently, Zell Miller. And, what does it even mean to be a "liberal" in your study of Milton or of the French Revolution?

Then comes the question of "why"? If that is the question, it should be studied. The rightwing "think tanks" have not studied the question, and have only polemicized about these poorly constructed "studies." (These are the same people who assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was 2-5 years from having a nuclear bomb.) In this instance, George Will jumps to conclusions about why.

I have been in a major history department for 20 years, and have served on innumerable search committees, in my own department and in other units on campus. I have never, ever, even once, heard any search committee member broach the political party affiliation of a candidate for a position, and there has never been any way to even know such a thing from the materials submitted. Hiring is done at the grass roots level in academic departments. The department appoints a search committee. The committee solicits manuscripts, reads widely, and decides on 10. Then it narrows those to 2-3 for a campus visit. Those finalists come and give a talk. If they seem less coherent or less able to engage with hard questions than their writing had suggested, then they are dropped. The question is always, "is this an interesting mind?" "Is this person's methodology sound?" "Has this person mastered the relevant literature (i.e. has read the other articles and books on the subject)?" The manuscripts are read by the search committee, by the Department executive committee, by the faculty at large, by the School's executive committee and deans, by the divisional committee (e.g. social sciences or humanities).

There would be no way to stack this process politically. The school executive committee is elected at large from all school departments; ours often has economists or biologists on it. The divisional committee often has political scientists. A substandard historian being hired only because he was a leftist would never get through this gauntlet. Each search committee is ad hoc, staffed according to field, and each differs in composition from the others. All the other committees are constantly rotating personnel, by election. There is no possibility of a centralized cabal that could appoint people of only one political coloration. In fact, David Horowitz wants to find a way to use state legislatures and congress to corrupt this grassroots and professional process by politicizing it and focusing on political outcome rather than academic achievement.

So if it were true that we don't have many conservatives in the department, which I could not verify because it is a department of over 70 persons and I don't know the politics of most of them, then how could that be explained?

That certain professions at certain points in time, skew politically, is demonstrable. For instance, back in the Eisenhower era, the US officer corps was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Now, only 10 percent of US officers identify themselves as Democrats (a really worrying development). Yet the salaries of the officer corps is probably disproportionately provided by the blue states. Why should this have happened to the officer corps? Should Congress legislate political balance in the upper ranks of the US armed forces?

In immigration studies, there are "push" and "pull" factors. Some people emigrate because of war or poor economies. Some people are perfectly well off but emigrate for even greater opportunities. The former is a push factor. The latter is a pull factor.

The most logical explanation for any political bias in some parts of the professoriate in my view is that the sort of persons with the skills to be in a major academic liberal arts department could also be successful in business, lobbying, law, advertising and other well-paying professions. And it is the corporate world and its lobbying appendages that have the marked bias, to the Right. Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn't be comfortable in such a position. (All think tanks hire explicitly by ideology, and 17 of the 19 most influential ones in Washington are deliberately staffed by conservatives, but that doesn't bother Will.)

Exhibit A is William J. Bennet. Bennett has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Texas. If he had been a man of the left, he would be teaching that subject at some small liberal arts college for $70,000 a year. Because he was on the Right, he had an entree to the Reagan administration, and rose to become Secretary of Education and then drug czar.

The vast opportunities open to an intellectual on the Right can be seen in Bennett's career. It is often forgotten that he deserted public service as drug czar after only about a year, leaving all of his commitments unfulfilled. He was able to land at Joe Coors's and Richard Mellon Scaife's so-called American Heritage Foundation. Bennett's opportunities were so many and so lucrative that the hard work of public service, and the ethics rules requiring careful reporting of income, seemed increasingly unappealing. The opportunities are so enormous, if one is willing to oppose affirmative action and support increasing inequality of wealth and bash unions, that it is even hard to keep such persons in high-profile, remunerative public service positions on the Right. They are sucked out of them by the corporate vacuum cleaner.

The next time we meet Bennett, he has somehow made so much money that he can drop $6 million in Las Vegas casinos in a single year (he says he won as much as he lost, which, if true, means he probably cheats). This level of gambling makes him a "whale" in casino terms, given all sorts of perquisites. That is a very different life than teaching in a small liberal arts college, having spent one's youth making in the $20,000s and $30,000s a year (that would have been true of Bennett's generation of academics). And the price of admission to all those riches? Say things like that "homosexuals" have an average lifespan of 42 years, or public education should be privatized, and blame poor people for being poor because they are lazy and immoral and gamble too much.

So, Mr. Will, it is the "pull" factor that explains your conundrum. Liberal academics aren't viciously excluding conservative intellectuals who apply to teach hundreds of students a week for $45,000 a year (nowaday's entry-level salary at a good liberal arts college), after they paid $100,000 for a Ph.D. in English literature from a top-rate university and spent 8 or 9 years beyond the BA toiling away as graduate students on tiny stipends. Conservative intellectuals don't have to put up with that kind of thing (that is how they think of the privilege of teaching). They have other opportunities. They can be whales, and can pontificate on morality to the great unwashed.

As for Will's argument that academia "has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. " -- it is another instance of blaming the victim.

Academia has not marginalized itself. It has been marginalized. Perfectly reasonable beliefs such as that workers should have a right to explore unionizing without fear of being fired have been redefined by Joe Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife as "out of the mainstream." Thinking that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq (as I said repeatedly in 2002 and early in 2003, even as I admitted Saddam's atrocities) was defined as out of the mainstream and unpatriotic. Corporate media bring in a parade of so-called "experts" (often lacking credentials and saying ridiculous things) from "think tanks," in Washington and New York instead of letting academics speak. (There are some exceptions, obviously, but I am talking about over-all numbers). Wouldn't you like to hear about Ayman al-Zawahiri from someone who actually had read him in Arabic? The universities have such experts. The think tanks mostly just have smelly little orthodoxies of the Right.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Elections in Iraq will be Held on Schedule, But with What Result?
Or, how Khatami and Krauthammer are Both Wrong

At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The US military said that guerrillas had launched a major campaign of intimidation aimed at frightening Sunni Arabs into boycotting the forthcoming elections.

Seventeen parties, mostly small Sunni Arab groupings along with the two major Kurdish parties, made a plea Saturday that elections be postponed. Some major Sunni Arab groups, such as the Association of Muslim Scholars, had already called for a Sunni Arab boycott.

Al-Jazeera interviewed Sunni cleric Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi on Saturday. He said that the Allawi government had not been elected and that Sunnis would not participate in illegitimate elections. The al-Jazeera anchor, a canny woman, asked al-Kubaisi how a legitimate government could be established without elections. Al-Kubaisi angrily retorted that there can be no legitimate elections under the shadow of foreign occupation. (This exchange belies the reputation in the US of al-Jazeera as the Fox Cable News of the Arab world. Would a Fox anchor have been that aggressive with, e.g., Jerry Falwell?)

Anyway, the plea for a postponement was roundly rejected on Saturday by all the most important actors. George W. Bush, US Ambassador to Baghdad John Negroponte, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Election Commissioner Abdul Hussein Hendawi, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his 3 colleagues in Najaf, and 43 major political parties, all voiced a resounding "No!" The first 3 would probably have been enough.

Even Iran's President Mohammad Khatami, who was meeting with Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari, came out for holding the elections "as soon as possible." Jaafari is leader of the Shiite Dawa Party, the most popular in Iraq. Khatami portrayed the issue as one of restoring security, suggesting that an elected government would have a better chance of calming the country. He said Iran had more of a stake in a stable Iraq than anyone else.

Khatami would probably have been better advised to keep his mouth shut. The struggle over postponing elections has already taken on a strong tinge of Sunni-Shiite struggle, especially since the Kurdish parties appear to have given at least lukewarm support to the plea of the Sunni Arabs for a delay (most Kurds are Sunnis; some Kurdish officials hedged their bets). Most of the major Iraqi players insisting on the election being held on time are Shiites, whether Arabs or Turkmen. To have Iraq's Shiite neighbor also press for elections to be held makes it look as though the Shiites are ganging up on the Sunnis. That perception contributes to the guerrilla war in the first place.

Charles Krauthammer, after 18 months of blithe optimism on Iraq, has now suddenly decided that the country is embroiled in a Civil War and that the forthcoming elections will resemble those of 1864 in the United States, when the Confederate states did not vote for Lincoln.

As usual, Krauthammer is wrong. Historical analogies are always tricky, but this one is simply inaccurate. The problem is that Iraqis are not electing a president, even a war president. They are in effect electing a constitutional assembly. The main business of the new parliament is to craft a permanent constitution.

So, the analogy would be to 1789. What would the new American Republic's chances have been if the Southern states had not been able to send delegates to the constitutional convention, and so had been excluded from having an input into it? All sorts of compromises had to be hammered out in 1789, concerning southern slavery and how to count a slave for census purposes, etc. If the South hadn't been able to show up, the northern states would simply have ignored those issues, and the secession of those states might have come 70 years early. Would the North have been able to resist it so successfully at that point?

Likewise, Sunni Arabs have a big stake in the permanent constitution. Will it give Kirkuk and its oil to the Kurds, depriving Arabs of any share in those revenues? Will it ensconce Shiite law as the law of the land? Will it keep a unicameral parliament, in which Shiites would have a permanent majority, or will it create an upper chamber where Sunnis might be better represented, on the model of the US senate? If all those issues go against the Sunnis because they aren't there to argue their positions, it would set Iraq up for guerrilla war into the foreseeable future.

And that is why Khatami's hopes that an elected government will be more stable are unrealistic. It isn't that the government is elected that lends stability, but rather widespread acceptance of the government's legitimacy. The Sunnis are unlikely to grant that if they end up being woefully underrepresented. And then you will just have to reconquer Fallujah again next year. How long before you are just conquering rubble and snipers?

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat conducted a random poll of 100 Iraqis on Saturday, in person or by telephone, and found that about 60% wanted the elections to go forward, 35% wanted a postponement, and 6% refused to answer. It is not clear if "random" means "scientifically weighted." If they just contacted 100 random persons, their poll probably isn't worth much. If they tried to vary locale, social class, ethnicity and sex according to proportion in the population, then it would be more telling. They don't say if the respondents were from different cities, e.g., or all in Baghdad.

Quentin Langley is wrong for much the same reasons that Krauthammer is. He gives 10 reasons for which he thinks the Iraq elections will be a "success." Most of his points are made in apparent ignorance of the most basic facts about contemporary Iraq.

Langley's ten reasons and my response:

"10. Despite the overwhelming media focus on trouble spots, these are all in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where just 20 percent of the population live."

This allegation is simply incorrect. First of all, there is no "Sunni triangle." The Sunni Arab heartland is more like a rectangle, and it is vast, encompassing much of the capital, Baghdad. Even if it were the only problem, it wouldn't be a small one. In fact, "trouble spots," if by that is meant things like carbombings, grenade and mortar attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi national guards, and machine gun fire, are all over the country. Tel Afar, Kirkuk, Hilla, Amarah, Majar al-Kabir, Samawah, Sadr City, etc., etc., routinely see "trouble spots." While most of the guerrillas are Sunni Arabs, they have demonstrated an ability to strike all over the country. And, some of the problems come from other groups, whether Shiite Turkmen in the north or disgruntled Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen in the south.

If hundreds of people show up to a school to vote in Hilla and suddenly take mortar fire, with dozens killed, then will that really have no effect on turnout? What if such incidents occur all over the country? Maybe voters will be brave and refuse to be dissuaded from voting. Maybe they won't. To pretend the problem does not exist or is limited to only a small part of the country, however, is to live in a fantasy-land.

"9. There are as many people in the Kurdish regions in the north, as there are in the Sunni Triangle. The Kurdish regions have had successful multi-party democracies for 12 years."

This datum does not guarantee a successful outcome to the elections. The two major Kurdish parties have now developed cold feet about them because of fear of Shiite dominance. Moreover, the maximalist demands of the Kurds, for a consolidated Kurdish superprovince, for Kirkuk, for petroleum revenues to remain local, for permanent exclusion of Federal troops from their soil, are more likely to cause trouble themselves than to offset the troublesome Sunni Arabs.

"8. The majority Shias (60 percent of the population) are keen to participate. Spiritual leaders, including Ayatollah Sistani, have urged people to vote and even calling it a religious duty. Under this doctrine, people who don't vote can go to hell."

This point is true, but does not guarantee successful elections. In fact, if Shiite turnout is very big and Sunni Arab turnout low, it will create a tyranny of the Shiite majority, a special problem when parliament turns to constitution-making.

"7. The electoral system chosen (national lists) is not particularly vulnerable to intimidation. Votes are counted locally but the totals are calculated nationally, and seats in parliament are awarded in proportion to votes. A gang that intimidates voters locally will have almost no impact on the national vote."

What an absurd thing to say. By the author's own admission, intimidation is likely to be greater in the Sunni Arab heartland than in the Shiite south or Kurdish north. Therefore, the differential rate of intimidation could keep Sunni Arabs away from the polls in greater numbers than the other major ethnic groups, producing that tyranny of the Shiite majority of which I warned.

"6. A boycott by Sunnis would be counterproductive. In the U.S., representation is allocated to each state according to population. Under national lists, the weight of any region or strand of opinion is determined by turnout. If Sunnis stay at home, Sunni candidates don't get elected."

In history, peoples have done many things that are unproductive. The Shiites of Bahrain boycotted the first free elections in that country recently, allowing Sunni fundamentalists to dominate parliament in a country with a national Shiite majority. This point assumes that the author's idea of what is rational is shared by the people he is analyzing, the classic "mirror" problem.

"5. The coalition has trained a new Iraqi army, which is taking on more and more of the security role."

Among the more ridiculous claims this author has made. The "new Iraqi army" was largely useless in Fallujah, except for a handful of the braver Kurds and Shiites.

"4. The turnout is going to be huge. Liberal journalists will report on the day that turnout is disappointing, because they will only be counting in Baghdad. When votes come in from Kurdish and Shia areas it will prove to be even bigger than the American turnout, which itself was up by a fifth from 2000."

Big Kurdish and Shiite turnouts and a low Sunni Arab turnout would not in fact be good news.

"3. People in Iraq are fed up with war."

The tens of thousands of Iraqis determinedly fighting a guerrilla war are not fed up with war. They are prosecuting it.

"2. More and more people in Iraq have access to the Internet and other free information sources. They no longer have to trust government propaganda. Al Jazeera, and a growing network of Iraqi bloggers - most of whom regard Americans as allies - give Iraqis access to freedom of speech."

These same media are being used by the guerrillas and by the boycotting parties. Many Sunni Arabs would not know that the Association of Muslim Scholars had called for a boycott if it were not for al-Jazeera's interviews with its leaders.

"But the biggest reason the Iraqi elections will be a success is ...
1. Western liberals who claim that Arabs don't want or aren't ready for democracy are just wrong. What liberals call "Western" values are human values. Arabs want to be free and to govern themselves just as much as people in Europe and America do."

"Western liberals" for the most part haven't said any such thing. It was the British and American Right that overthrew the last freely elected, democratic government of Iran, in 1953. The French encouraged the Algerian military to cancel the election results in 1991. Democracy in the Middle East has often been sought by its peoples, and has had no bigger enemy than the rightwing parties of Europe and the United States.

A statement such as "Arabs want to be free" is anyway mere propaganda. Which Arabs? When? Under what circumstances? The millions of Shiites who support Muqtada al-Sadr don't appear to me to want to be free of puritanical restrictions or of charismatic authoritarianism. The millions of Sunni Arabs who are supporting the guerrilla war, actively or passively, don't seem to want the kind of "freedom" Langley is imposing on them. A majority of Iraqis clearly want a new, parliamentary government to succeed, but significant minorities and maybe even a plurality do not. Glib statements by Westerners about what "Arabs" want are the New Orientalism, since the Western observers put themselves in the position of ventriloquists for their pliant Arab lap puppets. We don't get to hear some of the real Arabs, like Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, in American media. Langley gets to substitute himself for them.

The success or failure of the political process in Iraq anyway has nothing to do with yearning for democracy. It has to do with the frankly stupid policies implemented by the Bush administration in Iraq. If the whole enterprise goes bad, it won't be because the Iraqis couldn't live up to Mr. Langley's ideals. It will be because the Americans, especially the Neoconservatives, crafted a ridiculous electoral system based on that of Israel.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Supporting Nawal Saadawi

Al-Hayat on Saturday ran an attack from a Muslim fundamentalist point of view on Egyptian novelist Nawal Saadawi. She recently argued that children should all receive hyphenated last names, from both the mother's and the father's side, instead of only the last name of the father. She said that this method would allow families to acknowledge the equal contribution of each parent to the child.

The Al-Hayat article ridiculed and attacked Saadawi. It quoted Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi at length on how here suggestion is contrary to Islamic law (though al-Qaradawi did not actually demonstrate this allegation, and most of his points were just the ramblings of a male chauvinist. Al-Qaradawi is an elderly, old-time Muslim Brotherhood activist now settled in Qatar. He can sometimes be unconventional, but not on issues like this.

The the article quoted Camillia Hilmi, a woman Muslim fundamentalist who is Phyllis Schlafly's Arab twin. She went on at length about how there is a wicked feminist cabal in the West that hates men and wants to exterminate them so that women can rule the world. She also accused them of tampering with the New Testament, so as to make God a woman in their text. She said that unfortunately, this feminist cabal dominated the committees of the United Nations. She then complained that Saadawi has fallen under their malevolent influence.

Saadawi has long been a target of Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists, and even made the secular government of Anwar El Sadat nervous enough to arrest her. She wrote a novel about Sadat, The Fall of the Imam. It enraged the religious right in Egypt. The Al-Azhar Seminary has recently started a campaign to have it formally banned by the Egyptian government. Please sign the letter of solidarity for Nawal Saadawi on the Web.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Things are Not What they Seem Department

On Thursday night on the David Letterman Late Night show on CBS, actress Natalie Portman announced that she was studying Arabic.

On Friday night on the LBC Arabic satellite network the main attraction was a karaoke contest that involved a fair number of old American disco songs from Gloria Estefan and Donna Summer.

More evidence that Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election Plans Roiled
Sunni Extremist Death Threats against Sistani

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that the Shiite vote may get split. He says that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is declining to join the mega-Shiite party list toward which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is working. Likewise, it is not clear that Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers will join the big list, since they are dissatisfied with the offer of only 10 percent of the list's seats in parliament.

It seems to me that the Shiites needn't any longer worry too much about a split list. I can't imagine that Allawi's list is going to do all that well, since his Iraqi National Accord, consisting of ex-Baathists, isn't very popular and he is potentially a lame duck. Why would southern Shiites vote for ex-Baathists who ordered Marines into Najaf last August? Only if Allawi has enormous advantages of incumbency could his list overcome all his negatives.

President Ghazi Yawir seems to me unlikely to get many Shiite votes. Since he took Iraqi cabinet minister and Kurdish activist Nasrin Barwari as a second wife, he might pick up some Kurdish votes. (To underline the complexities of Iraq, Barwari is something of a feminist.) The Shamar tribe, which Yawir does not head but from whose chiefly family he comes, does have a small Shiite section, but it isn't big and many Iraqi tribes are religiously split like that. I can't see how Yawir can translate that fact into any significant number of Shiite votes. My guess is that most Shiites will vote as they think Sistani wants them to.

If the Sadrists run their own list, they might not do so badly, and if they mobilize poor Shiites to vote who otherwise might stay home, they might well actually increase the proportion of the national vote that goes to the Shiites.

So I now think the Shiites will manage to get their parliamentary majority. The real danger is that the Sunni Arabs will stay home, and the Shiites get 85% of the seats. If that happens, the religious Shiite parties are likely to dominate parliament, perhaps even holding 51% of seats (138 of 275).

A rear-guard Sunni Arab (and other) effort to postpone the elections grew in force on Friday, with 17 small parties now agitating for a 6-month delay. So far, however, the leading Shiite figures and parties are insisting on going ahead in January, and both Allawi and Bush seem to be committed.

It could be argued that the elections may as well be held in January, since 1) the security situation is not actually likely to be better in six months and 2) postponement might try the patience of Sistani, who insisted on early elections and can bring hundreds of thousands of protesters into the street with a single word. A Shiite agitation for elections at a time when most Sunnis want a delay could produce communal rioting.

An argument for delay is that security is so bad in the country that elections can easily be disrupted. Already, 90 out of 540 voter registration sites are closed. The guerrillas can strike at will into the heavily fortified Green Zone. On Friday they killed four British employees and wounded at least 14 with mortar fire. The kind of mortar they used has a range of many miles, so all they had to do was bring it in close enough on a flatbed truck with a cover, uncover, fire, and then disappear. The point is that if a hard target like the Green Zone (government offices, US embassy) can still be struck at will, then soft targets like hundreds of polling stations are sitting ducks. January 30 could be a bloodbath. Iraqis, aware of this, are already complaining about plans to use schools as polling places, since they don't want their children bombed.

Already, Al-Zaman reports that guerrillas in Mosul targeted voter registration offices in Mosul this week, setting at least one on fire, and directing death threats at election workers.

Of course, the other problem with holding the elections on Jan. 30 is that many Sunni Arabs are angry and sullen and are likely to boycott. There is no point in holding elections that have no legitimate outcome.

Sunni radicals are aware that the Shiite grand ayatollah, Sistani, is a key obstacle to their own dreams of a Taliban state in Iraq, and some think they know what to do about that. KarbalaNews.net reports in Arabic that Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) websites in Saudi Arabia-- which have a direct and indirect impact on the situation in Iraq-- have issued a call for the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. One Salafi cleric, writing at Muntadiyat al-Qimmah, rejected all Shiite pleas for Muslim unity because, he said, Shiites are "more deserving of being killed than the Crusaders."

KarbalaNews complains that such sites present doctored "sayings" falsely attributed to the Prophet Muhammad commanding jihad against the Shiites. (The Sunni-Shiite split did not exist at the time of Muhammad, d. 632).

Aside from the report of the content of this Salafi site, which the author says has the support of Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, this article demonstrates the great fear Iraqi Shiites have of Saudi Wahhabism, which has through the past two and a half centuries been fiercely anti-Shiite.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq and Damned Statistics

The Red Crescent has finally been allowed into Fallujah (its earlier exclusion was probably a violation of international law). Its spokesman is saying that less than 200 civilian families appear to still be there. If this estimate is true, it suggests that by the time of the US assault, only about 5,000 persons were left in the city. At least 2000 were killed, some 1400 captured, some escaped, and a handful of civilian families remained. If Fallujah was a ghost town before the assault, that would help explain the repeated US military assertion of virtually no civilian casualties (which is still not entirely plausible). But it would also raise a question as to the effectiveness of the assault. Fallujah's population was estimated at between 250,000 and 300,000. If only 5,000 or so were left, then obviously a great many guerrilla fighters, whether full- or part-time, escaped. The few remaining civilian families suffered from lack of food, contrary to earlier assertions of US military spokespersons.

Al-Hayat plays anti-al-Jazeera on Saturday, running an article about how the Fallujans are furious at the "mujahidin" who fought the Americans using their city as a base. One Interviewee among the survivors said that if a holy warrior proffered his hand, he'd rip it to pieces with his teeth. The Fallujans complain that the radical Muslim fundamentalists established themselves in the poorest city quarters, paying exorbitant rents, even though residents pleaded with them to fight the Americans outside the city. One said that anyone who made such arguments was tagged by the militants as an American sympathizer and received death threats.

Do I detect sarcasm toward the US military in the column of Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough? They ridicule Centcom for claiming that the Fallujah operation had broken the back of the guerrilla effort and for suggesting that Fallujah was the greatest battle since the fall of Baghdad. They have also drawn up "talking points" for those wishing to defend the operation, which underline how many explosives were in Fallujah; charge that every one of the city's 77 mosques had been used as a weapons storage facility or fortress for attack; and added that "In one sector alone, a Marine unit found 91 caches and 432 IEDs. As a comparison, in October in all of Iraq, the coalition found 130 arms caches and 348 IEDs."

Since there are an estimated 250,000 tons of explosives and munitions missing from the prewar Baath stockpiles, I fear that whatever was found in Fallujah was a drop in the bucket. And, a lot of Iraqi cities must be full of such materiel. And, contrary to the "broken back" imagery, a confidential Marine report suggested that the guerrilla war would grow in intensity and breadth in the build-up to the January 30 elections.

Alas, even Fallujah itself is still a problem. Guerrillas staged a shootout on Friday that killed two marines (3 guerrillas died as well).

Not only were many Iraqis disturbed at the way the Fallujah campaign was conducted, but they were upset about the assault by Iraqi national guards and US troops on the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad last Friday. Mosque preachers, both Sunni and Shiite, universally condemned the raid yesterday in the Friday sermons. Al-Zaman says that Shaikh Adnan Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, called on the United Nations, the Arab League and other international organizations to intervene to ensure that no further such attacks on mosques are conducted by the Allawi government or the American and coalition forces. Iraqi Muslims were especially appalled that the attack took place during Friday prayers, and resulted in 2 deaths of worshippers. The US maintains that the mosque was a center for the guerrilla war.

Daily Outrage, at The Nation's website, lists some statistics that were not in the New York Times op-ed piece on Friday. For instance, 90 of 540 voter registration stations in Iraq are closed owing to poor security. And here is the coup de grace:

Iraqi Public Opinion
** Only 33 percent of Iraqis think they're better off now than before the war, as a Gallup poll discovered.
** Just 36 percent believe the interim government shares their values.
** 94 percent say Baghdad is more dangerous than it was before the war.
** 66.6 believe the US occupation could start a civil war.
** 80 percent want the US to leave directly after the January elections.

[Note added 11/28/04. I got a long email message disputing these polling numbers, some of which seem drawn from IRI rather than from Gallup (as advertised), and which, my correspondent argued, cherry-picked the results in an unfair way. I don't have time to double-check all this, so note here: caveat emptor.]

The London Times reports that nearly 700 persons die under suspicious circumstances (most of them from bullet wounds) every month in Baghdad. These are not, at least mainly, victims of the guerrilla war. They are mostly victims of crime or revenge. I figure that as 8400 murders a year in a city of 5 million, or 168 per 100,000 per annum. The highest murder rate in the US for 2003 was 45.8 per 100,000, in Washington, DC, with Detroit coming in second. That is, Baghdad is nearly four times as dangerous as the most dangerous American cities, more than a year and a half after the fall of Saddam. The US has by its stupid mistakes deprived Baghdad's residents of the basic right to personal security. It is true that Saddam's secret police used to dump bodies at the morgue, of course. But all the polls show that Baghdadis feel themselves substantially worse off in personal security now, and no wonder.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial: Levine: "Iraq's Lose-Lose Scenario"

Note: This version of the text is slightly revised from the one posted earlier on Friday November 26.

Iraq's Lose-Lose Scenario

By Mark LeVine

Dept. of History, UC Irvine, author of Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Since November 2 I have often heard it said that in an environment where the majority of Americans are divided, cynical and distrustful of their fellow citizens and government, it was natural for them to choose a strong, conservatively religious President with a narrow political vision to lead them. If true, this dynamic does not augur well for the Iraq that will emerge after January 30.

Underlying the decision to confirm Iraqi elections for the end of January are two important calculations: first, that the US military can manage the ongoing violence well enough to permit elections to take place across broad swaths of the country; second, that they will produce an outcome favorable both to the Bush and Allawi Administrations. Only time will tell if such optimism is warranted; the plea issued today by seventeen Iraqi parties to delay elections because of the "threats facing national unity" and "strong political polarization because of sectarian roots" do not augur well for a positive outcome. But even if they are held on or close to schedule, it is almost certain is that the elections will symbolize a frustration rather than fulfillment of the freedom, democracy and prosperity the US and its Coalition allies pledged to bring to Iraq twenty some months ago.

In this context, the ostensible "victory" of US forces in Falluja marks a strategic turning point for the United States; not because it has come close to enabling truly democratic elections by destroying the insurgency, but rather because it revealed a deepening erosion of solidarity between Shi‘i and Sunni Iraqis that is the United States’ only hope for maintaining a long-term presence in the country. Such lack of solidarity is in contrast to the mutual aid and support displayed during the Falluja and Najaf invasions of last spring. Had it been translated into coordinated Sunni-Shi‘i resistance--Sadr City exploding along with Falluja-- the occupation would have quickly become untenable.

Indeed, as the human, moral and material toll of the occupation skyrocketed, most Arab Iraqis, Shi‘a and Sunnis alike, have come to abhor the American presence along with an Allawi government viewed as little more than an American puppet. We don’t have to look far to figure out why they: 100,000 deaths and counting, untold billions of dollars of property and infrastructure damage, a barely-functioning health system, massive unemployment, and official corruption that is so pervasive that one of Prime Minister Allawi's senior advisors described the Government to me as “Saddam with new faces”--all are better recruiting tools for an insurgency than a dozen bin Laden and Zarqawi videos.

In this context sustained Iraqi Arab unity would have meant the defeat of the occupation and an ignoble American retreat from Iraq. But its opposite, intercommunal hostility and even violence, will just as surely mean the defeat of democracy, peace and prosperity. This is the stark choice facing Iraq in the coming weeks, and the US management of the occupation has encouraged both trends since March, 2003: by creating both a weak state open to US influence and a weakened society too torn by internal strife to unite against the occupation.

There are many reasons why the solidarity between Sunnis and Shi‘a, which has historically been tenuous, dissipated in the last six months. To begin with, while leaders of the two communities have exerted great efforts to promoting sectarian harmony (made easier by the fact that so many Iraqi families are a mix of both sects, and even Kurds as well), numerous interviews I conducted while in Iraq earlier this year, seconded by the often insulting and sometimes incendiary language of sectarian media, reveal significant suspicion and even hostility between the two groups after the toppling of the Hussein regime. This was heightened by acts of extreme violence, including suicide bombings that killed more than 150 Shi‘a in Karbala and Baghdad, and the murders of many religious figures on both sides.

But the historical staying power of an “Iraqi” rather than sectarian identity, coupled with the grind of an occupation beset by failed promises and worsening violence, made common cause a logical option among many Sunnis and Shi‘a (especially the poorer Shi‘a who are attracted to Moqtada al-Sadr). Such sentiments remained strong even as the Shi‘i establishment has by and large supported--or at least tolerated--the American presence as a way to secure power based on their position as the country’s largest ethniic or religious group.

This calculus has clearly changed in the last few months. Of the many reasons for this, perhaps the most important is that so many victims of the revolt have been Shi‘a, especially the police and army recruits and officers killed in large numbers at least once every week or two. Such attacks, along with the presence of many (perhaps thousands) of foreign and often anti-Shi‘i Sunni fighters in Iraq, have resurrected the Shi‘i anger at the suffering they endured under Saddam’ rule, when Sunnis were generally accorded better treatment communally than their Shi‘i neighbors.

In this situation, as one former high ranking Governing Council official explained to me, “This time around in Falluja the Shi‘i view was, "‘Good, let the Sunnis feel what we felt all those years under Hussein’.”" Indeed, if a figure whose ear is as close to the proverbial Shi‘i street as Moqtada al-Sadr remained largely silent as Falluja burned, it seems clear that most Shi‘a have decided that however much they dislike the occupation or Allawi, both are needed to cement Shi‘i political power and defeat an increasingly Sunni insurgency that would be very costly and nearly impossible for the Shi‘a to combat on their own.

Such a sentiment has enabled the US and Iraqi authorities to transform an Arab into a Sunni revolt, with Shi‘a and Kurds predominating among the forces fighting alongside the Americans and leaders in both communities stressing the political and religious duty to vote. Of course, Ayatollah Sistani and the Shi‘i establishment might well be playing the United States: using the elections to solidify political power, after which it the Americans will be asked--or forced--to leave‘’. The worse the violence, however, the less the chance of this happening anytime soon. But also the lesss the chance of peace, reconstruction or a functioning democracy, so far the still-born birthright of post-Saddam Iraq.

Mark Levine
Department of History
University of California Irvine
mlevine
@
uci
.edu

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

25,000 US Casualties in Iraq; 9% of Troops Put in Hospital or Killed
Over 2000 Iraqis Killed in Fallujah

CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as "wounded in battle," but also 17,000 classified as non-combat sick or injured, of whom 80 percent do not return to their units in Iraq. Although some of the 17,000 are victims of disease, some unspecified number have actually been injured as a result of being in a theater of war. If you have an "accident" while guns and bombs are going off all around you, is it really an "accident"?

The Editor and Publisher piece blames the "US press" for under-reporting these figures. But obviously it is the Department of Defense that constructed the categories that allowed some war heroes to be shunted off as victims of "accidents." So it isn't the press's fault. It is Donald Rumsfeld's fault (and, sure, Karl Rove and George W. Bush, the Teflon Twins).

The Iraqi Defense Ministry has admitted that 2085 Iraqis were killed in the course of the US assault on Fallujah. The same ministry, along with US military spokesmen, keep denying that any civilians were killed.

Personally, I would take all these statistics with a big grain of salt. The US has bombed so many buildings in Fallujah in recent weeks that there must be bodies still in the rubble. Will the rubble be combed for dead bodies? And, even if, as some US military personnel have suggested, 95% of civilians had fled, that would be on the order of 15,000 persons. How likely is it that a massive military assault on residential neighborhoods killed none of them?

Some un-embedded wire service reports suggest a different picture, saying that Fallujah survivors :

"charged, in interviews, that as well as deaths from bombs and artillery shells, a large number of people, including children, were killed by American snipers. Some of the killings took place in the build-up to the assault on the rebel stronghold, and at least in one case, that of the death of a family of seven, including a 3-month-old baby, American authorities have admitted responsibility and offered compensation. Men of military age were particularly vulnerable. But there are also accounts of young children, women and old men being killed.

Mere common sense, it seems to me, makes these reports more credible than blithe claims of no "collateral damage" at all. On the other hand, Iraqi guerrillas are perfectly capable of manufacturing US war crimes where none existed, as part of their own propaganda war. That there were almost certainly civilian casualties does not in and of itself tell us whether the military assault was necessary, or whether it was conducted as it should have been.

The fog of information war thrown up by the Allawi government, the US military, and the guerrilla sympathizers, however, does make the episode difficult to judge morally and ethically. In a democracy, such judgments are necessary, so that there is something radically wrong with the system, when we ordinary Americans don't have a realistic idea of how many US troops have been harmed in the prosecution of this war, and likewise have no clear idea of the human cost of an operation like Fallujah II.

The irony of the twenty-first century Information Age is that the American public is uninformed as never before about the most crucial information in our lives. The new Age of Ignorance amidst information riches is made possible precisely because modern means of communication lend themselves to manipulation by wealthy, powerful forces that understand how to make an emotional impact that will obscure the real issues. This observation is as true of the Baath Party as it is of the Republican Party, as true of al-Jazeerah as it is of Fox Cable News.

The difficulties of political interpretation are, it seems to me, underscored by the interview that Majid Musa, deputy speaker of the Iraqi National Council and leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, gave to Egyptian Radio (BBC World Monitoring, Nov. 23).

The Egyptian interview asked what the participants at the Sharm El Sheikh conference could be expected to agree on.

"Majid: I believe that there is a common ground and that a consensus is possible. The continuation of the unstable conditions, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq and the activities of terrorists and saboteurs will not be restricted within Iraqi borders. The impact of those crimes and this terrorism will spread throughout the region, unless we take timely measures and cooperate to ward off such dangers." He added that the issue of the exact shape of Iraqi federalism was an internal affair.

The Cairo interviewer asked him about a deadline for withdrawal of US troops. (France had pressed for a deadline of Dec. 31, 2005, for this withdrawal, but the other Sharm El Sheikh participants, including Egypt, rejected it).

"Majid: As for the other issue, which is the withdrawal of foreign forces, it is an objective that all Iraqis without exception seek to achieve. Nobody could claim that they are keener than the Iraqi people to see a quick end to the presence of foreign troops. However, the problem is deciding when those troops could depart. We have not yet built sufficient military, police or security forces to protect the security of Iraq."

It appears to me that the stance of the Iraqi Communist Party, at least for now, is not so far from that of the US government-- curb terrorists and saboteurs, decide on federalism in the Iraqi parliament, and be patient about foreign troops until an Iraqi military can be trained. That is, the ICP seems somewhat to the right of the Gaullists here!

What seems indisputable to me is that Spencer Ackerman at Iraq'd is correct to be skeptical of the Bush administration arguments, reported by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, that the Sunni Arabs can be so beaten down and terrified that they will fall in line behind Iyad Allawi! See the comments, above, of Mark Levine.

Rather, the political wages of Fallujah are ethnic division, anger and sullenness that could cripple Iraq well into the future.

If this observation is true, then the current operation in Babil province, which continued on Thursday, is also unlikely to yield the political fruits sought.

In addition, AFP writes, "On the ground, four people were killed and 16 wounded in two bomb attacks in Samarra, one of them a suicide attack, and another south of the main northern oil capital of Kirkuk."

Radio Sawa Iraq is reporting, via Reuters, a huge explosion at the Green Zone (government offices and US embassy) in Baghdad, resulting in a big column of smoke. How you have elections when the most politically important parts of the capital are in this condition, I have no idea.

According to AFP, the story being trumpeted all day on Fox Cable News about the discovery of chemical and anthrax weapons labs in Fallujah by Iraqi troops is questionable to say the least. The US military denies it and Hans Blix is skeptical. I smell the troika of Iyad Allawi, Naqib al-Falah, and Hazem Shaalan behind this announcement, which will be remembered even if it is discredited.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bloggers Respond

The weblogging community responds to Colonel Yigal Carmon's outrageous threat to sue me over my characterization of MEMRI as a well-funded organization dedicated to cherry-picking Arab news reports to make them look bad:

Brad DeLong says "MEMRI Needs to Be Moved to "Unreliable": Ah. Clearly it's time to stop reading (and citing) MEMRI."

Henry Farrell says,

"MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves."

[Cole says: Thanks, Henry. The University Counsel and I spoke, and he underlined that the University of Michigan would never take a position on faculty speech and I can assure readers that there isn't the remotest possibility that the hallowed Home of the Wolverines would take such a clumsy feint seriously.]

Abu Aardvark says,

"To be blunt, Professor Cole is right. MEMRI routinely selects articles which show the worst of Arab discourse, even where this represents only a minority of actually expressed opinion, while almost never acknowledging the actual distribution of opinion. As for the Reform Project, it tends to select statements by pro-American reformers who concentrate on criticizing other Arabs, again with little regard for the real debates going on among Arabs. Your selective translations therefore offer a doubly warped perspective on the Arab debates: first, over-emphasizing the presence of radical and noxious voices; and second, over-emphasizing the importance of a small and marginal group of Arabs who share your own prejudices. What you leave out is almost the entire Arab political debate which really matters to Arabs: a lively debate on satellite stations such as al Jazeera and al Arabiya and in the elite Arab press about reform, international relations, political Islam, democracy, and Arab culture which English-speaking readers would greatly benefit from knowing about."

Further evidence for this point of view is available in the form of Brian Whitaker's debate with Yigal Carmon at the Guardian website. Whitaker's points suggest that the widespread impression that MEMRI is accurate but selective may be too generous. Serious lapses in accuracy are also apparent, and so far unexplained.

Matthew Yglesias writes: "Cole seems to be in the right on the key point of factual dispute, though I'm willing to believe he's gone too far in intimating that MEMRI is some kind of front for the Israeli government. More to the point, MEMRI is clearly seeking to use the legal system to silence people who disagree with its politics." [Cole says: Matthew, I don't think I actually intimated that before now, though it is beginning to occur to me and others now that the heavy-handedness has been underlined.]

Maxspeak says "MEMRI's game is to troll for objectionable statements in Arabic-language publications -- not a daunting task, to be sure -- and foist them on the non-Arabic speaking publics in the West as an endless object lesson in Islamic backwardness and intolerance."

Kurt Nimmo appears convinced that MEMRI is a black psy-ops project of Israeli military intelligence aimed at shaping Western public opinion in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim directions.

Begging to Differ points out that MEMRI is probably a "public figure" for US legal purposes. This is the standard for such actions in such instances: "If a plaintiff alleging defamation is considered a 'public figure,' or a person or entity whose views and actions on public issues and events are of concern to other citizens, that plaintiff must prove the alleged defamation was made with 'actual malice'--that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." [Cole says: "Actually, everything I said was true, as far as I know, and none of my points has been seriously contested with solid information."]

American Amnesia says,

"MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Organization, hasn't received attention here at American Amnesia for one simple reason: it's a compost of specious translations of worst-of-the-worst opinion pieces coming out of the Arabic press. Think of an organization dedicated to translating into Arabic the Jerry Falwells, Bob Jones, and other scraps of ideological detritus bobbing around in our local papers, and you've got MEMRI's mission and net worth."

(Cole notes: Until I see figures for all the MEMRI offices, and we have an idea of how much of their work exactly is done in those offices and perhaps elsewhere, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I deny that I have misstated their funding. It is silly to think that the nearly $2 mn. that underwrites their Washington office is anything but the tip of their financial iceberg.)

The blogging world has been enormously supportive, and hundreds if not thousands of emails have been sent in protest to MEMRI. I have by no means listed all the interesting reactions on the Web to this issue. I am very grateful. It seems to me that if we don't make a stand here, freedom of speech on the internet is endangered.

P.S. The Boris and Natasha of Arab-Israeli politics, are saying that I brandished a lawsuit against them for putting up a dossier on me and encouraging people to spy on me for them, in 2002. Damn straight I did. And nor are these two incidents comparable. I did not threaten to sue them for libel, but for personal harassment. I didn't cyberstalk Yigal Carmon. In fact, I don't think I ever even mentioned his name until he threatened me. As a private person, he should be left alone. The rhetorical strategy of alleging that if you ever threatened to sue someone on solid grounds, you may not complain about someone else frivolously threatening you with a SLAPP, is typical of these polemicists. Move on. Nothing of interest to see here.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fall-Out of Fallujah Keeps Falling

Sunni Arabs in Iraq are blaming Shiites for conspicuously failing to come to the defense of Fallujah during the recent American assault. Dhiya Rasan and Steve Negus of the Financial Times write, "Those of the black turbans” Iraq's Shia clergy “are but traitors and agents of America. It is they who have provoked the Americans to attack the Sunni, whom they call extremists and terrorists,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Kubaisi told his congregation last Friday."

On the other hand, the Marines have concluded that with all the powerful munitions they have found in Fallujah, the Sunni guerrillas could have taken over all of Iraq.

On the other hand, Fallujans are afraid that the mere presence of US troops in the city virtually guarantees a long-term guerrilla war that will disrupt their lives into the distant future. Explosions still wrack the city, and many Fallujans vow to fight the US presence.

Reuters reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party of Muhsin Abdul Hamid and several other small Sunni Arab parties are still agitating for the postponement of the elections scheduled for January 30. They argue that time is needed for "national reconciliation" and that the national party lists disadvantage the Sunnis. The Reuters piece notes that a high official in the party was arrested last week.

Az-Zaman reports that tribal leaders in four north-central provinces have threatened to have members of their (largely Sunni Arab) tribes boycott the elections if they are held on the basis of national lists rather than local district representation. Shaikh Naji Jabbarah, the representative of Salahuddin Province, said that a conference would soon be held in Tikrit to make a final decision.

The same source reports that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has called upon 250 notables and party leaders to join him in a joint list, which he would head. Allawi would be the first name on the list, and how many members of parliament from it were actually seated would depend on how many votes the list got nationally. Allawi is betting that the list can get at least the 40,000 or so necessary to seat the number one candidate (himself).

Once elected, the parliament will then elect a president and two vice-presidents. They in turn will appoint a prime minister. Allawi is almost certainly trying to make deals behind the scenes with the persons and parties most likely to capture the presidency and vice-presidencies, in hopes that they will reappoint him to his present position.

The US continued its new offensive, against guerrillas in Babil province south of Baghdad. It has been a center of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war. It had earlier been a Shiite area, but many Sunni Arabs were settled there by Saddam and given expropriated land. A Basra group of activist Shiites had recruited volunteers to go up there and protect Shiites from Sunni attacks.

The CNN anchor in the US during the daytime on Wednesday said that the US troops were fighting "thugs and terrorists" in the "triangle of death".

This sort of language is really inexcusable in a news organization. There are of course thugs and terrorists among those fighting US troops, but a lot of the guerrillas are just Sunni Arab nationalists who reject the US presence and fear that they will lose everything if the Shiites take back their land and homes. I don't know at what point US electronic journalism became a propaganda arm of the White House and the Pentagon, but it is not a healthy development. And, of course, CNN is hardly the worst offender in this regard!


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on MEMRI
On Torture: "Everyone Experiences Pain"

Further to the frivolous threat of a lawsuit directed at me by Colonel Yigal Carmon, director of MEMRI and formerly of Israeli Military Intelligence , an informed reader writes:

You asked a few questions about MEMRI in your most recent posting including why Brian Whitaker found that three of their staff in Washington were ex-military intelligence. The answer to that one is quite easy: they used to post it openly on their website until they decided to get more coy about their identity, but thanks to the magic of the web you can still find the old page here.

I could swear I remember going through their website a long time ago as well and finding info on their other offices, this site says they have offices in London, Jerusalem, and Berlin. The Berlin office info can be found here.

This posting on MEMRI's site describes Carmon recently as the head of their Jerusalem office:

You might try scanning through old versions of the website on archive.org to see if you can find more info . . .

Actually, the Disinfopedia entry on MEMRI has a fair amount of information about the "Jerusalem Branch," which is apparently no longer listed at the American web site. Of course, there is a real question as to whether the Washington DC office isn't actually a "branch" of the Jerusalem operation. A reader writes, "MEMRI has a Jerusalem web-site in Hebrew: www. memri. org. il. The Domain registration is:
Amutat Yesodot Shalom
7 Hamaalot St.
Jerusalem Israel 78542
Phone: +972 2 6244730
Fax: +972 2 6255779."


For other criticisms of MEMRI see The Forward.

I wrote another inquirer:

I think it would be possible for there to be a MEMRI USA incorporated here, and to show only US income [on Form 990].

Think about all the labor that has to go into scanning hundreds of Arabic newspapers, deciding which articles to translate, and then translating and disseminating them. Most of them aren't on the Web. Who buys them and warehouses them? Where? How do they get to Washington, DC the next day?

I think you have to figure . . . [lots] for each office and big . . . money for the Jerusalem office.

Then Norbert Mattes wrote me from Germany:

Dear Mr. Cole,

I followed your dispute with Yigal Carmon/MEMRI with interest. I´m the editor of a small German quaterly called Inamo. Our project, which is called The Information Project for the Near and Middle East (a bit like MERIP), has no real funding. We can pay the expenses of the journal by selling it but receive no compensation for our work on it.

In the Fall, 2002, issue we printed a translation of the article by Brian Whitaker (Guardian) about MEMRI and its selective approach to translating articles from the Arab press. Nine days later Yigal Carmon reacted to Whitaker's article, and his reply was published at the website of the Guardian.

In Inamo, we then we brought out three articles concerning MEMRI (No. 32, winter 2002) . . . these included a reply of MEMRI-BERLIN to Whitaker's article as well as an article by Christopher Hayes, an Inamo editor, concerning the work of MEMRI-Berlin, along with a portrait of Yigal Carmon . . .

In response to this further material, an article appeared in "Die Wochenzeitung" (Zurich, Switzerland) of 6.2.2003, entitled "An enemy of Peace: The German academic periodical Inamo profiles MEMRI founder Yigal Carmon in their latest Issue, NR. 32, winter, 2002."

In January 2003 we got a letter from Carmon's attorney in Berlin regarding this article. He threatened legal action and demanded a retraction of 12 points in the article. Otherwise, he said, he would take us to court. The amount of damages he threatened to ask for was 50 000 Euros [$60,000], in addition to attorney and court fees. The lawyer appended a counter-statement by Carmon himself. He alleged that, in accordance with German media laws, we had to print it. I initially cut out about forty percent of his response because it had nothing to do with our article.

We disputed six of his original points. For instance, he had threatened us with legal action for asserting that he supported torture. We stood our ground, pointing out that in an interview in the Washington Post, Yigal Carmon had said he accepted the application of "pain." The Washington Post asked him about if he could cause pain to a Palestinian prisoner to get information. Carmon said words to the effect that 'pain does not take your life; pain comes, pain goes; pain disappears ... everybody has had this expierience.' [see exact quote below]. With regard to two points, we did commit errors in our research.

But we had to print his response, because we had to reach a settlement with his attorney, not having the money to go to court. They accepted the 6/6 offer, but we had to print his reply in full. Carmon or MEMRI did take care of the lawyer fees.

Later on I spoke with Yossi Melman from Haaretz. He had written an article about Carmon, the one man secret service and said, "I will be your witness." It was too late . . .

All the best,


Norbert Mattes
editor of INAMO

P.S. By the way. Carmon of course replied in the Guardian to the article by Brian Whitaker. At the beginning of October, 2002, an e-mail chat began between Whitaker and Carmon. But suddenly Carmon stopped. I spoke with Brian at the beginning of November, he said "I´m still waiting for an answer from Carmon." If he doesn´t answer within three weeks we will print the chat in the Guardian." So they did middle of January 2003.

*Washington Post May 4, 1995: "Yigal Carmon, a former terrorism adviser to Rabin and former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir . . . [,] Asked whether he would justify the infliction of pain to extract information, Carmon replied: "Pain is not taking life. Pain comes and goes. Pain disappears. You know, everyone experiences that. Unwillingly, of course."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Boycott Statement of Iraqi National Constituent Assembly

The intrepid Alissa Rubin of the LA Times reported last week on the meeting of political organizations in Iraq calling for a boycott of the forthcoming election. Their formal statement has just become available to me in English, and I'm reprinting below.

"In the name of God, the merciful,

The Iraqi Constituent Conference statement on its stance regarding elections

In accordance with the Iraqi National Constituent Conference statement dated 27 October 2004 regarding the "elections" to be held next year, which included the essential requirements to hold free and fair elections, and given the fact that the competent authorities did not meet these objective requirements, we announce that we will boycott these elections.

We are boycotting these elections because they will not represent the will of our people and their just demands for sovereignty and independence given that such elections will be held under imposed bases stipulated in the interim State Administration Law. This law was rejected by independent political and religious figures because it represents a grave threat to Iraq's future, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The attack on Iraqi cities, especially the savage annihilation crime in Al-Fallujah, represents a definite obstacle for Iraqis to adequately take part in the political process under the control of the occupation and in the absence of sovereignty. How can it be possible to hold national dialogue and engage in the political process while criminal conduct is targeting the people?

We, in the Iraqi National Constituent Conference, declare our commitment to free and fair elections when their full requirements are met. Therefore, we call on our people to boycott [the elections] and not to be fooled by the misleading media which want the process to slip through and falsify the will of our people in Iraq through legitimizing the schemes of the occupation and the non-elected government.


General Secretariat Members:

1. Secretary-general of the congress, Shaykh Muhammad Jawad al-Khalisi

2. Official spokesman, Dr Wamid Jamal Nazmi

3. Association of Muslim Scholars

4. Arab Nationalist Movement

5. Imam Al-Khalisi University

6. Democratic Reform Party

7. Unified People's Party

8. Iraqi Turkoman Front

9. Iraqi Christian Democratic Party

10. Islamic Bloc in Iraq

11. The Office of Ayatollah Ahmad al-Husayni al-Baghdadi

12. The Office of Ayatollah Qasim al-Ta'i

13. Union of Iraqi Jurists [Huquqiyun]

14. Higher Committee for Human Rights

15. Iraqi Women's Association



The Iraqi National Constituent Conference

2 Shawwal 1425 [AH], corresponding to 15 November 2004"

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

MEMRI Funding

I have received several emails from people who looked up the funding for MEMRI in the internet guide to charitable organizations, and found that it reported income of a little less than $2 million a year.

But that is only the United States. MEMRI is an international organization. It has, for instance, a Berlin branch, which has also brandished lawsuit threats.

Does it have an Israel office? If so, housed where? How much of its work is done offshore? Why did Brian Whitaker find that three of its Washington staff was ex-Israeli military intelligence?

When the Council of American Ambassadors visited Israel in 2002 and met with Israeli public figures, why did the roster look like this: "During our visit, we met with the following officials and non-officials: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; Foreign Minister Shimon Peres; Defense Minister “Fouad” Ben Eliezer; Housing Minister Natan Sharansky; Bank of Israel Governor David Klein; Foreign Ministry Director General Avi Gil; Jewish Agency Chair Sallai Meridor; Envoy for the PM, Omri Sharon; former Ambassador Dore Gold; United States (US) Ambassador Dan Kurtzer; Jerusalem Report editor, David Horovitz; Haifa University Professor Dan Scheuftan; and Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) Director, Yigal Carmon."?

I'd be glad to print Colonel Carmon's responses to these inquiries, as well. Am waiting to hear from him.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Another campaign against Sunnis

A major military campaign was launched by US and British troops in Iraq on Tuesday, targetting Babil province or what is called "the triangle of death." This is the area south of Baghdad where cities such as Mahmudiyah, Latifiyah and Iskandariyah lie.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

MEMRI and Bias

Many thanks to all the readers who have written in response to my posting about the attempt of the Israel-linked MEMRI "translation service" to intimidate me with the threat of a lawsuit.

Many of the letters have been eye-opening, and I give an example, which seems to me especially instructive, below.

Dear Mr Carmon,

I regularly read Dr Cole's weblog, Informed Comment. This is an excellent service that summarizes reports from published in the Arabic press about events about that part of the world. I was dismayed to learn that you and your organization, MEMRI, have threatened to sue Dr Cole over some comments he made regarding your selection of material from the Arabic press. In your letter to him, you indicate that his suggestion that your organization "cherry-picks the vast Arabic press" is "patently false".

Curious, I had a look at your website and found my way to "Cartoons from the Middle East Media". This area contained about 750 cartoons, divided into four categories essentially based on whether their targets were Israel, the USA, or both countries. After reading through a sample of these, I came to two plausible conclusions: either 1) Arabic cartoonists are a singularly unimaginative lot, and are essentially incapable of publishing anything that pokes fun at anybody in the world other than Americans, Israelis and Jews or 2) that your claims to be presenting "representative" material from the Arabic press may not be entirely based in reality.

Again, I decided to see for myself and looked at cartoons in a few Arabic papers online. What I found was a wide variety of political cartoons about people and politicians from the Arab world, Europe, the UN, and, admittedly, Israel and the USA, although the latter were in proportions far, far smaller than your website would appear to suggest. Frankly, I find your claim to being objective in selecting items for your website to be woefully at odds with what is actually presented there. In all seriousness, I don't understand how you could expect any intelligent person to perceive it as such. Clearly Dr Cole does not, and I respectfully request that you withdraw your threat to sue him for publishing a perfectly valid viewpoint regarding MEMRI's choice of material on its website.

Respectfully yours . . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Persian Gulf Flap

As if we did not have enough life and death issues to deal with, the Iranian state is now keeping National Geographic out because it identifies the Persian Gulf as also the Arab Gulf.

As with most disputes about what to call something, this argument is silly. The Persian Gulf was called that in English after Greek and Latin writers of the ancient world. The ancient Iranians who moved into Elam around the ninth or eighth century BC were called Parsumash in the ancient Assyrian tablets, and appear to have called themselves Pars as well as Iran (=Aryan). They gradually took over Elam in southwestern Iran and it became known as Pars. To this day, it is called the province of Fars (Arabic does not have a "p" so when Iranians became Muslim and started using the Arabic alphabet, they tended to replace the "p" with an "f").

Since the Iranians had the most extensive navigation system in the Gulf at that time, the Greeks and Romans tended to call it the Persian Gulf or the equivalent in those languages.

There is a neat symmetry here. The Europeans called Iran "Persia," using the part (Pars) to describe the whole. The Muslims called Greece "Yunan" or Ionia, using this coastal region of Anatolia, once populated by Greeks, to name the whole.

The rise of nationalism has complicated this naming system. First, Reza Shah insisted from 1933 that all Western newspapers call the country Iran, not Persia. But then shouldn't it become the "Iranian Gulf?" Why keep "Persian" only for this purpose? Then the rise of Arab nationalism led some Arab intellectuals to insist that it is the "Arab Gulf," properly speaking. OK, but Westerners have been calling it "Persian" since at least Herodotus.

I say we just call it "The Gulf" and be done with it. Other possibilities exist, but all of them are contentious.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Deliberate Murder of 10-year-old Girl by Israeli Military

A tape recording has surfaced showing that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed a frightened 10-year-old little girl in Gaza, who had been identified to them as such.

If the tape is as described, this seems a clear case of a crime against humanity.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic
MEMRI tries a SLAPP

I just checked my campus mail and found a letter in it from Colonel Yigal Carmon, late of Israeli military intelligence, now an official at the Middle East Media Research Organization, or MEMRI. He threatened me with a lawsuit over blog comments I made here at Informed Comment, reprinted at anti-war.com. This technique of the SLAPP or Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation had already been pioneered by polluting industries against environmental activists, and now the pro-Likud lobby in the US has apparently decided to try it out against people like me.

I urge all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.

Here is the letter:

' November 8, 2004

Professor Juan Cole
University of Michigan History Department
1029 Tisch Hall
435 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003

Dear Professor Cole,

I write in response to your article "Osama Threatening Red States?" published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. While we respect your right to argue the veracity of our translations, you certainly may not fabricate information about our organization. You make several claims that are patently false:

Trying to paint MEMRI in a conspiratorial manner by portraying us as a rich, sinister group, you write that "MEMRI is funded to the tune of $60 million a year." This is completely false.

You also write that MEMRI is an "anti-Arab propaganda machine" that "cherry-picks the vast Arabic press." If you have any level of familiarity with MEMRI, you should be aware of our Reform Project, which is one of the most important of MEMRI's projects, and which receives much of our energy and resources. The Reform Project (www.memri.org/reform.html) is devoted solely to finding and amplifying the progressive voices in the Arab world. It is especially disappointing that these charges do not come from an overzealous journalist, but from a member of the academic community, from whom one should be able to expect at least the minimum amount of research and corroboration.

In addition, you write that "MEMRI is one of a number of public relations campaigns essentially on behalf of the far right-wing Likud Party in Israel." This, too, is completely false. MEMRI is totally unaffiliated with any government, and receives no government funding. While I was formerly an Israeli official (and retired more than a decade ago), I have never been affiliated with the Likud Party, or any other party.

As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of. We hope this will not be necessary.

Sincerely,

[signed]
Yigal Carmon

Colonel Carmon's letter makes three charges: 1) that I alleged that MEMRI receives $60 million a year for its operations. 2) That I alleged that MEMRI cherry-picks the vast Arab press for articles that make the Arabs look bad. 3) That I said that MEMRI was affiliated with the Likud Party.

This is how I would reply:

1) I am glad to publish the annual funding of MEMRI, and its sources, as provided by Colonel Carmon, if he will tell us what the figure is, which he has not. As a historian, I have no desire to have anything but the facts in evidence. MEMRI obviously a well-funded operation, as any familiarity with its scope and activities would make clear. In the meantime, I am glad to acknowledge that the figure I gave has been disputed by Colonel Carmon. I think he would find that in democratic countries, in any case, a dispute over an organization's level of funding would be laughed out of court as a basis for a libel action. In fact, I am giggling as I write this.

2) I continue to maintain that MEMRI is selective and biased against the Arab press, and that it highlights pieces that cast Arabs, especially committed Muslims, in a negative light. That it also rewards secular Arabs for being secularists is entirely beside the point (and this is the function of the "reform" site). On more than one occasion I have seen, say, a bigotted Arabic article translated by MEMRI and when I went to the source on the Web, found that it was on the same op-ed page with other, moderate articles arguing for tolerance. These latter were not translated.

3) I did not allege that MEMRI or Colonel Carmon are "affiliated" with the Likud Party. What I said was that MEMRI functions as a PR campaign for Likud Party goals. Colonel Carmon and Meyrav Wurmser, who run MEMRI, were both die-hard opponents of the Oslo peace process, and so ipso facto were identified with the Likud rejectionists on that central issue.

Colonel Carmon was not a formal member of the Likud party while serving in Israeli military intelligence because active-duty military are not usually involved in civilian political parties. Since he retired to the US, he did not have the occasion to join the Likud, but there seems little question that if he were living in Israel he would vote for Likud rather than Labor, given his public stances.

So, the charge, that I claimed an "affiliation" of MEMRI with Likud, isn't true in the first place, and there is nothing to retract. That issue almost certainly generated the entire letter. MEMRI is a 501 (c) 3 organization, which is tax exempt in US law, and therefore cannot engage in (much) directly political activity without endangering its exemption. I don't think MEMRI does so directly intervene in politics as to make its 501 (c) 3 status questionable. But it is obvious that 501 (c) 3 is widely abused by rightwing think tanks.

More discussion on MEMRI on the Web can be found here.

I've said all I am going to say to Colonel Carmon just now. Israeli military intelligence is used to being able to censor the Israeli press and to intimidate journalists, and it is a bit shocking that Carmon should imagine that such intimidation would work in a free society.

I will add another criticism of MEMRI, which is that it systematically violates the intellectual property of Arab writers by appropriating their content without paying for it and storing them on its servers, and then claiming copyright in their work as translated. This is a shameful way of proceeding. Where the source articles are published in a country that is signatory to the major international copyright agreements, it may be illegal. All sites dealing in other languages do quote or translate from time to time, which falls under fair use. But MEMRI has a much more systematic set of appropriations going.

MEMRI has begun taking out blog ads. Since it can hardly go about threatening bloggers with lawsuits without violating the essential spirit of open discourse on the Web, it has forfeited any claim on our eyeballs. I urge all bloggers to decline advertisements from MEMRI until such time as Colonel Carmon withdraws his outrageous threat.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.