Tsunami toll rises above 125,000

On very early Friday morning, Reuters was reporting that the death toll in Sunday's tsunami had now climbed to 125,000.

I have a feeling that it will mount yet higher. Some are saying that the toll in Indonesia alone may be 80,000 or more. As relief workers reach some coastal and island areas, they are finding nobody at all, with entire villages gone in places like Aceh. Just gone.

Banda Aceh in Indonesia, which had recently seen some improvement in the security situation after a long separatist insurrection, has been devastated.

I put a courtesy advertisement on the right for Oxfam's relief effort and blogads has put up a courtesy ad for UNICEF's effors. On this last day of 2004, let me just ask that anyone who has been grateful for Informed Comment during the past year take a moment to donate to Oxfam's tsunami aid project, or to UNICEF or to one of your choice. The death toll is incredible, but the needs of the living are unimaginable.


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Death and Death Threats in Iraq

Some 15 Iraqis were killed in various violent incidents on Thursday, and two Lebanese businessmen were kidnapped.
Dawn reports:

"Three border policemen were gunned down in Baquba, north of Baghdad, while on leave, and the son of local police chief was kidnapped. In the capital, an Iraqi army officer was killed while strolling in the street. Four civilians were killed in an ambush at Shorgat, north of the capital, while further north two civilians were killed and four hurt when a bomb exploded near their car as it followed a national guard convoy. Two more Iraqis died and four were wounded when they tried to break through a national guard roadblock in Syniya, a woman was killed and three people wounded by a roadside bomb on the road between Baghdad and Balad and, in Samarra, a national guard was died and four others were wounded in an ambush."

Ansar al-Sunna and 2 other guerrilla groups in Iraq have threatened to kill anyone participating in what they termed "the farce" of Iraqi elections.

CNN is reporting that all 700 voter registration workers in Mosul have resigned after death threats. The guerrillas are alleging that the secular process of American-sponsored elections will result in un-Islamic laws. I don't see how Mosul can participate in the election under these conditions. It has a population of about a million.

The fighting in Mosul that began Wednesday resulted in the death of one US soldier and 25 guerrillas, after guerrillas blew up a truck bomb near a US facility in a coordinated attack.

Radio Sawa Iraq did an interview with Iyad Allawi on Monday in which the dispute between Allawi and Iraqi Vice-President Ibrahim Jaafari over Syria was highlighted. Allawi has accused Syria of harboring Baath guerrillas and allowing infiltration of Iraq. Jaafari has expressed extreme skepticism about these charges. The dispute between the two is in part ideological. Jaafari is a leader of the al-Dawa Party, which has good relations with Iran, which is in turn allied with Syria. Allawi is an essentially American appointee with longstanding ties to the CIA.

KarbalaNews.net reports that Adnan Pachachi, head of the Independent Democratic Bloc, called again on Thursday for a postponement of the January 30 elections. He, Ghazi al-Yawar and Nasir Chadirchi are among the few Sunni Arab politicians with name recognition still in the race.

Candidate name recognition doesn't appear very important, however. For security reasons, the actual names of most candidates on the 78 party or multiparty lists have so far not been released. This odd situation, in which the candidates are not known amonth before the election, attests to how dire the political and security situation in Iraq really is.

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Pipes Favors Concentration Camps

That the Revisionist-Zionist extremist Daniel Pipes has fond visions of rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps isn't a big surprise. That a mainstream American newspaper would publish this David-Dukeian evil is. Of course, this is also a man that President Bush appointed to a temporary vacancy at the United States Institute of Peace, after the Senate understandably balked at a regular appointment for him.

Pipes's little project requires him to attempt to justify the internment of American citizens (of Japanese ancestry) during World War II, a violation on several grounds of the Bill of Rights. I hope Asian-Americans realize that a key wing of the Republican Party, i.e. the Neoconservatives, wishes them ill.

If the American yahoos ever start putting people in concentration camps, I think we may be assured that they won't stop with the Muslims or the Asians, and Mr. Pipes will come to have reason to regret his imprudence and, frankly, his demonic implication.
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Platform of the United Iraqi Alliance

The Iraqi newspaper "al-Adalah" published on Dec. 23 the platform of the United Iraqi Alliance, the mainly Shiite coalition sponsored by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. It was translated by BBC World Monitoring. Since this party very likely will dominate parliament, it is worth looking at the platform.

First, the coalition includes the following parties:

1. Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution in Iraq SAIRI [Or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI]

2. Islamic Al-Da'wah Party.

3. Centrist Grouping Party.

4. Badr Organization.

5. Islamic Al-Da'wah Party/Iraq's Organization.

6. Justice and Equality Grouping.

7. Iraqi National Congress INC .

8. Islamic Virtue Party.

9. First Democratic National Party.

10. Islamic Union of Iraqi Turcomans.

11. Turcoman Al-Wafa Party.

12. Islamic [Faili] Grouping in Iraq [Shiite Kurds].

13. Islamic Action Organization.

14. Future Iraq Grouping.

15. Hizbullah Movement in Iraq.

16. Islamic Master of Martyrs Movement.

As to the platform itself, it has two parts, basic principles and vision of Iraq's polity, and then specific areas of endeavor. As for basic principles:

First, the Iraq that we want:

1. A united Iraq - land and people - with full national sovereignty.

2. A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.

3. A constitutional, pluralistic, democratic and federally united Iraq.

4. Iraq that respects the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people. The state religion is Islam.

5. Iraq that respects human rights, that does not discriminate on the grounds of sects, religions, or ethnicities, and that preserves the rights of religious and ethnic minorities and protects them against persecution and marginalization.

6. Iraq that provides a climate of peaceful coexistence among Iraqis without preferential treatment for any group.

7. Iraq in which the judiciary is independent and in which justice and equality prevail.

I'm not sure most Americans realize that the biggest and most important party coalition in Iraq, which will almost certainly form the next government, has explicitly stated in its platform that it wants a specific timetable announced for withdrawal of US troops from the country.

The rest of the statement promises security, fighting terrorism, a depoliticized military; a state guarantee of a job to every Iraqi, social security and workmen's compensation, state support for the building of houses for homeowners; providing health services and medicine and health insurance; supporting women's participation in politics, the economy and social life; support for youth and for families; developing industry and agriculture and the provision of basic services; education; etc.

An independent foreign policy is promised, as is membership in the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. [This plank implies non-recognition of Israel until there is a global peace settlement accepted by these two organizations).

I think we are looking at the policies of the new Iraq. They aren't what Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz imagined.

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Christian-Muslim Violence in Egypt

In upper Egypt, a Muslim young man is dead after clashes between Muslims and Christians in a village in Minya province. There are said to be 20,000 Muslims and 500 Coptic Christians in Dimsha Hashim, and the Christians have to travel a couple of miles to the nearest church. Apparently one of the Copts had a plan to turn a private house into a church, provoking the protest by a gang of young Muslim men.

Egypt still has on its books an Ottoman-era law restricting church building to Christian-majority areas and requiring government permission, and generally Copts face a certain amount of discrimination in Egyptian society, though in general their right to life, property and worship is recognized.

Note that restrictions on the building of religious edifices by minorities are common in Eurasia. Muslims in Greece, e.g., need special permission to build mosques, and the plan to build one in Athens has been controversial. Even in the United States, Muslim communities have often faced difficulties in getting permission to build mosques or cemeteries from local municipal or county authorities.

Although about 6% of Egypt's 70 million inhabitants are Coptic Christians, they live disproportionately in the south of the country, called Upper Egypt, and in some places in that region they form substantial populations and are economically and politically powerful. Christian-Muslim conflict is common there, and is intertwined with clan feuds.

The combination of Christian-Muslim conflict and a tradition of clan feuding has also contributed to particular success for radical Muslim groups in recruiting students in Upper Egypt to al-Jihad al-Islami, the organization that later joined with Bin Laden to form al-Qaeda. The jihadis have targeted Coptic Christians, but the government has generally intervened against the radical Muslim fundamentalists.

The Coptic Christian church goes back to the early centuries of the Common Era and is often recognized as "indigenous" in Egyptian nationalism, since the Copts are felt to be the descendants of Pharaonic Egyptians who converted to Christianity, and so are contrasted with the "Arabs." (In reality, of course, all Egyptians are a mixture of Nile Valley, African, Arab and other groups). Copts have a special place in the mythology of Egyptian secular nationalism, therefore. But for Muslim fundamentalists they are problematic and often suspected (wrongly) of being stalking horses for Western imperialism (in fact Copts played a key role in anti-British agitations that led to Egypt's independence of London in 1922).

Egyptians are considering the possibility of constitutional and political change as the Mubarak era begins to draw to a close. On Thursday the left-leaning Tagammu Party called for an end to the government's emergency decrees, a sort of martial law that suspended key elements of the Egyptian constitution, on the grounds that they were blocking economic and social development (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat). Among the needed changes, Egypt needs to reform its laws to grant complete freedom of religion and to stop discrimination against minorities.

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Clashes in Mosul, Samarra

The massive bomb in Baghdad that killed 30 persons and wounded 25 the night of Tuesday- Wednesday turns out to have been an ambush. Guerrillas contacted the Iraqi police, told them the house was a safe house, and when the police approached, they blew it up. They also flattened ten houses around it.

The Guardian also says, "In the southern province of Babil, police said 20 members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Imam al-Madhi Army militia were detained on suspicion of involvement in planting explosives and attacking police stations in the region."

Guerrillas launched a daring truck bomb attack on US troops in Mosul on Wednesday. The US troops replied with small arms fire and then called in jets to bombard the southern part of the city.

Al-Zaman Students in the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Education at Mosul University demonstrated for the first time Wednesday, demanding that general examinations be postponed for a semester, until early February 2006, instead of being held in summer of 2005. They said that the lack of heating oil made it hard for them to study, and the lack of gasoline made it difficult for many students to get to class.

Al-Zaman: Sources in the police announced that they had discovered the bodies of an Iraqi contractor and a female engineer on the road between Mosul and Tuz, and found the body of a Turkish truck driver in Bid'iyyah just south of Samarra. Two policemen were wounded by guerrillas in the district of Yathrib to the east of Balad.

The National Guards said that they had captured 25 suspects in al-Azamiyah along with weaponry, and another 25 in Mahmudiyah, both districts of Baghdad. They alleged that among those captured in Mahmudiyah were some Syrians. An Egyptian was captured in Karradah, along with pamphlets and grenades. They also said that 8 guerrillas mounted an attack on the National Guards in Rustumiyah, but that they were captured after an exchange of fire. The US military announced that three suspected guerrillas were captured in the district of Balad, and clashes broke out between National Guards and guerrillas in Samarra.

It was announced that two Iraqi children recently led the Marines to a site where roadside bombs were concealed, near Baiji.

Around 12 noon on Wednesday, National Guards and guerrillas clashed in Samarra's al-Bubaz district, which had witnessed a roadside bomb explosion recently. The National Guards were searching the area near Samarra General Hospital, when guerrillas opened fire on them.

Reuters reported of the Samarra clash that it involved both Iraqi national guards and US troops. The US military announced that two patrols had come under fire. US helicopter gunships were called in, shops closed, and the area was deserted. The previous night, a roadside bomb had wounded one US soldier and five Iraqi policemen in Samarra.

Reuters adds,

"An Iraqi National Guardsman was killed on Wednesday in the Siniya area west of Samarra, an officer in the US-backed force said. Around 110 Guards also resigned after their Siniya commander was killed in a car bomb explosion along with several Guards two weeks ago. The eight-member Siniya village council resigned yesterday following the assassination of its president."

I have noticed a pattern of assassinations of members of provincial and municipal governing councils in recent weeks. Presumably these actions are aimed at derailing the provincial elections also scheduled for January 30. The guerrillas' success in causing the whole governing council of Siniyah to resign, along with over 100 National Guards, seems ominous. In the wake of all those resignations, presumably the guerrillas that had threatened these people are now in control of the village.

The human side of the poor security situation in Iraq is apparent in Jackie Spinner's article today for the Washington Post on how widespread veiling has been forced on formerly relatively liberated Iraqi women. Spinner's piece belies claims made earlier this year by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that the US had improved the situation of women in Iraq.



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Bush and the Tsunami

The transcript of President George W. Bush's remarks on the Tsunami is now available. After days of silence and invisibility, Bush finally came out on Wednesday to address perhaps the greatest natural disaster of our times.

He said he had called four heads of state to express his condolences and was coordinating with other countries, and was sending some military logistical help, along with the $35 million in aid now promised (initially it was $15).

QUESTION: Mr. President, were you offended by the suggestion that rich nations have been stingy in the aid over the tsunami? Is this a sign of another rift with the U.N.?

BUSH: Well, I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed.

Take, for example, in the year 2004, our government provided $2.4 billion in food, in cash, in humanitarian relief to cover the disasters for last year. That's $2.4 billion. That's 40 percent of all the relief aid given in the world last year was provided by the United States government. We're a very generous, kind-hearted nation, and, you know, what you're beginning to see is a typical response from America.
First of all, we provide immediate cash relief to the tune of about $35 million. And then there will be an assessment of the damage so that the next tranche of relief will be spent wisely. That's what's happening now.

Just got off the phone with the president of Sri Lanka. She asked for help to assess the damage. In other words, not only did they want immediate help, but they wanted help to assess damage so that we can better direct resources. And so our government is fully prepared to continue to provide assistance and help.

It takes money, by the way, to move an expeditionary force into the region. We're diverting assets, which is part of our overall aid package. We'll continue to provide assets. Plus the American people will be very generous themselves. I mean, the $2.4 billion was public money, of course provided by the taxpayers.

But there is also a lot of individual giving in America . . .

This entire spiel was very well rehearsed and mostly wrong.

As The Guardian notes,

Jan Egeland - the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator and former head of the Norwegian Red Cross . . . question[ed] the generosity of rich nations. ``We were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries,'' Egeland said Monday. ``And it is beyond me, why are we so stingy, really. ... Even Christmas time should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become.'' Egeland told reporters the next day that his complaint wasn't directed at any one nation.

So Egeland had not in fact singled out the United States. He was talking about the 30 richest countries generally.

Second, Bush is an MBA, so he knows very well the difference between absolute numbers and per capita ones. Let's see, Australia offered US $27 million in aid for victims of the tsunami. Australia's population is about 20 million. Its gross domestic product is about $500 billion per year. Surely anyone can see that Australia's $27 million is far more per person than Bush's $35 million. Australia's works out to $1.35 per person. The US contribution as it now stands is about 9 cents per person. So, yes, the US is giving more in absolute terms. But on a per person basis, it is being far more stingy so far. And Australians are less wealthy than Americans, making on average US $25,000 per year per person, whereas Americans make $38,000 per year per person. So even if Australians and Americans were both giving $1.35 per person, the Australians would be making the bigger sacrifice. But they aren't both giving $1.35; the Bush administration is so far giving an American contribution of nine cents a person.

The apparent inability of the American public to do basic math or to understand the difference between absolute numbers and proportional ones helps account for why Bush's crazy tax cut schemes have been so popular. Americans don't seem to realize that Bush gave ordinary people checks for $300 or $600, but is giving billionnaires checks for millions. A percentage cut across the board results in far higher absolute numbers for the super-wealthy than for the fast food workers. But, well, if people like being screwed over, then that is their democratic right.

Bush's underlining of the $2.5 billion he says the United States gave in emergency humanitarian aid last year annoyed the hell out of me. He said it was 40% of such monies given by the industrialized world. But the US is the world's largest economy, and neither on a per capita basis nor as a percentage of GDP is that very much money. Bush said "billion" as though it were an astronomical sum. But he spends a billion dollars a week in Iraq, without batting an eye. That's right. Two weeks of his post-war war in Iraq costs as much as everything the US spent on emergency humanitarian assistance in 2003 for all the countries in the world.

One reader wrote in,

If the US didn't have 150,000 troops bogged down in Iraq with hundreds of thousands more either winding down from or preparing for deployment, just think of how many lives we could be saving right this instant by putting hundreds of thousands of the most mobile and most efficient airlift, sealift, rapid emergency management, and medical forces in the world to work throughout the Indian Ocean Basin (and for a fraction of the cost of the war). Instead we're barely managing a couple warships and 15,000 or so troops, a fraction of what we might have done if the Administration had their priorities straight. Opportunity cost may seem like an abstract economic principle, but it seems there's nothing quite like the most devastating tidal wave in human history to make it crystal clear. Bush's War is now costing lives in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, etc, etc, etc.

The US Federal budget in 2004 consists of about $1.8 trillion in receipts and $2.3 trillion in expenditures. The 2003 official development assistance budget was $15 billion (a very large portion of which goes to countries that don't need the assistance, and is given for strategic reasons). That is about 0.14 percent of the US GDP. Norway, in contrast, spends $2 billion a year on humanitarian assistance, which comes to almost a full 1.0 percent of its GDP. This is the sort of thing that drove Egeland to make his remark. He was even complaining about Norway, which is several times more virtuous than the US on a per capita basis in this regard.

Bush fears the tsunami for two big reasons. If the US government really stepped up to the plate, Bush would not be able to argue for making his tax cuts for the rich permanent.

And, the world public has just seen on its television screens the sort of disasters we can expect if Bush's denial of global warming continues as US policy. So he has to fall back on silly arguments from meaningless absolute numbers and on vague hopes for private giving. The tsunami says that government is needed to help people. That's not what Bush wants the US public to believe. But the tsunami is bigger than Bush.


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Tsunami Toll Nearly 70,000 and Rising
Where's Bush?

The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.

The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don't mourn being dead, that is left to the living.

Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.

As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).

Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn't the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.

The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.

Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.

Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly.


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Dozens Killed in Iraq

Early Wednesday morning, a huge explosion rocked West Baghdad, flattening several houses and killing 28, including 7 policemen. Iraqi police were raiding the building, a suspected safe house for guerrilla forces, when it went up in flames (presumably because munitions stored there caught fire).

Dawn estimates the number of dead in Iraq violence on Tuesday at 42 (This was before the house exploded). Al-Zaman says 26 of them were Iraqi police or national guards. Sunni Arab guerrillas launched apparently coordinated attacks on police stations in the Sunni heartland. In Dijla alone, guerrillas killed 12 police. The Baathists and Salafi Muslim fundamentalists fighting the guerrilla war see police and national guards as collaborators with foreign occupation.

In recent days, several members of the Sadr Movement [Arabic] have been arrested, including one sweep of 15 in Hilla on Sunday. A spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr warned that the arrests threaten to provoke unrest in Shiite areas on the even of the forthcoming elections.

Syria is denying giving aid to the Iraqi guerrillas. Personally, I don't think it is plausible that Damascus is helping the Salafi Muslim fundamentalists, whom the Allawis (folk Shiites) in charge of the Syrian Baath fear and despise. Some Baath officials or officers might be helping some Iraqi Baath guerrillas. The Syrian Baath is no longer a coherent party, but rather has multiple cliques. But note that the Iraqi Baath and the Syrian Baath seldom got along, and Syria allied against Iraq in the Gulf War.

Georgie Ann Geyer gives evidence that the US military is in denial about how badly the fight against the Sunni Arab guerrillas is going. The US has no Iraqi police in Mosul, a city of a million, and there has been an expansion of the number of guerrilla cells thoughout the Sunni Arab heartland.

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Bin Laden votes in Iraq and Shoots himself in the Foot

Usamah Bin Laden's latest video was broadcast on al-Jazeera on Monday, in which he commanded Muslims to boycott the January 30 elections in Iraq, and expressed his approval of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi had been a rival of Bin Laden's in Afghanistan and had earlier declined to share resources with al-Qaeda. But in recent months al-Zarqawi changed the name of his group from Monotheism and Holy war to Mesopotamian al-Qaeda, and pledged fealty to Bin Laden.

In declaring "infidels" all who vote under the "infidel" interim constitution negotiated by Iraqi politicians with US civil administrator Paul Bremer last winter, Bin Laden is seeking to counter the decree of grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that Iraqis must vote in the upcoming elections or they will be consigned to hell. Bin Laden is arguing, according to the Aljazeera.net in Arabic, that the interim constitution that is the framework for elections is artificial and pagan ("jahili", pertaining to the Age of Ignorance before Islam) because it does not recognize Islam as the sole source of law.

Bin Laden's intervention in Iraq was hamfisted and clumsy, and will benefit the United States and the Shiites enormously. Most Iraqi Muslims, Sunni or Shiite, dislike the Wahhabi branch of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and with which Bin Laden is associated. Nationalistic Iraqis will object to a foreigner interfering in their national affairs.

Zarqawi is widely hated in Iraq because the operations of his group often kill innocent Iraqis as opposed to American troops. The Shiites in particular despise Zarqawi, and are aware of his hopes of provoking a Sunni-Shiite bloodbath in Iraq. (The muted Shiite response to the US assault on Fallujah in November and December derived in large part from a conviction that the city had become a base for Zarqawi and like-minded Salafi terrorists). Zarqawi websites have claimed credit for the assassination in 2003 of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, a respected Shiite leader, which involved descrating the Shiite holy city of Najaf. The mainstream of the Kurds hates Zarqawi, because of his earlier association with the small Kurdish radical Muslim terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, which targeted the two major Kurdish parties.

Bin Laden as much as declared Grand Ayatollah Sistani an infidel. But Sistani is almost universally loved by the 65% of Iraqis who are Shiites, and is widely respected among many Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, as well. Bin Laden, the Saudi engineer, makes himself look ridiculous trying to give a fatwa against the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf. If anything, to have al-Qaeda menacing the Shiites in this way would tend to strengthen the American-Shiite alliance.

If Bin Laden had been politically clever, he would have phrased his message in the terms of Iraqi nationalism. By siding with the narrowest sliver of Sunni extremists, he denied himself any real impact. By adopting Zarqawi, who has killed many more Iraqis (especially Shiites) than he has Americans, he simply tarnishes his own image inside Iraq.

It appears that Bin Laden is so weak now that he is forced to play to his own base, of Saudi and Salafi jihadists, some of whom are volunteer guerrillas in Iraq. They are the only ones in Iraq who would be happy to see this particular videotape.

The only way Bin Laden could profit from this intervention in the least would be if a civil war between Sunni Arabs and Shiites really did break out in Iraq, and if the beleaguered Sunnis went over to al-Qaeda in large numbers. Since the Sunni Arabs are a minority of 20%, they and he would still lose, but for Bin Laden, who is now a refugee and without any strong political base outside a few provinces of Saudi Arabia, to pick up 5 million Iraqi Sunni Arabs, would be a major political victory. His recent videotape calling for the overthrow of the Saudi government suggests that he might hope to use any increased popularity in Anbar province as a springboard for renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia, especially on its petroleum sector.

It is a desperate, crackpot hope. The narrow, sectarian and politically unskilfull character of this speech is the most hopeful sign I have seen in some time that al-Qaeda is a doomed political force, a mere Baader-Meinhof Gang or Red Army Faction with greater geographical reach.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Islamic Party Withdraws
Dispute over Theocracy among Iraqi Shiites

The near assassination on Monday of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a leading Shiite cleric and politician, raised new fears of sectarian strife in Iraq. Al-Hakim himself, however, urged Shiites to concentrate on winning the January 30 elections and to avoid doing anything that would derail them. (I.e. he knows that anti-election Sunni extremists are baiting the Shiites, and he is urging them not to fall for it).

Muhsin Abdul Hamid of the Iraqi Islamic Party withdrew his party ticket from the January 30 elections. He said he was not calling for a boycott, but his party was simply declining to participate because the Sunni Arab minority will be disadvantaged in any polls because of the poor security conditions in their provinces. The IIP withdrawal is a huge blow to the electoral process's legitimacy, since there are now no major Sunni Islamic groupings in the race, and only small, old-style 1960s Arab nationalist parties are competing for the Sunni Arab vote. The popular Association of Muslim Scholars has called for Sunnis to boycott the elections, a call taken up on Monday by Usamah Bin Laden as well.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said the US would "urge" Iraqi Sunnis to turn out to vote. He also said that any post-election scheme for ensuring proper Sunni participation, such as increasing the number of seats in parliament and awarding the extra ones to Sunnis as a quota, would have to await the election of the Iraqi parliament itself, since only it could make such new rules. Powell at one point seemed to me to suggest that ensuring Sunni representation at the cabinet level in the executive of the new government would be a sufficient step. But that is simply not true. Since parliament will craft the new permanent constitution, it is essential that Sunni Arabs have a proportionate role in drafting it. (See Andrew Arato's essay below for one possible solution to this problem.)

Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder reveals that the United Iraqi Alliance, the mega-Shiite list put together under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, nearly collapsed because of an internal dispute among the Shiite parties over theocracy.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has long backed rule by clerics. The Dawa Party is more lay in character, but does want an Islamic Republic that is ruled by Islamic law and Islamic economics. The Sadr movement claims to be a third way between Khomeinist theocracy and Najaf's quietism. Many important candidates on the UIA ticket come from these movements. They are opposed by more secular-leaning Shiites, who share the ticket with them.

In his book "Islamic Government," which originated as lectures in Najaf in the late 1960s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had put forward his theory of the "Guardianship of the Jurisprudent" (in Arabic, wilayat al-faqih). He held that in the absence of a Prophet or appointed vicar of the Prophet (an Imam), the clerics should rule in Islam. Khomeini's idea was, in this form, a complete innovation in Islamic thought, similar to Lenin's transformation of Marxism when he posited the intellectuals as the vanguard of the proletariat. Khomeini may indeed have been influenced by Leninism via Iraqi Baathism, as Ervand Abrahamian has speculated. In Khomeini's system, the clerics are the vanguard of the Imam (Shiites believe the Imam is absent, in a supernatural realm, but will someday return--rather as Christians believe of Christ).

Although Abdul Aziz al-Hakim now denies it, he has long supported Khomeini's ideology.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani rejected the rule of the jurisprudent in political affairs, for which he is disliked by hardliners in Iran. But he affirms the guardianship of the jurisprudent in "social affairs." That is, he feels the clerics should intervene through their rulings (fatwas) to ensure that Islamic law and Islamic principles are upheld by any Muslim-majority parliament. Obviously, this stance is not the same as a separation of religion and state. Rather, it is simply an insistence that clerics influence the state indirectly, rather than ruling themselves.

SCIRI has for many years accepted the guardianship of the jurisprudent in political affairs. Dawa's position is closer to that of Khomeini, but the party does hope to implement Islamic law or shariah as the law of the land.

A big victory for the largely Shiite United Iraqi Alliance probably will not lead to clerical rule, though Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said in spring of 2003 that he hoped the Shiite majority would eventually make its will felt. But it is likely to lead formerly rather secular Iraq toward greater implementation of Islamic law or shariah. If the Sunni Arabs boycott in large numbers and end up underrepresented, this situation would magnify the power of the Shiite parties, including the theocratic ones.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arato Guest Editorial: The Iraqi Constitution

The Iraqi Constitution: A Modest Proposal

Andrew Arato

Iraq is on the verge of a disaster that is ultimately of our making. The United States has imposed a political process on Iraq characterized by the exclusion of the main representatives of militant, and organized actors fully capable of acting on their own behalf. If elections are held now the constitution-making National Assembly will dramatically under-represent Sunni Arab minority, many of whom are already “negotiating” with weapons in hand.

If elections were postponed however, it is the the Shi’ite Arab majority that might very will explode, and with considerable justification. They too, led by the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, have regarded the imposed process and the delay of free elections with anger and suspicion.

The obvious problem is that a legitimate, new constitution in a divided society cannot be made except with the full participation of all major, potentially contentious groups of the country. Iraq missed out on a Hungarian- or South African-type Round Table that could prepare such participation, and now free elections alone can produce the partners in constitution making. But the results of the elections are likely to be seriously distorted because of the insurrection, even assuming that the Shi’ite majority is capable of guarding against electoral fraud and manipulation on the part of the interim government.

Changing the mistaken, single district electoral law might have been the most useful suggestion for avoiding catastrophe, but it is now unfortunately too late. There are, however, alternatives once a constitutional National Assembly is elected that would deal with the same problem of regional or ethnic or party-political under-representation as long as that representation does not drop to zero. The most obvious one is setting up a constitution drafting committee based on party parity, and a qualified majority rule. Constitutions are not actually drafted by plenary sessions, here the probable locus of misrepresentation, but parliamentary committees where that representation can be corrected. I worked on constitution-making in Hungary 1994-96, and in particular on a scheme by which a 75 % governmental majority was greatly reduced to give real participation rights to the opposition, on the drafting committee level. Parliament could only vote on drafts that came out of a committee in which there was almost parity among 5-6 parties. Something like this, less formally but more successfully was done in Spain in 1977.

Let us assume for the sake of argument a National Assembly with 60% for the Shi’ite led block (The Iraqi United Alliance), 20% for the Kurdistan List and 10% for a combination of various authentic Sunni Arab lists, 5% for the governmental list of Allawi, and 5% for various other groupings. In this case, a 15-person committee could be set up having 3 expert members for each of these groupings, with the requirement that positive decisions (preferably on single clauses) be taken by 12 out of 15 members. The majority would still be protected, since nothing could be adopted without its plenary votes. The Kurdish minority could be protected too if in addition the rule were adopted that a final draft requires the support of 80% of the members of the National Assembly.

The combination of these provisions would be preferable even for the Kurds to the three-province veto available in the current interim constitution, the Temporary Administrative Law. As that poorly drafted and hastily imposed document is written, a simple parliamentary majority can apparently adopt a new constitution, while the negative vote of 2/3 of merely three provinces--hence possibly as few as 1/10 of the populatio--can block ratification. This arrangement is entirely unstable, and the leaders of the Shi’ite majority have never accepted it. They could very well repudiate it along with all other restrictions originally imposed by the occupying power.

There is a desperate need therefore to negotiate new and legitimate but less crippling counter-majoritarian limitations in constitution making. There is an even more obvious need for the leaders of the majority to clearly signal their intentions right now to undertake such negotiations after the elections.

Andrew Arato
Professor
The New School University

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tsunami a Foretaste of Global Warming

The horror of waves caroming across the Indian ocean at 500 miles an hour (the speed of a commercial jet liner!) and then crashing into beaches and shorelines at a height of as much as 30 feet, for all the world like liquid Godzilla, crushing sunbathers and carrying hapless villagers off deep into the sea, can scarcely be guessed at for those of us who only see a bit of rubble and ankle-deep flooding, in the aftermath, on the cable television news feeds. On Sunday at least 12,500 to 14,000 lives were abruptly snuffed out in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and elsewhere in the path of the enormous waves, called tsunami. [ 1/27/04 2:33 pm: The toll is now 22,000 and rising]. It was caused by a massive earthquake in the Pacific off Indonesia, of nearly 9 on the Richter scale--the fourth largest measured in the past century. On the east coast of India, some 500,000 persons were left without electricity or sewerage, surrounded by dead animals and human corpses, some of the latter in trees or atop surviving houses.

This particular tsunami was caused by an earthquake and was unrelated to climate change.

Since some readers have been confused by skimming, let me repeat this sentence: This particular tsunami was caused by an earthquake and was unrelated to climate change.

But everyone should realize that global warming contributes to extreme weather events, causing more hurricanes and typhoons and stronger ones.

Even in the year 2004 extreme weather events caused on the order of $100 billion in damage-- an unprecedentedly high figure and one due to rise.

Giant waves are only one potential problem with global warming.


A recent documentary on the effects of global warming in Maryland showed:

"According to CCAN, global warming may ultimately damage coastal property, destroy freshwater aquifers and eliminate entire towns and islands. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the altered precipitation patterns associated with climate change could reduce Maryland's major agricultural crops by 24 to 42 percent. Other negative changes may include a decline in Chesapeake Bay crab and fish harvests, and increases in deaths from urban heat stress and mosquito-borne diseases, according to CCAN."

As Naomi Oreskes pointed out in the Washington Post on Saturday, the scientific literature for the past decade has expressed no doubts about the reality of global warming or of human responsibility for some large portion of it. Although not all scientists are convinced, the scholarly literature where this matter is debated technically is characterized by broad consensus. The main doubts that are raised are in the mass media, for ulterior motives, by non-scientists. Moving to cleaner energy as soon as possible is the only way to prevent future tsunamis that will hit closer to home for Americans.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Suicide Bomber Kills 9, Wounds 39 Outside Home of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim

A carbomber detonated his payload Monday morning outside the home in Baghdad of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, killing at least 9 persons and wounding 39. Al-Hakim's mansion, taken over from former senior Baath official Tariq Aziz, is in the Jadiriyah quarter, and serves as party headquarters for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). This party, which was based in Tehran 1982-2003, has joined the group slate, the United Iraqi Alliance, put together under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and al-Hakim places high on the list. This attempt to assassinate al-Hakim seems likely the work of Baathists determined to derail the elections scheduled for January 30.

On August 29, 2003, a huge car bomb in Najaf killed al-Hakim's older brother, Muhammad Baqir, who had headed SCIRI since 1984. I said at that time that I thought the likeliest perpetrators were Baathists. The al-Hakims directed what the Baath government would have seen as terrorist actions against the regime for nearly two decades from a hostile country, and the Baath is damned if it is going to watch an al-Hakim now become prime minister of the country.

Guerrillas set off another bomb in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala southwest of Baghdad, killing a family of 7 when it destroyed their home.

On Sunday, some 14 Iraqis had been killed in assassinations and bombings around the country.

Guerrillas bombed another pipeline on Sunday, running between Kirkuk and Baiji. The northern pipelines to Turkey have been closed for weeks. They usually pump about 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: In Baqubah, Iraqi National Guards prevented hundreds of students from holding a peaceful demonstration. Eyewitnesses say they waded into the students and beat them. The Temporary Administrative Law guarantees Iraqis freedom of assembly, but many of its provisions have been suspended by the caretaker Allawi government.

In other news, Iraq's highest-ranking general rejected on Sunday President Bush's allegations that Iraqi armed forces deserted from Fallujah. He did admit that some refused to report for duty in the first place. (This latter is not cowardice by the way; many Iraqi soldiers say they dislike the idea of fighting other Iraqis on behalf of the US).

It also seems clear that the suicide bomber that attacked the cafeteria at the US military base near Mosul on Tuesday was a radical fundamentalist who disguised himself in an Iraq National Guard uniform. Some bloggers had been alleging that the incident showed that the US had been right to dissolve the Iraqi army. But the facts belie this claim. Had the army not been dissolved, so many ex-soldiers would not have joined the insurgency out of despair, anger or lack of funds. And the Iraqi army could have been deployed against the Army of Ansar al-Sunnah, whom they then hated.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Bush administration has been exploring with Iraqi figures like Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the election commission the possibility of a set-aside for Sunni Arabs in the parliament to be elected on January 30. The American overtures have met substantial resistance, but not complete rejection, writes Steven Weisman.

Of course, I heartily endorse this initiative, and had proposed it myself in early December.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

How to Save the Iraqi Elections (Reprint Edition)

The following piece appeared in the Detroit News in early December:


Sunday, December 5, 2004

Bush policies set off skirmish on fate of Iraqi elections

Upcoming voting is headed toward train wreck unless U.S. sets aside legislative seats for Sunnis

By Juan Cole / Special to The Detroit News


The extended train wreck that has been American-dominated Iraq is wending its way toward a decisive intersection, the national elections scheduled for Jan. 30. The Bush administration strategy has been to attack and marginalize political forces that protest the American presence in the country, and to set the elections up on a national basis so as to exclude extremes.

But these two strategies have now backfired, creating a perfect storm of political peril. Security is so bad that voters standing in line at polling stations will likely take mortar or grenade fire, and elections may simply not be practical.

Even if voters navigate those dangers, another shoal lurks beneath their bow. Most of the Sunni Arabs deeply resent the U.S. military presence and reacted with outrage to the assault on Fallujah and the shooting by a Marine of a wounded guerrilla in a mosque. They can now take revenge on Bush by staying home on Election Day.

If the resulting parliament under-represents the Sunnis, the new government will lack legitimacy. The dangers were recognized by 15 small Sunni Arab parties, which recently argued that the elections must be postponed so they could have time to win over their constituents. They are said to have been joined in the plea by the two large Kurdish parties, though some other reports contested this allegation.

The United States and the interim government of Prime Minister Allawi rejected this plea for a postponement, as did over 40 Shiite parties and the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

It is even worse. The new parliament will double as a constitutional convention.

The members of parliament will have to make hard decisions about the fate of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by both Kurds and Arabs, and about the place of religious law in the new state.

To exclude Sunni Arabs from such discussions is a recipe for civil war.

Most Sunni Arabs had been members of or supporters of the Baath Party. The Bush administration fired thousands of Baathists from their jobs, dissolved the Baath army and gave the Sunni Arabs the impression that the Americans intended aggressively to marginalize them. These moves helped stoke the persistent guerrilla war of the past 18 months.

The major post-Baath Sunni parties are religious, and include the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party. The popular AMS is urging a boycott of the elections.

Assuming the security problems do not prove fatal to the elections, they can now be salvaged politically only in one way. The interim government, which has already declared martial law, must pass a decree ordering a onetime set-aside of a generous 25 percent of seats for predominantly Sunni Muslim parties.

This sort of quota is regrettable, but it is the only solution to the crisis. It should not form a precedent, but rather should be done as an emergency measure just this once. Once the parliament meets to craft a constitution, it is important that it create an upper house that somehow over-represents the Sunni Arabs and Kurds, so as to prevent a tyranny of the Shiite majority.

The American-designed government, with a one-chamber legislature, ensures permanent Shiite dominance, likely by religious parties, which contains the seeds of future disaster for Iraq.

The Bush administration has committed a series of epochal blunders in Iraq.

Taking the risk that the Sunni Arabs will boycott the Jan. 30 elections, and failing to prepare for the possibility, would be another huge error.

-----------
Juan Cole teaches history at the University of Michigan and is the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

IraqTheModel

On December 12, just before I went off to Japan on a trip, I drew attention to a web log entry by Joseph Mailander at the Martini Republic, which raised questions about the bona fides of a web site run by three Iraqi brothers called IraqTheModel. Mailander had come to be suspicious of the site for various reasons, some of them now known to be wrong. I had been contacted by Mr. Mailander with some of these suspicions a few days previously, and had responded then that I thought some of them were overdrawn. In particular, I demurred from his attempt to link the site to the CIA. I enclose the relevant comments from that message below.

In my own posting on this issue, I did not actively make any allegations against IraqTheModel myself at all. In my own mind, I was merely drawing attention to Mailander's entry on an informal, "Isn't this interesting?" basis. In particular, I thought that the Martini Republic posting raised some very interesting issues (that was what I meant about it being very important), most notably about the possibility that the blogging world was open to some sorts of manipulation. Since bloggers often pride themselves in being more honest than the corporate media, Mailander had started me wondering whether there weren't ways to pump up a site artificially. Coincidentally, Kevin Drum had just published an expose of the way in which CBS News had used a lobbyist on the issue for a "man in the street" interview on privatizing social security.

The only substantive point I made with regard to IraqTheModel myself was that the authors appeared to me not very representative of Iraqi public opinion. That is all right, of course. They are putting forward their own ideas. It is just that if we want to really understand contemporary Iraq, we should understand that few of their co-citizens think as they do.

And then I went abroad, and all hell broke loose in cyberspace, as a number of bloggers attacked my posting (well, OK, they attacked me; I think the phrase "pond scum" was deployed.) It turned out that Mailander's identification of the ITM web site server as being in Abilene, TX, was innocent and typical of blogspot users.

I was under the gun preparing my lectures, and then was on a whirlwind trip and often did not have good internet access (I blogged only telegraphically for most of the past couple weeks), and it has taken me this amount of time to get back and catch up on the controversy. If I had just been at home in my normal routine I could have responded immediately and no doubt that would have been better. In cyberspace time I am now probably talking about ancient history.

In retrospect, of course, I should have been clearer about my lack of active endorsement for Mr. Mailander's specific allegations, even as I made clear that what interested me was the issue of how the blogging world might be affected by political "marketing." I don't doubt Mailander's good faith, but obviously there were elementary errors in his initial entry. And, if I could take it back, I wouldn't have linked at all. This is a matter in some ways of not knowing my own strength. Blogging is deceptively informal, sort of like a conversation rather than like formal writing. So it is natural to cross-link among friends and say, 'Hey, check this out.' But my weblog has come to be so widely read that this degree of informality is now a luxury I obviously cannot afford, and I will try to be more careful.

The other thing to say, though, is that errors come with this territory. You can't be out here posting daily and not commit some errors from time to time. When kind readers correct them, I try to put the corrections in brackets, even ex post facto. Indeed, errors are the human condition. Many of the more vitriolic critics of Informed Comment alleged 2 years ago that Iraq was 2-5 years away from having a nuclear bomb, that Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons, that Saddam was in bed with al-Qaeda, that Iraqis would universally greet US troops with garlands and sweets, that the Iraq war and aftermath would be a "cakewalk," that the road to peace in Palestine/Israel went through Baghdad, etc., etc. The commentators who made these allegations want to be held harmless from these enormous and highly consequential errors that have gotten large numbers of people killed. But I kept getting these annoying messages that my merely cross-linking to a site had endangered my "credibility." One of the more vehement attacks on my site was written by someone who writes for Tech Central Station, which is in turn published by the Republican lobbying firm, DCI Group. And the first time Jeff Jarvis mentioned me it was to complain in summer of 2003 that I seemed to be seeking out bad news on Iraq-- when in fact, I was just ahead of the curve in seeing the growing guerrilla war; he has never apologized.

It is now being alleged in the rightwing press (which really is a paid-for manipulation of public opinion) that I said that the Ali brothers were connected to the CIA. I never said any such thing. My phrase "certain quarters" referred to, at most, the Republican Party or organizations associated with it. As the email below should make clear, I never thought that charge plausible. Some have suggested that the controversy endangers the brothers' lives. But if meeting with high US officials in Washington and blogging about it does not, nothing would.

(Personally, by the way, I cut the CIA a lot of slack in the post-9/11 world; I don't like the dirty tricks the Company has sometimes played, but we do need a CIA to fight al-Qaeda, which does want to destroy us. I know some analysts read this site, and I am honored if they feel they learn anything here, and hope it helps the country. So I'm just not the sort of person that would use the CIA rhetorically in a negative fashion.)

So, anyway, I offer this posting as a clarification and also, as a retraction of the comment about the Abilene ISP and any unfounded implication of USG support for the IraqTheModel site. And I apologize to the Ali brothers for the error, and want to stress that I bear them no ill will. I am sorry I was abroad and unable to respond in detail before now.

From: Cole, Juan
Sent: Fri 12/10/2004 4:56 PM
To: Joseph Mailander
Subject: RE: IraqTheModel and Abiline Texas


Dear Joseph:

. . . The CIA ISP is hilarious, but the explanation is certainly correct. A real CIA operation would go out of its way to avoid using that acronym.

The question of how they ended up with an Abilene ISP is a good one

Another issue is artificial visibility. Is the US press being directed to the Iraqi bloggers who are actually popular in the blogosphere, who object to US policy? The US government is one hell of a press agent . . .

cheers Juan

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombings and Assassinations Mar Christmas Day in Iraq

Douglas Ireland of the LA Weekly has a fine piece on the problems with the coverage of Iraq in the US media, and offers some helpful pointers on how to penetrate the fog of information war.

Guerrillas detonated a car bomb on Saturday at Khan al-Nus, between the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, killing five Iraqi civilians. The guerrillas had apparently been aiming at a US military convoy but missed.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat and wire services report that new bodies were pulled out of rubble near a truck bombing that appears to have targeted the Jordanian embassy in the Mansur District of Baghdad on Friday, bring the total number of deaths in that incident to 9.

Near Taji, Guerillas gunned down Jalil Ibrahim and Ali Muhammad. Ibrahim was a member of a local governing council.

South of Mosul, guerrillas assassinated an Iraqi translator working for the US military, along with his wife, at the village of Abu Hiza'.

Gunmen assassinated Dr. Hasan al-Ruba'i, 45, a professor in the medical school at Baghdad University, as he drove in his car with his wife. She was unharmed. Al-Ruba'i had a reputation for having stood for academic integrity against attempts to make hiring or firing decisions at the medical school on the basis of politics imposed from above.

In a case of mistaken identity, US troops killed Muhammad Nihad Hamudi as he was driving out near the airport. They had thought him a guerrilla, but he was not.

In Mosul, in two separate incidents guerrillas attacked Iraqi police with a hand grenade and with small arms fire. There was no word of casualties.

In Samarra, clashes between guerrillas and Iraqi national guardsmen left two guardsmen and three civilians dead.

The Association of Muslim Scholars claimed that on Friday, US troops had invaded the home of one of its members, Shaikh Muwaffaq Muzaffar Al-Duri, the Friday prayers leader at Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Mosque. The AMS claimed that US troops "executed" Al-Duri, with "the utmost barbarity." The US military denies any knowledge of the incident.

The AMS office in Iskandariyah, Babil province, was also assaulted by a mixed force of US troops and Iraqi national guards. The AMS is often suspected of having at least some links to the guerrilla resistance among Sunni Arabs to the US presence in Iraq. The AMS says that in the past 2 months, some 20 Sunni Friday prayer leaders have been assassinated or disappeared, 80 have been arrested, and several mosques have been invaded and searched.

Militants kidnapped multimillionnaire Turkish businessman Kahraman Sadikoglu along with several other Turks from the port city of Umm Qasr on the Gulf earlier this week, a video showed. Sadikoglu, a shipping magnate, had been helping clear the Gulf of debris from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

US Marines captured two members of the Monotheism and Holy War group that now styles itself the "Mesopotamian al-Qaeda." AP reports, ' A Marines statement identified the men as Saleh Arugayan Kahlil and Bassim Mohammad Hazeem. Their cells kidnapped and executed 11 Iraqi National Guardsmen, carried out car bombings and other attacks in the Ramadi area and "smuggled foreign terrorists into the country," the Marines said. "This group is responsible for intimidating, attacking and murdering innocent Iraqi civilians, Iraqi police and security forces, and business and political leaders throughout the [A]nbar province," the statement said. '

Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times reports that candidates loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr on the various electoral slates running for parliament number altogether about 180. He says Sadr himself, a Shiite fundamentalist and Iraqi nationalist who wants US troops out of the country, is hedging his bets so as to maximize his opportunities to take advantage of the post-election situation. If the elections go well, he will have at least some followers in place in parliament. If they go badly, he can point out that he had public reservations all along.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Study of Arabic in the US

Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post Dispatch has an interesting article on the lack of Arabic speakers in the US. He says that a little over 10,000 students are now studying Arabic. That is a big increase from the 1980s, when it was about 2500, or from the early 1990s, when it was about 4500. It compares poorly to 30,000 studying China, and 400,000 studying Spanish.

The subtext of the article is, of course, US security needs. At one point he quotes someone named Carafano at the so-called American Heritage Foundation suggesting that universities aren't "defense-friendly" and that therefore their students "won't be security-minded." What a load of hogwash. First of all, universities are much more interested in the genuine defense of the United States than hack shops like the AHF (funded by Joe Coors of Coors beer and notorious far rightwing billionnaire gadfly Richard Mellon Scaife). What the university community mostly is not interested in is naked imperial aggression, of the sort the so-called American Heritage Foundation promotes.

Second, almost everyone in the security agencies of the US government-- the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, etc., etc., has at least a BA or BSc. from a US university, so it makes no sense to allege that university-trained students are uninterested in the security field. Why should students who study Arabic be less so?

I'll tell you what the real problems are. In some of what follows, I am influenced by comments of my colleague John Walbridge of Indiana University, but I am responsible for these remarks, and some of them are mine alone:

1) The US education system generally does a horrible job of teaching languages. Schools most often start the kids on a language only in 7th grade (typically age 11 or 12!). And often they only give the children a "sampling" of languages that year (which is useless). So they do not really begin until age 13 or so, about the time that language learning ability atrophies. If you want fluent speakers of other languages, you should be starting them in kindergarten. Not only do younger children learn languages faster and better, but being at least bilingual as a young child keeps the brain malleable for learning languages later in life. If you are monolingual and 14, learning languages is unlikely to come easily to you. This frankly brain dead approach to language teaching in the US is a vast mystery to me, but no doubt it has something to do with financial issues. Since Americans appear to think it is far more important to give tax cuts to billionnaires than actually to pay for needed social and cultural services in society, it is no wonder they don't fork over money to tutor our five-year-olds in French. But US security, and the US image in the world (they are related) would both be much improved if more Americans were fluent in languages.

2) There is almost no scholarship money for studying Arabic. Why should students do something that is exotic, that may or may not produce well-paid employment, and for which there is almost no fellowship incentive?

3) Arabic translation is a relatively poorly paid occupation. The kinds of salaries offered Arabic translators by the FBI after 9/11 were frankly laughable.

4) The recruiters for the US security agencies shy away from hiring Muslim Americans, for fear they might turn out to be double agents. Muslim Americans are more likely to know Arabic well than others, and 99.999% of them are loyal Americans. All the 9/11 hijackers had to be brought in from abroad.

5) The recruiters for the US security agencies don't want Americans who have spent long periods abroad, lest they have developed local sympathies. This foolish approach excludes the most knowledgeable US citizens. (It is a flaw in the philosophy of American journalism as well, and its silliness can easily be shown by pointing to the work in Iraq of Anthony Shadid, an Arabist who had previously covered Egypt; obviously, Shadid has gotten stories that non-Arabic speakers unfamiliar with the culture could not have).

6) The recruiters even advise Americans studying Arabic not to go on summer or semester-long study abroad programs, since apparently even that much living outside the US could permanently injure their loyalty to their country. But such study abroad is essential to gaining fluency!

7) Being involved in Arabic studies and Middle Eastern studies in the United States is extremely controversial and often leads to character assassination, and you just have to have an iron constitution to put up with all the junk that gets thrown your way by the bigotted. David Steinmann's "Campus Watch Program" (he is also head of the far-rightwing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that produced Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith), which smears university professors and students that don't toe the Likud Party line, is a case in point. (Ironically, Feith helped make a mess of the American enterprise in Iraq by excluding veteran State Department Arabists from the Coalition Provisional Authority in summer and fall of 2003!)

Not only is being misrepresented and smeared painful to most people, but trying to be even-handed on the Middle East will get a person called "racist" (i.e. insufficiently enthusiastic about Ariel Sharon), Orientalist (insufficiently enthusiastic about radical Muslim fundamentalism), or "terrorist-lover" (i.e. insufficiently enthusiastic about aggressive imperial warfare by the Bush administration). Since such epithets can harm careers, any sensible person would just stay away from Middle Eastern languages, or study something safe like Spanish.

Well, obviously, you just aren't likely to get really fluent Arabists into the security agencies under these circumstances. And nor are you going to get Americans able to communicate with Muslim audiences actually before those audiences if the US government doesn't trust the ablest Americans in this regard, and if David Horowitz is busy libelling them. I don't expect this miserable situation to change anytime soon. And I am sure that this situation puts the United States at risk.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hiding Christmas in Iraq

The US Christian Right has been loudly complaining about the alleged exclusion of Christmas from the US public sphere. (There isn't really any evidence of it.)

But Iraq's approximately 700,000 Christians actually are having to hide their celebrations for fear of violence from radical Muslim extremists. Borzou Daragahi reports that most Iraqi Christians are declining to put out Christmas lights or symbols, and many are attending daytime masses or none at all for fear of car bombs. Many masses have even been cancelled by the churches. Christians had been relatively safe under the Baath regime. Daragahi writes,

' "It's true that the Americans are Christians and we are Christians. But they should not associate us with them. All the Christians want the Americans to get out and the occupation to end. Nobody is with the Americans," said Father Gabriel Shamami, who leads the St. George's Church in Baghdad. '

There have been some horrific bombings of Christian churches by Muslim radicals in the past year, and some churches were bombed as recently as Monday, Dec. 20, 2004. A wave of kidnappings of Christians has also plagued the community.

Thousands of Christians have fled Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Estimates vary widely, from just 10,000 to as many as 200,000. Most have moved to Jordan, Syria or Lebanon, all of them relatively hospitable to Christians. The Baath regime had been generally tolerant of Christians, since it stressed Arab nationalism rather than Islam as the basis of the state.

A conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue was held recently in Baathist Syria, where major Christian and Muslim figures spoke about harmony between Christians and Muslims. Most Syrian Christians support the Baath government because it provides tolerance to them, and they know that were it to fall, it would likely be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood. About 10 percent of Syria's 18 million citizens are Christian.

Ironically, the Bush administration wants to overthrow the Syrian government, risking the same kind of destabilization there that has so hurt Iraqis--including Iraqi Christians.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

At Least 30 Killed, Dozens Wounded in Iraq Violence

AFP and other wire services report that violence in Iraq on Friday killed at least 30 persons (including 24 guerrillas in Fallujah) and wounded dozens.

Guerrillas blew up a fuel tanker in Baghdad near the Jordanian embassy, killing at least one person and wounding 19.

A campaign of assassination against provincial notables serving on local and provincial governing councils sponsored by the US continued, with the killing of tribal leader Shaikh Zaid Khalifa Muhsin Al-Bin-Uways late on Thursday in Sa'diyah. On Wednesday, guerrillas had gunned down Hazem Daraa, a tribal leader in Tikrit.

In downtown Samarra, US forces battled guerrillas, leaving 4 civilians wounded in the crossfire.

Guerrillas and Iraqi national guardsmen fought one another in Duluiyah, leaving one Iraqi dead and four wounded.

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb between Samarra and Tikrit, killing one child and wounding three others.

There was more fighting in Fallujah, in which one radical Muslim web site estimated 24 guerrillas, mostly foreigners, were killed.

Some of the inhabitants returning to Fallujah have left again. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat quoted one as saying that not even animals could live in the ruins the Americans had left behind.

Guerrillas captured Iraqi National Guards Colonel Saadi Aftan Hammoud on Friday, as he travelled to Ramadi from Baghdad (AP).

Three Kurds were kidnapped and a fourth wounded in Kirkuk. They were working for the water and sewerage authority.

Guerrillas dynamited the mayor's mansion in Ramadi.

In Buhriz near Baqubah, guerrillas hit the police station and governor's mansion with mortar and small arms fire, but caused no casualties.

AP reported that US troops opened fire on a family travelling by car in Baghdad, killing a young girl and wounding her mother and brother.

The fundamentalist Association of Muslim Scholars, which has a high standing among Sunni Muslims, called again on Friday for a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections for parliament scheduled for January 30. AP writes:

' "We are not against the elections, but we want fair elections that represent the Iraqi people. Since this is not possible at the time being ... we call for postponing it," senior cleric Sheik Ahmed Abdul-Ghafour al-Samaraie told worshippers at Baghdad's Um al-Qura mosque during Friday prayers. '

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Radical Militants on Planet al-Qaeda Wanted Bush to Win US Election

Georges Malbrunot, one of two French journalists recently released by radical Muslim fundamentalists in Iraq, spoke to CNN on Friday:

Malbrunot quoted his captors as saying Bush's re-election "would improve our ability to fight . . . We vote for Bush because Bush help us a lot by intervening in Afghanistan. So, from that point we could spread all over the world and we are now in 60 countries," Malbrunot cited one of the militants as saying on October 15, two weeks before Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry. Malbrunot, 41, quoted the same militant as saying: "Our main targets are Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And because of Bush, if he is re-elected, we are sure that American soldiers will remain in Iraq for years."

Malbrunot said that the group that held him was not Iraqi nationalists but rather internationalist jihadis and that he felt as though he were on Planet Bin Laden while in captivity.

Actually, that the radical Muslim fundamentalists much preferred that Bush win was self-evident, since Bin Laden and his fellow travellers want to sharpen contradictions between the Muslim world and the West. It is in that extreme polarization that they know they will find the best chance to pose as champions of Islam and ultimately to take over. They know very well that Bush has decided to make a long-term US push into the Muslim world, involving probably several wars and more occupations. If Bush had stopped with Afghanistan and rebuilt the country properly, he could have dealt a death blow to al-Qaeda. By occupying Iraq militarily, he has given al-Qaeda unprecedented access to the Sunni Arabs (and some Kurds and Turkmen) of Iraq. They hope to use this new base not only to roil Iraq but ultimately to throw Saudi Arabia into turmoil, as well. It is not that far from Mosul to Jidda, where al-Qaeda recently attacked the US consulate in revenge for the assault on Fallujah. Three years ago, an al-Qaeda attack on a US consulate in Saudi Arabia would have horrified most Saudis. Now? I'm not so sure.


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Four US Troops Killed

Guerrillas in al-Anbar province killed 3 Marines on Thursday.

In Baghdad, guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill one US soldier and wound two others.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas fired mortar shells that killed a policeman and three civilians.

Some 900 residents of a particular city neighborhood of Fallujah were allowed to return on Thursday, passing through a strict identity check. AFP writes,

' The returnees were entering an apocalyptic backdrop of flattened city blocks and bullet-scarred homes, where wild dogs and cats have feasted on corpses and the sour smell of the dead filled the streets for weeks. '

Guerrillas and Marines clashed in northern Fallujah, however, and the US bombed the city. Some of those hoping to return instead turned around and went back to their temporary shelters elsewhere. The Marines were fingerprinting and doing retinal scans of military-age men who returned, to begin building a data base of potential guerrillas. They turned by 16 men, apparently on suspicion of being connected to the guerrilla resistance.

Veteran security affairs correspondent Walter Pincus of the Washington Post points out that the guerrillas have better informants and intelligence inside US bases than the US has inside the insurgency. This point seems obvious from the outside, by one kind reader in Iraq just told me that the US officers he is talking to are convinced that they are winning and are getting better sources. I fear I think they are just being unrealistic, if so.

Iran's foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi warned Thursday in Damascus against the forces that are trying to provoke civil war in Iraq. (Iran, as a Shiite-majority country, would like to see Iraq stay together under majority Shiite rule; since it has its own Kurdish minority, it has no interest in seeing the Kurds become independent.) In fact, Iran is likely to play a stabilizing role in Iraq, since it does not want massive turmoil on its doorstep.

The Daily Star also notes the charges of Hasan Allawi (why are they all Allawis?), the Iraqi ambassador to Syria, that a captured Baathist guerrilla had photographs on him of high Syrian officials with known Iraqi insurgents. This allegation strikes me as ridiculous. First of all, why would Syrian officials be so stupid as to pose for such a picture? And why would expatriate guerrillas be so stupid as to carry such photos with them when infiltrating into Iraq? Allawi must think we are all gullible fools.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani's Office Calls on Aides to Encourage Voting
Kurdish Troops to Guard Polling Stations?

Al-Hayat: The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on supporters and aides of the Shiite religious authority in all Iraqi provinces and cities to encourage the people to participate in the elections scheduled for the end of January, and to offer all help and assistance to the voters in casting their ballots in complete freedom. The office also asked, during a large meeting held in Najaf with the aides and supporters mentioned above, that they make citizens aware of the need for "self discipline and avoidance of the sectarian turmoil that the enemy is attempting to foment."

Iraqi minister for national security affairs, Qasim Da'ud, said that it was no longer plausible that the elections might be postponed, since, he said, Iraqis understood that the elections were the "legitimate gate through which the democratic process might be entered." He maintained in an interview with al-Hayat that the security situation was improving, and gave as proof that the guerrillas were now specifically targetting the electoral process.

A Kurdish party official, Faraj al-Haydari, told the newspaper that Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan's recent visit to Salahuddin Province was for the purpose of exploring the possibility that Kurdish forces might be used to guard the oil pipelines and to provide security to polling stations in late January.

The use of Kurdish Peshmerga or paramilitaries to guard polling stations might work in some parts of the country. But in Kirkuk, where Turkmen and Arabs contest Kurdish control of the city, and where calls for postponement of municipal elections are strident, it could actually cause more trouble.




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Mosul Paralyzed as House to House Searching Continues
10 Die in Samarra, Mahmudiyah Violence

Az-Zaman: Schools, offices and shops were closed in Mosul, a city of over a million, on Wednesday as US troops conducted house to house searches in the southern and western areas of the city for the guerrillas who planned the bombing of the mess hall at the nearby US base on Tuesday.

It now appears that the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber who got inside the tent rather than by incoming mortar shells or rockets. Credit for the bombing was claimed by the radical Ansar al-Sunnah group, a small, largely Kurdish group based in northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, a large explosion in the Najjar District of Mosul shook the whole city on Wednesday.

Az-Zaman also reported the assassination of another member of the local governing council in Baqubah, Yusuf Abd al-Raziq, along with a police lieutenant.

Over 10 Iraqis were killed on Wednesday in clashes and explosions in Samarra (just north of Baghdad) and in Mahmudiyah (in Babil province south of the capital). The US has been fighting Sunni Arab guerrillas in Babil province to stop their attacks on Shiite locals and pilgrims, an action warmly supported by Iraqi vice president Ibrahim Jaafari and other Shiite leaders.

In Mamoun district, west of Baghdad, guerrillas hit a police station with a rocket, killing one and wounding two.

Ma'd Fayyad of Ash-Sharq al-Awsat interviews interim Iraqi education minister, Dr. Sami al-Muzaffir. Dr. al-Muzaffir frankly expressed his regret at leaving his professorial post at Baghdad University to become minister of education. He said that 80% of Iraqi schools have been damaged in the war, though many had now been repaired, and new ones were being built. There were plans to build 4500 schools, with World Bank, Kuwaiti and other grants, though great obstacles stood in the way of getting to work on them soon. He said there were over 6 million students in Iraq and 370,000 teachers, a very good ratio of 1 to 19, with many of the teachers having MA degrees. He admitted, however, that the distribution of the teachers was highly uneven, with some schools having far too few. He said that thousands of Baathist school teachers have now been rehired, and that many teachers formerly excluded from teaching by the Baath have also been hired. Altogehter 17,000 teachers have been returned to the classroom. In many instances, he made their rehiring dependent on their accepting a posting in a school that needed teachers. With World Bank help, 550 new textbooks have been printed in Iraq, and 50 outside.

Iran has closed its borders with Iraq and has forbidden Iranians from going as pilgrims to the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, because of the poor security situation. (Az-Zaman says there was some sort of firefight in Najaf on Wednesday).

AP reports that the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt warned against the erection of a sectarian state in Iraq. Al-Zaman, however, reports the statements of Jordanian foreign minister Hani al-Mulqi differently. He spoke, not against sectarianism, but against "political Islam" (al-Islam as-Siyasi). Obviously, he meant the Khomeinist variety. But it is interesting to see the foreign minister of an important Arab country denouncing "political Islam," all the same. He added, "We must safeguard to Iraq's Arab identity, since its Arabness unites Sunnis and Shiites." He is thus opposing Arab nationalism to political Islam, and opting for Arab nationalism. (One problem with this way of thinking is that the Kurds are sore over attempts to "Arabize" them, and old-style Arab nationalism distinctly lacked any appreciation for multiculturalism). I think al-Mulqi's formulation is naive. Baathism is gone, and whatever comes after it in Iraq will have to recognize the political rights of the Shiites and Kurds. Arab nationalism functioned latently as a vehicle of Sunni Arab superiority, which is just not going to continue. I think a subtext here may also be that he is coding Shiites as somehow Iranian and not truly "Arab," which is a mistake Sunnis often make about Iraqi Shiites.

I don't often agree with Patrick Buchanan, but in this article on Rumsfeld and the Neoconservatives, he largely nails it. The one thing I object to in what he says is that he seems to me to let Rumsfeld completely off the hook, blaming everything on his Neoconservative appointees.

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Going to War with the Clothing We Have

The Civil Air Patrol at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany is making a plea for help for wounded US soldiers sent there. I quote the original letter below in full. Note that getting things all the way to Ramstein requires more postage than the APO address might suggest. I know the first reaction of most people when they read this message will be to be angry at political figures. But first send money, then be mad. By the way, this sort of treatment of US troops is common, even though they are all that stand between us and forces such as al-Qaeda. The grunts who do the heavy lifting aren't actually paid anything. The allowance given them to move from one base to another often doesn't cover their expenses. The Bush administration is even trying to back away from commitments made with regard to Vets' health benefits. Tens of thousands of badly wounded US veterans are likely to be produced by the current round of wars, and some proportion of them will end up homeless.

From: Lori Noyes
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 12:28 AM
Subject: Request for Help for our wounded troops at LRMC

Dear CAP Friends:

I am writing is to tell you about a project the Ramstein Cadet Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, is starting. The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) here in Germany got an influx of about 500 wounded troops from Iraq last week and more arrive almost daily. They arrive straight from the battlefield, with only the torn, dirty, bloody clothes on their back. They have no clothes, underwear, or toiletry items. The hospital provides them with only a cotton gown or pajamas, robe, and disposable slippers. Some stay only a few days before being sent to hospitals stateside, while others are here up to several weeks. The military gives them a $250 voucher to buy clothing and toiletries at the BX, but many are not ambulatory, and those who are have to wait for a bus to get down to the BX on Ramstein 7 miles away. The BX runs out of the clothing and it takes weeks for more to come in. Those who can go to the BX still need something to wear to get there!

The cadets are collecting new clothing and toiletries to that they can take to the wounded at LRMC. Below is a list of items the wounded need. It is cold here in Germany and warm items are needed. Items need not be name brands . . .

For males - all sizes, but mostly medium and large


briefs

boxer shorts

undershirts or T-shirts

white crew sox

cotton turtleneck shirts

flannel shirts

sweatshirts (crew or zip-up hooded)

sweat pants

inexpensive athletic shoes

knit caps

knit gloves


For females - all sizes, but mostly medium and large

cotton briefs

cotton T-shirts

cotton turtleneck shirts

flannel shirts

bras - mostly sizes 34, 36, 38 with cup sizes B and C

white crew sox

sweatshirts (crew or zip-up hooded)

sweat pants

inexpensive athletic shoes

knit caps

knit gloves


Toiletry articles -

disposable razors

shaving cream - regular and/or travel size

deodorant - regular and/or travel size

tooth brushes

tooth paste - regular and/or travel size

nail clippers

combs

hair brushes

The hospital could also use new or used video tapes or DVDs of movies for the patients to watch. Comedies or light drama are best. Please avoid movies about war or those with excessive violence.

If your squadron would like to help, we would greatly appreciate it, no matter what the quantity. Every little bit helps.

If you wish to send money, make your check out to the Ramstein Cadet Squadron and put "Help for LRMC" on the memo line. We will use the money to purchase toiletry items and movies. But American-sized clothing listed below is what is mostly needed, which the BX is currently out of.


Send your donations to:

Lt Col Lori Noyes
PSC 2 Box 6037
APO AE 09012

or

Ramstein Cadet Squadron NHQ-OS-119
Unit 3395
APO AE 09094


We can get items to the hospital faster if they come to my mailing address, but feel free to send them to the squadron address.

Feel free to pass the word along to other CAP units in your wing. Thank you for your support of our troops.


In service,


Lori L. Noyes, Lt Col, CAP

Deputy Commander

Ramstein Cadet Squadron

For those who want to help the victims of bombings such as those at Najaf and Karbala recently, contributions can be sent to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (click on "Iraq Humanitarian Crisis" at "I would like my contribution to go to . . .).


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