Sistani, the UIA and the Elections

Anthony Shadid on Sunday in WaPo captured the edgy reality of life on the ground in Iraq in the build-up to the elections, and the anxieties of the Sunni Arabs before the advance of the Shiite political tsunami.

The death toll in Sunday's guerrilla attacks rose to 44, with about 100 wounded. One attack late in the day in Mosul wounded 7 US troops. It is unclear whether the NYT estimate includes the 10-15 British soldiers lost in an air crash.

The Iraqi election commission backed off its initial estimate of 72% turnout rather quickly. It then suggested that 8 million voted, or 60%. I don't think they really know, and would be careful of using these figures until they can be confirmed as the vote is counted. I saw them on Arab satellite tv estimating the turnout in Irbil in the Kurdish north at 60 percent. The turnout in Irbil should have been very high, since it is Kurdish and security is good. If that figure is true and holds, it would be an argument against the overall voting rate being 60 percent.

Muhammad Bazzi at Newsday discusses Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's role in the recent elections and his likely role in crafting the new constitution. He writes:

' Al-Sistani is especially keen to have a role in shaping the new constitution, which is supposed to be drafted by mid-August and put to a national referendum by Oct. 15. He is concerned about two issues: the role of Islam in Iraqi society and the extent of the political autonomy that would be granted to Kurds in northern Iraq. The ayatollah wants Islam to be declared the country's official faith and Islamic law to infuse civil laws. He is also resistant to giving Kurds a veto power over the constitution, as they currently have under an administrative law put in place by the U.S. occupation. Part of the reason for al-Sistani's backing of the unified Shia slate is to assure him a key role in drafting the constitution. But that is likely to rekindle the debate over the role of clergy in politics. "Al-Sistani wants to have a strong hand in drafting the constitution," Shammari said. "This will renew questions about what role he wants to play in politics." '

Sistani congratulated the Iraqi people on coming out to vote on Sunday. He expressed regret that his Iranian nationality made it impossible for him to vote. (Prominent Shiite Iranians declined to take Iraqi citizenship during the past century because being a foreign national often gave them immunity from harsh treatment by the Iraqi state.)

Three views of the voting in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf, Sistani's adopted city:

Sistani's adopted city, Najaf, witnessed a high turnout of voters, who cast their ballots (from all accounts) heavily in favor of the United Iraqi Alliance, the list cobbled together under Sistani's auspices.

Dan Murphy of CSM reports on the mood in Najaf in more detail.

Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports from Najaf that rubble is everywhere and some think Allawi will survive as Prime Minister. He quotes a Western diplomat: ' "Sistani has played it brilliantly . . . By reining in his radicals and going for elections, power is falling into the Shia lap." '

William Walls of the FT reports on the festive and defiant atmosphere of the far-south city of Basra (pop. 1.3 million). He expects the United Iraqi Alliance to do very well there, also.

Ashraf Khalil at the LA Times covers the questions that have been raised about the durability of the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, that Sistani has blessed. It is true that it is a hodgepodge of parties, but it seems to me that there is a good chance it will stay together on the whole. Khalil writes (and at the end quotes me):

' Disunity among the Shiite partners, "is one of the threats facing the list," said Ibrahim Bahr Uloum, a former minister of oil and Alliance candidate whose Iraq of the Future ticket is competing with the Supreme Council and Dawa in the Najaf provincial elections.

"Locally, there is some room for competition," he said, "but at the same time on a national level we have to cooperate."

Uloum predicted that "mutual respect" for the Shiite religious elite of whom Sistani is the most prominent member would help keep the factions in line.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor and expert on Shiite politics, predicted that enlightened self-interest would serve as "a powerful incentive for [the alliance's] various members to dampen down resentments and rivalries and cooperate."

"Controlling the Iraqi parliament is worth $17 billion a year in patronage," he said. "Pulling out of the ruling coalition and depriving yourself of any part of that would be a strange thing to do. Some immature groups might do it out of anger and annoyance, but they'd be very sorry." '

Sunni Arab turnout in the elections was light. The Sunnis in Samarra, a city of 200,000, only cast 1400 ballots. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat also reported that Tikrit's polling stations were deserted.

In eastern Mosul, where Turkmen and Kurds predominate, there was some turnout, but in the Sunni Arab western part of the city, firefights raged. The Arabs of Kirkuk appear largely to have boycotted the vote, whereas the Kurds came out enthusiastically (-al-Zaman).

Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune writes,

' In the Sunni-dominated cities of Latifiyah and Mahmoudiyah south of Baghdad, streets were largely free of violence, but voters said they were fearful of retaliation for voting. Polling centers were largely empty all day in many cities of the Sunni Triangle north and west of the capital, particularly Fallujah, Ramadi and Beiji, The Associated Press reported. In Baghdad's mainly Sunni Arab area of Adhamiyah, the neighborhood's four polling centers did not open, residents said. '

Dexter Filkins of the NYT wrote, ' In the town of Baji in northern Iraq, election officials did not show up. In Ramadi, where Iraqi officials set up a pair of polling places just outside the city, a total of just 300 ballots were cast, many of them by police officers and soldiers. '

The idea, mentioned by Condoleeza Rice on Sunday, that any significant number of Fallujans voted, is absurd and insulting. Most of the 250,000 Fallujans are still in exile, and the city is still occasionally the scene of fighting. There are reports of some voting in refugee camps outside the city. It is almost certainly motivated by a desire to have a legitimate, elected government that could effectively demand a US withdrawal.

Although some observers seem to be optimistic about the Sunni Arab vote, from what I could find out Sunday night, the signs were not actually good.

As for the neighbors, this Turkish author clearly fears both the religiosity of the Shiite party and the possible subnationalism of the Kurds.

In contrast, Iran clearly expects to benefit from the likely Shiite victory in the elections.

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Guest Editorial: Sunni Anxieties and the Rise of Shiite Power by Shahin M. Cole

Sunni Anxieties and the Rise of Shiite Power

Shahin M. Cole

Iraq after its elections is not out of the woods, and some severe dangers loom ahead. Iraq has had the form of elections, but will it have the substance of democracy? Can candidates who were afraid to reveal their identities before the election now be secure in doing so afterwards? Will not the members of the new parliament become immediate targets for kidnapping and assassination?

Moreover, now comes the hard part of drafting a permanent constitution in a way that meets the expectations of all the major groups in the country. Some substantial portion of them is likely to come away disappointed. What if controversial issues cause the negotiations to bog down? Will the third of the candidates who are women accept the likely attempt of the religious parties to impose religious codes in family law? Can a way be found to mollify the Sunni Arabs, who will be highly underrepresented in the parliament, and the legitimacy of which they are unlikely grant?

Far from seeing the elections as a good thing to be emulated, the Sunni Arab neighbors of Iraq are likely to be alarmed at the rise of Shiite dominance. They will also be disturbed at any close Shiite-American alliance. Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Salafi fundamentalists elsewhere in the Gulf (including Iraq itself), deeply disapprove of Shiite doctrine and practice.

The Sunni Arab Iraqis declined to vote in any numbers not just because of the poor security situation, but out of conviction. Many feel that you cannot have free and fair elections under foreign military occupation. They would also be within their rights to argue that voting procedures were stacked against them. The interim government allowed Iraqi expatriates who have taken citizenship in other countries to vote. Since most expatriates are Shiites, Kurds and Chaldeans, moreover, allowing expatriates to vote in this election might well be viewed as harming Sunni interests. The US has in the past forbidden its nationals (except, after 1967, those with dual citizenship) to vote in elections in other countries, and has threatened to strip them of their citizenship if they did. Were all Iraqi-Americans who voted actually dual citizens? Is this step a permanent change in US procedure?

The Gulf monarchies are afraid of the Khomeini-inspired trend in Shiism to say that “there can be no kings in Islam.” If these Sunni hardliners had an “axis of evil,” the Shiites of Iraq and Iran would be in it. Many Sunnis fear Shiite power more than they ever feared Saddam’s predations. Many of them also view the United States as an imperial power in the region. A Shiite-American alliance is their worst nightmare, and many of them will see the Iraqi Shiites as puppets of the US. The elections, which the Bush administration sees as the solution to a whole host of problems, have upset the sectarian balance of power in the Middle East, and may well bring new kinds of instability in their train.

The differences and conflicts between the Wahhabi branch of Islam (prevalent in Saudi Arabia and Qatar) and Sunnis (who account for ninety percent of the world’s Muslims) are not widely appreciated. Sunnis and Wahhabis have often been at odds. The rise of a Shiite-dominated Iraq supported by American power could well create new alliances between Sunnis and Wahhabis that will radicalize both. The US CIA is already predicting that Iraq is becoming the new training ground for international terrorism.

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A Mixed Story

I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.

With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election." Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned. The measures were successful in cutting down on car bombings that could have done massive damage. But even these Draconian steps did not prevent widespread attacks, which is not actually good news. There is every reason to think that when the vehicle traffic starts up again, so will the guerrilla insurgency.

The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a "joke," and I stand by that.)

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear.

Iraq now faces many key issues that could tear the country apart, from the issues of Kirkuk and Mosul to that of religious law. James Zogby on Wolf Blitzer wisely warned the US public against another "Mission Accomplished" moment. Things may gradually get better, but this flawed "election" isn't a Mardi Gras for Americans and they'll regret it if that is the way they treat it.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election Update

At a little after noon EST, Jane Arraf on CNN is reporting about 30 percent turnout in Baqubah, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city to the northeast of Baghdad. It seems clear that the turnout was largely Shiite.

Although the violence and attacks have been extensive and took place all over the country, the security measures put in prevented massive loss of life. Suicide bombers clearly could not get close enough to crowds to take a big toll.

On the other hand, if the turnout is as light in the Sunni Arab areas as it now appears, the parliament/ constitutional assembly is going to be extremely lopsided. It would be sort of like having an election in California where the white Protestants all stayed home and the legislature was mostly Latinos, African-Americans and Asians.

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Dozens Killed in Election Day Guerrilla Campaign

Guerrillas launched mortar and suicide bomb attacks at polling stations throughout Iraq on Sunday as thousands of Iraqis headed to the polls. As many as 27 were dead by 1 pm Iraqi time, with several times that wounded.

Explosions rocked West, South and East Baghdad, as well as many cities throughout the Sunni heartland--Baqubah, Mosul, Balad, and in Salahuddin Province (7 attacks by noon). There was also an attack in the Turkmen north at Talafar, and in the Shiite deep south at Basra. In Basra, Coalition troops raided the al-Hamra Mosque. Four were killed and seven wounded in an attack in Sadr City. These kinds of statistics were common in the election-poll attacks.

Turnout seems extremely light in the Sunni Arab areas, where some polling stations did not even open. It was heavier in the Shiite south and in the Kurdish north.


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Zogby: 9% of Sunnis Will Vote
Stong Majority of Iraqis Wants US Out

Borzou Daragahi of AP reports an Iraqi poll that shows that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance coalition will do best in Sunday's election, but won't get a majority. The Iraqiya list of interim PM Iyad Allawi comes in second. The united Kurdish list will also do quite well (Kurds will almost certainly be over-represented in the new parliament). The poll says that no other list seems likely to get more than about 3% of the vote. In a 275-member parliament, that would be about 8 or 9 seats. If the poll is borne out by events, Iraqi politics will look an awful lot like Israeli politics in its dynamics, because the parliamentary electoral system works the same way. If the UIA can't form a government on its own, it will need a coalition partner-- either the Allawi list (which would give it a comfortable majority if that one does well) or a set of four or five small parties, each of which might have special demands and which might threaten to leave the majority coalition if they don't get their way.

Daragahi reports that Iraq's atmosphere is fearful and as though it is under siege.

Reuters says 17 persons have been killed in car bombings and other attacks in the lead-up to the elections. Electricity and polling stations are being targeted. Among the dead on Friday were at least 5 US troops, and possibly more as a US helicopter crashed and the fate of its crew remained unknown.

Zogby International did a poll of 805 Iraqis between January from January 19 to 23, 2005 in the cities of Baghdad, Hilla, Karbala and Kirkuk, as well as Diyala and Anbar provinces.

Results:

Sunni Arabs who say they will vote on Sunday: 9%
Sunni Arabs who say they definitely will not vote on Sunday: 76%
Shiites who say they likely or definitely will vote: 80%
Kurds who say they likely or definitely will vote: 56%

Sunni Arabs who want the US out of Iraq now or very soon: 82%
Shiites who want the US out of Iraq now or very soon: 69%

Sunni Arabs who believe US will hurt Iraq over next 5 years: 62%
Shiites who believe US will hurt Iraq over next five years: 49%

Shiites who want to hold elections on Jan. 30: 84%
Kurds who want to hold elections on Jan. 30: 64%

Sunni Arabs who want to postpone elections: 62%

Sunni Arabs who consider guerrilla resistance against the Americans legitimate: 53%

Iraqis who would support a religious government: 33%

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

15 Iraqis Killed in Attacks Focusing on Polling Places

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrillas killed 15 Iraqis on Thursday and blew up six polling sites, continuing their campaign to prevent successfull elections on Sunday. One such attack involved a clash with the new Iraqi army, and when the smoke cleared 11 Iraqis and one US soldier were dead.


Veteran Middle East correspondent Trudy Rubin has done some interviewing recently in Baghdad and came away hopeful about the wisdom of the Shiite political leadership about to come to power. She seems convinced that they are savvy enough to avoid provoking unnecessary ethnic conflict. I agree that the Shiite leadership has been remarkably restrained and responsible. I'm more worried about the Sunni Arab elite, which seems dedicated to a years-long guerrilla war that is probably doomed to eventual failure.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations

Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Pentagon who went there from the pro-Likud Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Project for a New American Century, will leave the Pentagon as of this summer. Feith's office is the subject of an FBI investigation as well as two Congressional investigations, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feith helped set up an Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia desk of the Pentagon to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence and create a case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and having operational links with al-Qaeda. At one point, contrary to Federal law, Feith's people actually briefed officials in the Executive on intelligence. Feith seems to have used David Wurmser a a liason of some sort, employing him at OSP before he later went to other key advisory offices at the State Department and finally in 2003 to Vice President Dic Cheney's office. Wurmser, who has ties to the Likud, is working for a US war against Iran and Syria. [An earlier version of this post got the sequence wrong out of a memory lapse.] The OSP was somehow able to get its analyses and false intelligence conclusions directly to Cheney's national security staff, from which they went directly to Bush, by-passing the CIA and the State Department Intelligence and Research division.

Having a Likudnik as the number three man in the Pentagon is a nightmare for American national security, since Feith could never be trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel Sharon. In the build-up to the Iraq War, Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who "put pressure" on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn't he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)

Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by one of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn passed them to the Israeli embassy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating Feith. There seems little doubt that he operated in the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and misleading "intelligence," that he created an entirely false impression of Iraqi weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaeda, and that he is among the chief facilitators of the US war in Iraq.

Feith is clearly resigning ahead of the possible breaking of major scandals concerning his tenure at the Department of Defense, which is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the American people in American history.

There are several downsides to Feith's departure, as welcome as it is for anyone who cares about US security in particular. The first is that now we probably have to see him forever on cable news channels as one of those dreary neocon talking heads flogged by the American Enterprise Institute, a far rightwing "think tank" funded by cranky rich people to obscure the truth. Another is that his departure now may help keep Bush from being blamed for his shady dealings in intelligence "analysis."

It is important to note that what is objectionable about Feith is a) his playing fast and loose with the truth, producing poor intelligence analysis that has been shown to be completely false and b) his doing so on behalf of not only American nationalist aspirations but also on behalf of a non-American political party, the Likud coalition of Israel, which desired to destroy the Oslo peace process initiated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (and which was therefore on the same side of this issue as the fanatic who assassinated Rabin). There is no objection to Americans having multiple identities or love for more than one country. Someone of Serbian heritage would make a perfectly good Pentagon administrator. But you wouldn't want a vehement supporter of Slobodon Milosevic as the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological dual loyalty that is dangerous. Mere sentiment based on multiple ethnic identities is not dual loyalty, and hyphenated Americans mostly have other countries they wish well (and rightly so).

It is also important to underline that only a small minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the problematic nature of Feith's tenure at the Department of Defense must not be made an excuse for any kind of bigotry.

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37 US Troops Dead, Other Americans Wounded
Large numbers of Iraqis Killed, Wounded by Car Bombs at Polling Stations, Party HQs

AP reports the worst news the US has had in Iraq ever:

A U.S. helicopter crashed in a desert sandstorm in the early morning darkness yesterday, killing the 30 Marines and one Navy sailor aboard . . . Six other troops died in insurgent ambushes in the deadliest day for Americans since the Iraq invasion began nearly two years ago. Only days before Iraq's crucial elections on Sunday, Muslim terrorists set off at least eight car bombs that killed 13 persons and injured almost 40 others, including 11 Americans.

Al-Zaman reports that 13 polling stations and 4 party offices have been attacked since Tuesday evening in Baghdad and to its north. Guerrillas kidnapped 2 election workers in Mosul, and 15 persons were killed and 30 wounded when a car bomb went off in front of the Kurdistan Democratic Party HQ in the city of Sinjar.

In his appearances on Wednesday, President Bush said that it was a positive that Iraqis are even having elections, since three years ago it would have seemed out of the question. You know, if all you have to boast about is that you are better than Saddam Hussein, it isn't actually a good sign. Can you imagine what would have happened to the Republican Party if its reply to Kerry's criticisms of last summer had been, "Well, the American Republican Party is a damn sight more progressive than Hitler was." Saddam was overthrown on April 9, 2003. It is 2005, and the US has been running Iraq for nearly two years. Now the question is, how does the situation in Iraq compare to the Philippines, or India, or Turkey. Answer: It sucks. There is little security, people are killed daily, there is a massive crime wave, and elections are being held in which most of the candidates cannot be identified for fear of their lives. So the conclusion is that the Bush administration has done a worse job in Iraq than the Congress Party does in India, or the AK Party does in Turkey. That's the standard of comparison once Saddam was gone. And, by the way, veteran NYT journalist John Burns, who is nobody's fool, told Tina Brown last Friday that he was taken aback when an Iraqi told him recently that he wished Saddam were back. This was an Iraqi who really had been delighted at the American invasion. So Bush should drop the cute sound bite about being better than Saddam.

Veteran Middle East journalist David Hirst talks about the implications for the Arab world of a Shiite victory in the Iraq elections (and of just having open elections). One thing I think Hirst missses is that Ayatollah Khomeini associated Shiism with a republican, anti-monarchy ethos, which is one reason the Arab monarchies are disturbed at the potential Shiite victory. They look at militant Shiism the way King George III viewed Tom Paine.

There are, of course, lots of elections in the Arab world. Some are more rigged than others. But there are almost no elections where the sitting prime minister and his party would be allowed to be turned out unexpectedly by an unpredictable and uncontrolled electorate. If Iraqi interim Prime Minister Allawi's list does poorly and his political star falls as a result of a popular vote, something democratic will have happened in Iraq, for all the serious problems with the elections.

One of the flashpoints in the elections is Kirkuk. The Kurds have gotten permission for Kurds originally from Kirkuk to vote in provincial and municipal elections as though they were resident in the city. Saddam had kicked a lot of Kurds out of Kirkuk and brought in Arabs, who now fear displacement. About a third of Kirkuk is Turkmens, who used to dominate the city, and they also fear losing it to a Kurdish super-province of Kurdistan. The area around Kirkuk is rich with petroleum. Kirkuk seems to me to be a tinderbox, and if it explodes it will set in motion ethnic conflict between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the north, which could involve Turkey.

AFP discusses the jockeying that is already going on for the post of prime minister. Predicting who will be chosen is very difficult. The parliament will elect a president and two vice presidents, who will form a presidential council. It will then appoint a prime minister. So parliament cannot dictate who the prime minister will be, and it needn't be the leader of the party that forms the government. We can't know what the calculation will be, of the presidential council. People have been asking what I thought of the International Republican Institute poll that 61 percent of Iraqis think Allaw has been "effective" in running the country. I find this result hard to believe. Last September an IRI poll found Allawi's favorability rating was 47 percent and that of Muqtada al-Sadr was 45 percent. IRI did not release the second finding, and my social science friends in Baghdad thought IRI's polling techniques appallingly bad. I flatly disbelieve that Allawi's favorability rating has risen since September. Since IRI is selective in releasing its results and doesn't seem to be running a tight ship in its Baghdad office anyway, it is hard to know what their poll results actually mean and how solidly based they are.

Cihan News Agency examines the issue of whether the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite list that has Grand Ayatollah Sistani's blessing, will implement shariah or Islamic law on the Iranian model. It is the wrong question. Obviously, the Iraqis will go their own way rather than adopting the Iranian system. The question is what the mix will be in a UIA constitution, of civil law versus relgious law (i.e. shariah). Which will be priveleged and in what situation? That the UIA will insist on some shariah, at least over time, seems to me self-evident.


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The Speech Bush Should have Given

This is the speech that I wish President Bush had given in fall, 2002, as he was trying to convince Congress to give him the authority to go to war against Iraq.

My fellow Americans:

I want us to go to war against Iraq. But I want us to have our eyes open and be completely realistic.

A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq's oil revenues will pay for it all, but that's ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it's going to need that just to run the new government we're putting in. No, we're going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I'm going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I'm going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don't like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I'm going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I'm going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades. In the meantime, your dollar isn't going to go as far when you buy something made overseas, since running those kinds of deficits will weaken our currency. (And I've set things up so that most things you buy will be made overseas.) We'll have to keep interest rates higher than they would otherwise have been and keep the economy in the doldrums, because otherwise my war deficits would cause massive inflation.

So I'm going to put you, your children, and your grandchildren deeply in hock to fight this war. I'm going to make it so there won't be a lot of new jobs created, and I'm going to use the excuse of the Federal red ink to cut way back on government services that you depend on. For the super-rich, or as I call them, "my base," this Iraq war thing is truly inspired. We use it to put up the deficit to the point where the Democrats and the more bleeding heart Republicans in Congress can't dare create any new programs to help the middle classes. We all know that the super-rich--about 3 million people in our country of 295 million-- would have to pay for those programs, since they own 45 percent of the privately held wealth. I'm damn sure going to make sure they aren't inconvenienced that way for a good long time to come.

Then, this Iraq War that I want you to authorize as part of the War on Terror is going to be costly in American lives. By the time of my second inaugural, over 1,300 brave women and men of the US armed forces will be dead as a result of this Iraq war, and 10,371 will have been maimed and wounded, many of them for life. America's streets and homeless shelters will likely be flooded, down the line, with some of these wounded vets. They will have problems finding work, with one or two limbs gone and often significant psychological damage. They will have even more trouble keeping any jobs they find. They will be mentally traumatized the rest of their lives by the horror they are going to see, and sometimes commit, in Iraq. But, well we've got a saying in Texas. I think you've got in over in Arkansas, too. You can't make an omelette without . . . you gotta break some eggs to wrassle up some breakfast.

I know Dick Cheney and Condi Rice have gone around scaring your kids with wild talk of Iraqi nukes. I have to confess to you that my CIA director, George Tenet, tells me that the evidence for that kind of thing just doesn't exist. In fact, I have to be frank and say that the Intelligence and Research Division of the State Department doesn't think Saddam has much of anything left even from his chemical weapons program. Maybe he destroyed the stuff and doesn't want to admit it because he's afraid the Shiites and Kurds will rise up against him without it. Anyway, Iraq just doesn't pose any immediate threat to the United States and probably doesn't have anything useful left of their weapons programs of the 1980s.

There also isn't any operational link between a secular Arab nationalist like Saddam and the religious loonies of al-Qaeda. They're scared of one another and hate each other more than each hates us. In fact, I have to be perfectly honest and admit that if we overthrow Saddam's secular Arab nationalist government, Iraq's Sunni Arabs will be disillusioned and full of despair. They are likely to turn to al-Qaeda as an alternative. So, folks, what I'm about to do could deliver 5 million Iraqis into the hands of people who are insisting they join some al-Qaeda offshoot immediately. Or else.

So why do I want to go to war? Look, folks, I'm just not going to tell you. I don't have to tell you. There is little transparency about these things in the executive, because we're running a kind of rump empire out of the president's office. After 20 or 30 years it will all leak out. Until then, you'll just have to trust me.

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Advice for Candidates: 'Do not Reveal your Identity . . . Stay Home as Much as Possible '

Jack Fairweather reports for the Telegraph from Baghdad on a meeting held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that instructs candidates on how to survive the elections. He writes: "The instructions are simple - avoid public places and do not reveal your identity, the cleric advised. Most candidates should stay at home as much as possible, he added."

Security is still so bad in Iraq that guerrillas were able to strike a national guard base near the airport with mortar fire Monday. As a result the air traffic controllers at Baghdad airport turned back both of that day's Royal Jordanian Airlines flights. RJA is the only commercial carrier that flies into Baghdad, aside from Iraqi Airlines themselves. Ironically, the inability of the planes to land stranded Iraqi Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan in Amman. When the Minister of Defense can't even fly to his own country because the area around the airport is in flames, you know that is a bad sign. There was no more word Monday about the growing feud between Shaalan and his rival, Ahmad Chalabi. Al-Hayat reported that a Lebanese bank was taking steps to return to Iraq $200 million that Shaalan had transferred there, ostensibly to buy tanks and other heavy armaments. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that Jordanian officials would be very happy to get Chalabi in their custody, so they could sentence him for embezzlement.

NPR's interview with me for Monday's Morning Edition about the Iraqi elections is now up on the Web. [link fixed 4:16 pm 1/25]

Eric Black of the Minneapolis Star Tribune argues that for all its somewhat absurd drawbacks, the election must go forward Sunday and may have some silver linings.

In this piece of a few days ago, Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder considers the current front runners for the post of prime minister in the new government. She reports the buzz around Adil Abdul Mahdi, who is currently Finance Minister and is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Abdul Mahdi has begun talking a relatively secular line, and he does have a Marxist past decades ago. Ironically enough, all this may make him acceptable to Washington. On the other hand, the idea that a SCIRI Prime Minister is going to be a determined secularist sounds a little far-fetched to me.

Award-winning journalist Anthony Shadid reports on the political scene in Basra, Iraq's southern port city, with its population of 1.3 million. He says that city politics has come to be dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but suggests that this dominance for the religious party may backfire in the elections. Many persons in Basra may vote for one of the more secular lists rather than for the United Iraqi Alliance (Which includes SCIRI) because they are dissatisfied with SCIRI's inadequate provision of social services.

Ed Wong of the New York Times writes an important piece about the behind the scenes maneuverings of major Sunni Arab leaders to ensure a role for their community in the drafting of the permanent constitution for Iraq-- even though Sunni Arabs will likely be grossly underrepresented in the parliament to be elected next Sunday. The parliament will double as a constitutional assembly.

The US military is planning to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for the next two years, according to Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace, Jr. He admitted that the number could fluctuate depending on the circumstances. I was saying before that I did not think it wise to announce a strict timetable for US military withdrawal from Iraq, lest the appointment of a date certain become, itself, an occasion for instability and violence. I think the troop levels should be drawn down steadily, without an announcement until perhaps the very end. But this announcement of a 24-month-long continued military presence is also unwise. Why would Lt. Gen. Lovelace say this? How can he know what the will of the new parliament will be, once it meets in mid to late February? Once there is an elected government, no matter how flawed the elections, the US will be in Iraq at the pleasure of the representatives of the Iraqi people. I think it is unfortunate that the US is saying anything at all about long-term plans just before the election. If they think they can present the new parliament with a fait accompli this way, I think they are going to be disappointed.

John Yaukey explains the case for handing security off to the Iraqi forces on a short timetable.

The announcement of the arrest of a key associate of the shadowy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was accompanied by hype that he was behind most of the spectacular car bombings in Iraq for the past 18 months. That seems silly to me, almost an insult to our intelligence. How could one man be behind so many attacks? Isn't it much more likely that they were the work of numerous Baath military and Salafi cells? My guess is that the interim government in Iraq is attempting to convince voters that it will be safe to come out on Sunday. This arrest will make virtually no impact on the guerrilla war, which is likely to go on for at least a decade.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani "Blesses" United Iraqi Alliance

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's web site [Arabic Link] has posted an article from the newspaper al-Ra'i al-`Amm which reports Sistani's oral answers to questions its reporter submitted to him. The piece says that although Sistani "blesses" the United Iraqi Alliance (the list grouping most of the major Shiite religious parties), he "at the same time supports all the patriotic lists." He says that he blesses the UIA because he knows the details of it and the personalities on it intimately. He does not insist that it is perfect or exemplary, and admits that some other lists may be better, but he simply does not know their details. (There are about 75 party lists and 6 coalitions, with over 7000 candidates).

[Cole: Sistani is going further in the direction of explicit endorsement of a particular slate than I would have expected from him, despite his use of euphemisms like "blessing" the list as opposed to "supporting" all the patriotic lists.]

Sistani also said that his lieutenants are urging Sunnis to vote as well as Shiites, and had had some success in convincing Sunnis to renounce their boycott of the elections.

He said that if Shiite militias were deployed to provide security to polling stations on Jan. 30, they must be firmly under the direct control of the central government.

Asked if he was satisfied with the pace of the rebuilding of Najaf in the wake of the heavy fighting there last August (between US troops and Mahdi Army militiamen), Sistani said that at this time a resort to violence made no sense. Diploatic and political approaches must be used, he said. He insisted that the spiritual position of Najaf was more important than its infrastructure. He pointed out that during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, Najaf was much less well developed as a city than the Iranian seminary center of Qom. But, he said, Najaf had a much bigger impact on the movement for constitutionalism than had Qom, because of its spiritual supremacy.

With regard to debaathification, he said that all Iraqis have equal rights. (I.e. Sunnis, who largely supported the Baath, should not be discriminated against qua Sunnis.) He said, however, that if anyone was wanted for crimes committed while in officer during the Saddam period, they would have to face justice in the civil courts.

He was asked about the Kurdish demand for a loose federalism. Sistani replied that "federalism" as the word was used in contemporary Iraq has a negative rather than a positive content. He said those who insist on it were responding to the lack of checks and balances in Iraqi governance during the previous regime. He said that it would take a long time of democratic practice in Iraq for "federalism" to begin being used in a positive sense.

With regard to Iraq's continued payment of reparations to Kuwait for the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Sistani said that there were two legal ways of looking at it. From the point of view of Islamic law, there are limitations on reparations. From the point of view of positive law, there are not. He implied that if the Kuwaitis really want to be good Muslims, they will follow Islamic law on reparations, which frowns on unbounded and unlimited transactions.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Israeli-Arab News Cycle

I found this Haaretz article too complicated too follow. So the Israeli Army has a psy-ops unit that used to be very active but has been less so recently, and is now being revived. This psy-ops unit plants articles in the Arab press about groups like Lebanon's Hizbullah, painting them as vicious terrorists. Then it comes to Israeli newspaper like Haaretz with translations, and urges that the pieces be written up for Israeli and Western audiences. But of course the pieces are reported as originating in the Arab press:

' The unit's activities have been controversial for years. In October 1999, Aluf Benn revealed in Haaretz that members of the unit used the Israeli media to emphasize reports initiated by the unit that it managed to place in the Arab press. He reported that the news reports focused on Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in terror activity. '

So is MEMRI, which translates articles from the Arabic press into English for thousands of US subscribers, in any way involved in all this? Its director formerly served in . . . Israeli military intelligence. How much of what we "know" from "Arab sources" about "Hizbullah terrorism" was simply made up by this fantasy factory in Tel Aviv?

As someone who reads the Arabic press quite a lot, this sort of revelation is extremely disturbing.

I also saw an allegation that British military intelligence had planted stories in the US press about Saddam's Iraq.

You begin to wonder how much of what you think you know is just propaganda manufactured by some bored colonel. No wonder post-Baath Iraq looks nothing like what we were led to to expect by the press, including the Arab press!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombs, Zarqawi, and Sistani's Constitution

On Monday morning, guerrillas set off another car bomb near the headquarters in Baghdad of the Iraqi National Accord, the party headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi was not in the offices. Early reports say at least ten people were injured.

Reuters also notes that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued a tape in which he denounced democracy as un-Islamic and warned of Shiite influence. He complained that the US was just using democracy as a cover for imperialist aggression, and added that democracy makes the people the source of authority, rather than scripture. Al-Hayat says Allawi responded immediately, vowing to wipe out Zaraqawi's group of terrorists.

Al-Hayat also says that Aqil Abdul Karim Saffar, a member of the leadership of the Iraqi National Accord (Allawi's party) said Sunday that if other parties win, it will provoke a civil war. He seemed to be saying that the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition, would be unacceptable to other Iraqis were it to win and form the government.

Well, I guess they already have American-style democracy. This reminds me of Cheney saying that the US would be struck by terrorists if John Kerry were elected.

Likewise, Jalil Nuri, a leader of the Sadr movement that is loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, said that the accusations and threats in which some party slates running in the election had resorted might well cause a civil war. I suppose he is probably talking about Hazem Shaalan and his threats against Chalabi, who is a political (not ideological) ally of Muqtada al-Sadr.

Hamza Hendawi of AP highlights the political role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He writes:

' A close al-Sistani aide acknowledged the cleric's concern about the constitution, saying that he would not have played such a prominent role in the vote had it not been for his belief that the assembly's key task was to draw up a constitution. ''This is a very important election,'' Hussain al-Shahristani, a nuclear scientist once jailed by Saddam, told The Associated Press. ''The assembly will write the constitution that will guarantee the future of Iraq. He won't have done this if it was just another election,'' said Shahristani, himself a candidate running on the slate endorsed by al-Sistani. The white-bearded cleric is expected to plunge anew into politics when the assembly begins to draft the constitution which, if adopted in a referendum scheduled to be held by Oct. 15, will be the basis for a second general election before Dec. 15. '

Based on past evidence, my guess is that Sistani will push for personal status law to be religious. It governs marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, etc. Sistani will want Shiites to be under Shiite religious law, Chaldean Catholics to be under Catholic canon law, Sunnis to be under Sunni shariah or Islamic codes, etc. This system is also used in Lebanon and Israel. It has disadvantages for women, and it causes an entanglement of the state with religion, since typically the clergy are the arbiters of it.

Sistani will also likely want a fairly strong Federal state, maybe even a centralized state like like France rather than the Swiss-style cantons that the Kurds seem to want, which will bring him into conflict with the Kurds.

If a parliament/ constitutional assembly can be elected January 30, it will then have to open all the cans of worms in Iraq at once as it crafts the permanent constitution.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Yawir on the Chalabi Affair

The LBC Arab satellite channel ran an extended interview Sunday afternoon EST with interim Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawir. The interviewer asked him at one point if Ahmad Chalabi would be arrested. He adopted a stern visage and said "Why would Chalabi be arrested?" The interviewer recalled for him that interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan had said late last week that Chalabi would be turned over to Interpol. She also pointed out that Shaalan is running on Yawir's slate, al-Iraqiyyun.

Yawir replied that in contemporary Iraq, there is a separation of powers. The judiciary is independent, and the executive does not have the authority to have people arrested. He insisted that the bad old days of personal rule in Iraq [exemplified in Saddam] were over.

He said that Hazem Shaalan is an Iraqi patriot, but has a tendency to express sharp opinions in public that do not represent those of the al-Iraqiyyun Party slate, nor even the interim Iraqi government. He pointed out that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had distanced his government from some of Shaalan's statements.

Shaalan directed his threat against Chalabi after the latter revealed that Shaalan had sent $300 million in cash to a Beirut Bank. Shaalan says it was to buy tanks and other weapons for the Iraqi government. The United States is investigating the transfer of funds.

Yawir also revealed that he had initially hoped to have a joint slate with Iyad Allawi, since the politicians on both lists are dedicated to "civil" (i.e. non-theocratic) governance. He said he did not like the word "secular" (`almani) to describe their stance, but preferred "civil" (madani). He said he believed that religion is too sublime and pure to be mixed into the nitty-gritty of day to day politics. He also expressed doubt that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had openly endorsed the United Iraqi Alliance, the largely Shiite list, saying that it was incumbent on a religious authority to stand above the fray and wish well to all Iraqis.

He admitted that the reason for which he decided to run a separate list had to do with a dispute over who would occupy the number 1 position. Al-Yawir said he felt that the president could hardly be the number two candidate on the list. He said that Allawi had inisted that the number one position had to be occupied by a Shiite [to appeal to Iraq's Shiite majority.] He expressed confidence that everything had worked out for the best, and speculated that the two parties might attract more Iraqis to vote than if they had been just one.

Actually, the logic of this election would have favored a single list, and al-Yawir was unwise not to compromise with Allawi on this issue. Parties will be seated by their proportion of the national vote, so it is in the interests of a party coalition to put together a list that will attract the biggest percentage of votes. This is why it was such a stroke of genius for Sistani and his people to insist that all the major Shiite parties be part of one coalition slate, the United Iraqi Alliance.

On the issue of postponing the elections, al-Yawir (a Sunni Arab) said he is a realistic man, and that it is not possible to stand against the majority of Iraqis who want the elections to go forward on January 30.

Al-Yawir also complained that although he had good relations with interim PM Allawi, he did not feel that the president was kept informed of all important decisions or that there was a satisfactory division of duties between the president and prime minister.

The anchor suggested that the interim constitution was vague and that this issue could be addressed when parliament took up the permanent constitution after the elections.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Hakim: No to Civil War, Yes to Timetable for US Withdrawal

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the United Iraqi Alliance list, says that Shiites refuse to be tricked into a civil war by the attacks of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Hakim alleges that Sunni Arabs are taking part in great numbers in the electoral process and says that he expects them to come out and vote on January 30. (According to some reports, many of the Sunni Arab slates that al-Hakim cited as proof of Sunni involvement in the elections have actually withdrawn.)

Registration has been extended for Iraqi voters abroad, since so far the number of registrants has been disappointing-- about 90,000. An estimated one million expatriate Iraqis are eligible to vote, but it appears that only a tenth of that actually will. It should be remembered that in many countries it is necessary to travel for hours (even hours by plane) to get to a voter registration office (there are only two in Australia and none in Perth; there are none in the US South below Nashville [corrected 1/23]). In any case, the expatriate vote is largely irrelevant, since the election is being held on a proportional basis. If a list gets 10 percent of the national vote, it can seat its top 27 or 28 candidates, who are on a ranked list, in the 275-member parliament. A hundred thousand expats could only add a percentage point or two to a list's total, especially since they will split their vote among several lists. (Dearborn, near where I live, is Sistani territory).

The Guardian asked a number of Iraqi politicians and observers of Iraq what they thought of the idea of a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the country. The idea is obviously growing in popularity. I expressed my anxiety about a repeat of India 1947 or Palestine 1948-- i.e. massive bloodshed, political partition, and subsequently several wars. Interestingly, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim seems to favor it, but underlines that it should be an Iraqi decision.

Helena Cobban, veteran Middle East observer and journalist and a dear friend, argues against my anxieties at her web log. She can't understand why I think things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. I can't understand why it would be hard to understand. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq's revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani's aides. Had the US not dissolved the Iraqi army, I'd be out in the streets now demanding an immediate US withdrawal. The failures of the Fallujah campaign made it amply clear that the US armed forces are unlikely to make headway against the guerrilla insurgency, and in the meantime are just making hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more angry. You will note that Sistani, who is not shy about these things, has not demanded an immediate withdrawal of US forces. In fact, I was told by a US observer of the scene in Najaf that a member of the marja'iyyah asked the US to take care of the Mahdi Army for them last summmer.

There is a saying in Arabic, Ahl al-bayt a`lamu bima fi'l-bayt--the people of a house know best what is in the house. When Sistani says the US should set a timetable and go, then I think we should all support that. But the US has made a big enough mess in Iraq without compounding it by hanging the Iraqis out to dry and decamping suddenly. By the way, Iraqis have more than once pleaded with me to argue against precipitous withdrawal by the US.

Helena also argues against my invocation of India 1947 and Palestine 1948, where I suggest that the pre-announced date of a British withdrawal helped throw both into chaos, partition and virtual civil war. She replies that there have been successful instances of decolonization without partition or civil war. Of course there have been. But I would argue that ethnically based politics is so entrenched in Iraq at the moment that it does look more like India in 1947 or Palestine in 1948 than it looks like Kenya, Ghana or even Algeria at the moment they gained their freedom. I thank her for noting that this is not a trivial concern.

Mind you, if the elected Iraqi parliament asks for a withdrawal timetable, I think the US has an absolute duty to comply. It is a different issue as to whether such a move is wise or could succeed without the Iraqis paying an even higher price than they have already paid.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi to be arrested

The political season in Iraq is turning extremely nasty. Not only were over 20 persons killed and dozens injured in bombings of a Shiite mosque and a Shiite wedding by guerrillas, but charges and counter-charges among politicians have now resulted in the prospective arrest of long-time Iraqi expatriate politican Ahmad Chalabi.

Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan announced on al-Jazeerah Friday that Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi would be arrested after the three-day Eid al-Adha celebrations that end Saturday.

[Update 12:35 pm: Interim Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib has denied that there is any warrant outstanding for Chalabi. Al-Naqib had in the past been a fairly close ally of Shaalan, but the two appear to have broken over this initiative of Shaalan's, which may be personal rather than representing an Allawi government stance. Allawi has never seemed able to control Shaalan's outbursts and I have long wondered why he kept him on as Defense Minister.]

Shaalan said that Chalabi would be turned over to Interpol to face justice in the embezzlement of $300 million from his own Petra Bank in the late 1980s, for which he was convicted in absentia in Jordan in 1992. Although Chalabi maintains that the conviction was politically motivated (he claims Jordan had a tacit alliance with his enemy, Saddam), the bank's Switzerland branch was audited and what auditors found was not pretty. Some 14 percent of the bank's loans went to family members and close friends, some $100 million, and most of those were not paid back. When the Jordanian government insisted in 1989 that banks keep 30 percent of funds on hand, Petra was over-extended and unable to comply.

I saw Shaalan on al-Jazeerah. He laid a number of other charges against Chalabi, saying he had engineered the dissolution of the Iraqi military in May of 2003, which threw the country into chaos and harmed its interests. He also tried to blame Chalabi for the Kurdish mini-civil war of the mid-1990s, which briefly brought Saddam's troops back up north.

Shaalan also accused Chalabi of defaming him. CNN expressed puzzlement about the latter, but the reference is in part to charges Chalabi made of financial corruption against Shaalan, involving a shipment last week of $300 million in cash to Beirut for an arms deal that, Chalabi implied, may have involved kickbacks. He was also referring to Chalabi's charges that Shaalan spied for Saddam in 1998 through 2003 and even spied on Chalabi (reported here a couple days ago from Chalabi's web site.) Chalabi was attempting to smear Shaalan as an unreconstructed Baathist and Saddam collaborator, and he was at the same time attempting to smear interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Allawi's al-Iraqiyah slate in the elections, by association.

Chalabi's latter move was typically sleazy and implausible (the Americans are better at vetting people than to allow a recent Saddam spy to become Minister of Defense), and was extremely troubling. It wasn't just down and dirty campaigning. It was closer to a kind of McCarthyism. I don't like Shaalan or his hardline views, and do think he still has some Baath attitudes (especially his anti-Iranian racism). But I very much doubt he was spying for Saddam in 2002! Whether the arms deal and the cash shipped to Beirut was irregular, I don't know. Chalabi's partisans will argue that Shaalan is just trying to prevent Chalabi from auditing the government books if the UIA comes to power.

On the other hand, for the Allawi government to make this particular response is also troubling. Chalabi is a candidate for parliament on the United Iraqi Alliance list, which groups the major Shiite parties. Shaalan has hinted around that the UIA is a stalking horse for Iran, and choosing the week before the election to announce the arrest of one of the list's top-ranking figures (# 10)--on thirteen-year-old charges-- could be seen as a way of attempting to damage its popularity. That is, getting Chalabi could actually be a way of getting Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the UIA leader who also heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (which had been based in Iran for over two decades). We know what Shaalan thinks of Iran and can imagine what he thinks of al-Hakim.

Moreover, it wasn't criminal for Chalabi to advocate dissolving the Iraqi army (though it was highly unwise and possibly sleazy), and it is disturbing that Shaalan is throwing that charge into the mix. Shaalan did not say so, but given his anti-Iran impetus, and given the charges against Chalabi that he has passed sensitive information on to Tehran, it could be that Shaalan thinks Chalabi pressed for the dissolution of the Iraq military because Tehran urged it. A former ambassador told me he that Chalabi was getting money from Iran, so he may have owed the ayatollahs. Of course, most of Iraq's neighbors would have welcomed and perhaps secretly lobbied for the dissolution of the Iraqi military, including Kuwait and Israel.

Chalabi was charged in May of 2004 with having passed sensitive US intelligence (the fact that the US had broken Iranian codes) to Iran, but the charges were ultimately quietly dropped and the prosecuting judge shunted off to desk work. It seems clear that in summer, 2004, Chalabi still had powerful supporters in the Pentagon who shielded him. Either that support has by now collapsed, or Shaalan is attempting to present them with a fait accompli. The State Department and the CIA, which have gained more power in Iraq in the past 8 months, dislike Chalabi and saw him as a corrupt "Gucci revolutionary" who never delivered and could not account for the money they gave him.

Given that the Iraqi government closed down the al-Jazeerah offices in Baghdad, saying that the channel was biased against it, it is odd that Shaalan chose that network to give this interview on. The chic anchor could barely suppress a smirk as she announced the interview.

[In the light of al-Naqib's later denial, it seems possible that Shaalan went to al-Jazeerah for the same reason everyone else does. It isn't controlled and will put on virtually anything except a criticism of the Qatar government. If Shaalan had gone to al-Iraqiyyah or Radio Sawa Iraq, he might have been stopped by Allawi or the Americans. It now seems possible that this affair will profoundly hurt the chances of the Allawi list in the elections (even though Shaalan is running on the Yawir list). The spectacle of the Defense Minister trying to have a political opponent arrested just as a matter of personal fiat, and being contradicted by the chief law enforcement officer, al-Naqib, is wholly unedifying. The news, which Chalabi publicized, that Shaalan recently sent $300 million in cash to Beirut to buy tanks and other weaponry on a covert basis also raises many questions about the probity and intentions of the interim government.]

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Montazeri Warns Iraqis Against Clerical Rule

Ayatollah Husain Ali Montazeri of Qom warned [Persian link] the Iraqi political class on Friday against allowing clerics to dominate the executive in their new government. He spoke through his son to the Persian service of the BBC. He said that clerics were just not trained to or capable of running a state. He said they should stick to oversight (i.e. using their moral authority to safeguard Islamic principles). He also said that the "guardianship of the jurisprudent" should only be exercised within the parameters set by voters. He condemned the Khomeinist system in Iran for having an "absolute" guardianship of the jurisprudent, with no checks on it in the form of a popular franchise.

Montazeri had been close to Khomeini and had at one point in the 1980s been his designated successor. But he broke with Khomeini and other hardliners over the extensive human rights abuses in Iran in the mid to late 1980s. He has openly questioned the doctrine of the guardianship of the jurisprudent (at least in the absolutist form practiced in contemporary Iran). Because challenging this ideological basis of the Iranian state is illegal, Montazeri was under house arrest until two years ago.

Montazeri's son, through whom the ayatollah spoke, was careful to say that Montazeri did not favor a separation of religion and state. Islam, he said, is not limited to acts of worship. But he thought Iraqis should take a lesson from the failures in Iran that had derived from clerics attempting to rule directly, a task for which he said they were unsuited.

Montazeri's position is somewhat similar to that of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, though Sistani rejects the guardianship of the jurisprudent in the political realm altogether, allowing it only in the realm of social issues. Montazeri's idea that clerical power should be delimited by the popular will is something I haven't seen in Sistani. Rather, I think Sistani thinks civil politics should be run on a civil basis, and religion stay in the seminary except when an occasional fatwa is required to protect the interests of Islam when they were touched upon by civil legislation.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A Pictorial Commentary on the first Line in Bush's Inaugural Speech

The full transcript is here. Pictures are clickable.

" . . . on this day prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution and recall the deep commitments that unite our country."

Let us consider the durable vision of our Constitution and the commitments that unite us as Americans, viz., the Bill of Rights. And let us ask whether Bush's first term left it intact:

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,



or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

or abridging the freedom of speech,



or of the press;



or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,



and to petition the government for a redress of grievances . . .

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.



Amendment V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.



Amendment VI: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense . . .




Amendment VIII: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Bush has sworn an oath to uphold the US Constitution. He won't. But Congress can. It should insist that the sunset provisions of the so-called "Patriot Act" (which should be called the "Abrogation of the Constitution Act") be allowed to expire in 2005 and that the extremely dangerous "Patriot Act II" be completely rolled back. Republicans who care about the Constitution should join Democrats who care about the Constitution in putting a stake through the heart of this abomination. A noble 200-year-old experiment in civil liberties and democracy, for which US troops are giving their lives, must not be ended by a single act of terrorism and a clique of authoritarians in Washington.

Bush's speech was about bringing liberty to the rest of the world. Let's see if he can first do something to restore to the American public the liberties we enjoyed, as free men and women, until 2001. Let's see if he can bring US government policies back into alignment with the Geneva Conventions and other international law on human rights, to which the US is signatory. Only then would he have earned the right to even think about trying to extend liberty to others. As of now, folks, your library records can be viewed at will by agents of the US government, and the librarian is forbidden to reveal to anyone that the government looked at these documents. Not only is a warrant not required, but even the invasion of your privacy is top secret and you will never know about it. Can anyone even prove that the 19 hijackers of 9/11 ever checked a book out of a US library? The Republic may not be able to withstand four more years of this.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Nine British Troops Wounded in Abuse-Related Blast

Guerrillas targeted British troops at the Shaibah base near Basra with a suicide bombing, wounding nine, along with a number of civilians. It appears that the attack was prompted by the circulation of images showing British troops torturing Iraqi detainees. The images emerged in connection with the trial of some British soldiers on abuse charges.

Arab satellite channels broadcast excerpts Thursday from an internet recording attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian radical Muslim fundamentalist, in which he bitterly attacked Iraqi Shiites for fighting alongside US troops at Fallujah in November. He accused them of looting the city. He also denounced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as an atheist and an apostate for declining to denounce the Fallujah campaign. He alleged that 800 Israeli soldiers took part in the fighting there (an absurd charge, of course, but it will be widely believed). The strategy attributed to Zarqawi, of attempting to foment a civil war between Shiite Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis, is a desperate one and so far the Shiites have refused to take the bait. Zarqawi may well be a black psy-ops operation of Baathist military intelligence, which is probably behind most of the violence in Iraq.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The two major roads leading south from Baghdad are increasingly dangerous, with travellers being attacked by highwaymen or by guerrillas.

A militantly anti-American preacher in Fallujah, Shaikh Muhammad Saadoun, was helped by his congregation to escape the American dragnet in the city, according to AFP. A preacher at the al-Furqan Mosque in the north of the city, he used to end his sermons with a prayer to God, "Grant us victory over our American enemies and their helpers."

Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan has assured Ash-Sharq al-Awsat that the documents showing him spying for Saddam in 1998-2003, which the Iraqi National Congress alleges it has, are forgeries and baseless. Ahmad Chalabi, who is close to Tehran and a proponent of radical de-Baathification, has recently gone after the virulently anti-Iranian Shaalan, a former Baathist.

Interim Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari said Thursday that fears of a civil war in Iraq were overblown. Jaafari, a head of the Shiite Dawa Party, said that neither Sunnis nor Shiites would accept such a conflict. He said that there was general appreciation in the Shiite community that the guerrillas targetting Shiites, while they might be Sunnis, do not represent the Sunni community.

The British government denied that there was a secret timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq.

A crisis has roiled the High Commission on Elections in Iraq just 10 days before the first nation-wide parliamentary elections since the party-less elections of 1954. The Commission attempted to dismiss its official spokesman, Farid Ayar. It said that a spokesman was no longer needed, and the Commission would just issue direct communiques. Ayar, however, refused to step down. He accused the president of the Commission, Hussein Hindawi, of resisting proposals that there be a rotating chair, and said the attempt to fire him was motivated by this resistance.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rice Doublespeak at Senate

The
transcript of the Rice/Boxer exchange is worth reading in full. Rice's performance is breathtakingly bad, and Boxer has all the quotes and facts at her fingertips. The issue is that Condoleeza Rice engaged in demagoguery before the Iraq war. She invoked the image of a mushroom cloud over the United States. But George Tenet had told her the evidence was weak in that regard. The State Department Intelligence and Research division thought the whole nuclear bit was far-fetched. But Rice kept on saying these alarmist things nevertheless.

In the end, Rice falls back on the same brain-dead rhetorical strategy as George W. Bush. Saddam was a threat because he is intrinsically evil. He is so evil that he can be a threat even though all he had in his arsenal were those spitballs toward which Zell Miller showed such derision at the Republican National Convention. Saddam was a threat to the region, she says. She is still saying this now, today. Saddam was not a threat to the region in 2002. That is ridiculous. Iraq was also not a threat to the US. This turns out to be the Achilles Heel of any doctrine of preemptive war. It would require, in order to be justified, much better intelligence than is usually available on the capabilities and intensions of the enemy. Rice still won't admit this, which means she may drag us into further wars with further gross mistakes in judgment.

On Wednesday, Rice testified again. Now aware that Senator Boxer and others were complaining about her rigidity, she finally admitted that the US had made some serious errors in Iraq. But the example she gave, of reconstruction work, was disingenuous. Actually the US companies working in relatively safe places like Basra and Sulaymaniyah have done very good reconstruction work. She seems to be trying to find some mistake she could admit to, which would actually be the mistake of the private sector and not of the Bush adminsitration! For an incoming Secretary of State not to be willing to recognize that Iraq is a mess in part because of US policies is to translate the realm of politics into some sort of fantasyland. And in a way, that is what has been happening in US politics since Reagan was elected and Peggy Noonan began writing those syrupy speeches.

Senators Chafee and Biden urged Rice to try to engage Iran. Biden suggested she
tell Bush that dropping some bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities and then hoping that the young people in blue jeans would toss out the mullas was probably not going to work. Biden has developed this wonderful sardonic sense of what exactly the Bush administration ideologues are thinking, and is able to puncture these insubstantial balloons masterfully, building on decades of experience in foreign affairs.

Rice responded concerning Iran that it was hard to have an engagement with a country that wanted to see Israel destroyed. It is such a simple-minded thing to say. Uh, let me see. In the 1980s wasn't it the Khomeini regime that sold Israel petroleum in exchange for spare parts for its American weaponry? Wasn't it the Israelis who put Reagan up to the Iran-Contra scandal by suggesting that the US ship TOWs to Iran in return for an end to the Lebanese hostage crisis? Even when it was more radical, and despite all the rhetoric, Iran was willing to deal with Israel in ways that helped the latter enormously.

It is true that some Iranian leaders, like Rafsanjani, say frightening things about Israel. But Rafsanjani has no executive power, and when he was president he didn't actually act on such sentiments. The point of engaging the Iranian regime would be to gradually ween it away from such extremism. Iran hasn't launched any aggressive wars in the region, or threatened to use weapons of mass destruction, unlke some other countries (the US had full diplomatic relations with Iraq in the 1980s at a
time when it had done both of these things.) I am very uncomfortable in having US national security policy and diplomacy dictated by how politicians in a country talk about our non-Nato allies (with whom, by the way, we do not even have a mutual defense pact). And I am very suspicious that now that Iraq is a basket case, all of a sudden Ariel Sharon is calling on the US to attack Iran.

If Rice is going to be a successful Secretary of State, she simply has to get back control of US foreign policy from the Likudniks in the Bush administration.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Consensus Growing in Iraq for a Withdrawal Timetable

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leading figure in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA the largely Shiite party that is likely to form the next Iraqi government), gave a press conference on Wednesday that I saw on LBC satellite television. Al-Hakim said that Iraqis did not want to continue to depend on foreign troops for their security, but would have to become self-sufficient in that regard. Al-Hakim headed for nearly two decades the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). His hopes of using it as the corps of a new Iraqi security force have been thwarted by the Americans, who insisted it turn in its heavy weapons and who remain suspicious of it as a stalking horse for Iran. (The Badr Corps was largely trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.) The Badr Corps has now morphed into a political party, the Badr Organization, which is separate from SCIRI and which has seats in the UIA slate. Al-Hakim's comments on Wednesday suggest that he may try to use Badr more aggressively if the UIA wins, against the Sunni Arab insurgency.

The UIA has it in its party platform that if it wins it will demand that the US establish a timetable for withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. This idea is becoming increasingly popular in Iraq.

The idea has now been endorsed behind the scenes by officials in the United Kingdom. A UK government source told the Daily Telegraph, '"The main Iraqi parties are already talking about when coalition forces should be drawn down . . . America knows it will have to deal with the issue soon." ' British eagerness in this regard is driven in part by the recognition by the Blair wing of the Labour Party that the presence of British troops in Iraq is extremely unpopular with the British public. Blair probably won't be dumped by his party the way Thatcher was by hers, but Iraq is just an enormous drag on his government and his popularity. The UK is currently having its own Abu Ghraib moment, as shocking photographs circulated during the trial of three British troops for abusing Iraqi detainees.

Arab satellite television news reported early Thursday morning that Iyad Allawi is also putting forward a plan to regain for Iraq sovereign authority over military decisions in Iraq, and asking for a withdrawal timetable. Such a timetable is also in the platform of Allawi's party.

The FT revealed one reason for which Allawi is making such frantic policy statements two weeks before the elections. Mohammad Tawfiq, an important Kurdish political figure, told the Financial Times that the interim government of Iyad Allawi had never developed a practical strategy for implementing security. He also predicted that Allawi would not get enough support in the forthcomming elections to form the new government, based on his talks with Iraqis from all over the country. He thought the United Iraqi Alliance would do very well, but that it would not nominate a cleric for prime minister. And he is confident that the Shiites will yield to Kurdish desires for a consolidated, ethnically-based province of Kurdistan, to be formed out of 6 of the present 18 provinces.

What are the pros and cons of setting a timetable for withdrawal of coalition troops? The pro is that unless a firm timetable is set, the coalition commanders will have no precise goal toward which to work in wrapping up their tasks in Iraq. They could easily end up being there as long as Israel was in Lebanon (and the Syrians, who came in to Lebanon in 1976 to restore order at the instance of the US and Israel, are still there!) Moreover, some of the hostility toward Coalition troops on the part of Iraqis might subside if there was a known timetable for their withdrawal.

One con is that a precipitous withdrawal of coalition troops could lead to the total breakdown of security and give the guerrilla insurgents the run of Iraq. This sort of factor has stood in the way of previous US bids to begin drawing down the number of troops.

Another con is that in colonial situations setting a firm deadline for withdrawal beforehand can be disastrous. The imperial power becomes a lame duck. Why should anyone care if they are arrested if they know the arresting officers will be gone in 6 months? Plus, such deadlines can encourage massive communal violence as ethnic groups jockey to take over as the imperial power departs. The British in India announced a deadline for August of 1947, and helped provoke the Partition of the country into Indian and Pakistan, an event that led to population displacements and rioting that cost between half a million and a million lives. Likewise, the May, 1948, deadline the British set for withdrawal from Palestine led to the outbreak of the 1948 War and the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their own country.

One solution to this latter problem might be to set a timetable for withdrawal of Coalition land forces, but for the US and its allies to continue to offer the new Iraqi government's army close air support in any battles with the neo-Baathists and jihadis that might try to take advantage of the withdrawal to make a coup and institute a bloodbath.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

4 Bombs Shake Baghdad Wednesday Morning
Condi Assures Senate Everything was Handled Properly
and Everything will be All Right

Guerrillas unleashed a terror campaign
of bombings on the Iraqi capital Wednesday morning, as at least four big explosions shook several sites. Affected were the area near the Australian embassy, a police station, and the Green Zone. Initial reports gave the death toll as 7.

A new Los Angeles Times poll showed that US support for the Iraq war had sunk to new lows, such that only 39% of Americans now believe that the situation in 2002 and 2003 was bad enough to warrant a war with Iraq. The news that there were no weapons of mass destruction appears to be gradually filtering down into even the Red states.
AFP points out
that the majority of the US public has been disaffected with the war in Iraq for some time, putting the lie to Bush's notion that he won a mandate to go on with the same policies there.

In the US, Dr. Condaleeza Rice appeared before the Senate in confirmation hearings on her nomination by Bush to be Secretary of State. I was struck by how much tougher The LA Times was in its coverage than most other news outlets. It notes, e.g., that Dr. Rice seemed unwilling to condemn torture unreservedly (her people back in Birmingham must be proud of that one).

I was alarmed at how doctrinaire all her answers were, and how she consistently refused to take any responsibility for misleading the American public into an unnecessary war. Her notion that the US cannot afford to let failed states fester is something that could be debated. But Iraq was not a failed state in 2002. If anything Condi Rice has helped turn Iraq into a failed state. If it is undesirable for the US to let failed states fester, surely it is even more undesirable for the US to use false pretences to turn countries into failed states. She either doesn't get it, or doesn't have the elemental courage and integrity to admit that she was wrong. Her deputy Stephen Hadley, by the way, was the one who over-ruled the CIA and authorized the phrase about Iraq buying uranium from Niger in the 2003 State of the Union address. Condi is responsible for her subordinates. If you just went through and made a quotation table of everything she said about Iraq in the first term, it would be hilarious to read now.

The one thing I disagree with the LA Times piece about is that they say she might be more effective because she is closer to Bush than Powell was. Not so. Her lack of political and intellectual independence from Bush will turn her into a mere parrot, and all the heavy duty decisions will be taken by Donald Rumsfeld and his Neoconservative phalanx. Her testimony, which sounded as though she had been stuck in a time warp for the past three years and hadn't noticed the disaster in Iraq, was a good sign of her future irrelevance and current inability to deal with reality.
The piece of fear mongering she did about the small weak country of Syria was the most alarming thing I heard. She is in no position to rattle sabers at this point. Those bombs in Baghdad on Wednesday weren't set from Damascus. They were local munitions, local military expertise, local Iraqi guerrillas. And, besides, threatening Syria too vehemently could easily backfire. If they start to fear Condi intends to overthrow them, the Syrian Baath will only have more incentive to support the guerrillas.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi attacks Shaalan

The rivalry between Iyad Allawi [Arabic link] and Ahmad Chalabi has heated up two weeks before the January 30 elections.

Jon Lee Anderson points out in his New Yorker piece, Allawi was a long-time member of the Baath Party, and is now a secular, tough pragmatist. He organized other ex-Baathists, especially officers and intelligence men, in his Iraqi National Accord, initially for MI6 (British intelligence) and then from the early 1990s in cooperation with the United States. Allawi's secular al-Iraqiyyah list is the most prominent competitor with the United Iraqi Alliance, the slate that groups the major Shiite religious parties.

When the US and the UN appointed Iyad Allawi interim prime minister last June, they knew that he would rehabilitate many Baathists and bring him into the government. They hoped he would correct for the excesses of de-Baathification, a policy of simply firing thousands of middle and low-ranking members of the party, most of the Sunni Arabs, from their jobs. De-Baathification was the brainchild of corrupt financier and political gadfly Ahmad Chalabi, at one time the favorite of the Department of Defense civilians. Chalabi had gradually lost favor, in part because of his close contacts with Tehran and allegations that he had passed the mullas sensitive information.

Allawi appointed ex-Baathists to key cabinet posts. Falah al-Naqib, the son of a prominent Baath official who ultimately became Iraq's ambassador to Sweden and defected in the late 1970s, became minister of the interior (in Iraq, this is sort of like being director of the FBI). For Defense, Allawi tapped an obscure man named Hazem al-Shaalan. Al-Shaalan was known as a former Baathist from al-Hillah (and therefore probably a secular Shiite).

Shaalan is even more of a hardliner than Allawi. On getting into office, he declared Iran to be Iraq's number one enemy, a sort of discourse that hearkened back to Baath propaganda of the 1980s. He took the lead in demanding military action against the Mahdi Army in Najaf, and was enthusiastic about the US campaign against Fallujah and its Sunni fundamentalist guerrillas.

Now Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has posted a dossier on Shaalan accusing him of spying for Saddam's intelligence apparatus (the mukhabarat) beginning in 1998 and up until the spring of 2003. Indeed, the web site claims that Shaalan personally spied on Ahmad Chalabi for Saddam. It says he operated in Europe under the code name 5H until early 2003, when he became Haydar Ahmad. He is said to have met with a high Saddamist intelligence official in Morocco in 2000. He also is accused of giving Saddam reports on Chalabi's own meetings with British and Iranian officials.

Since Chalabi is a world-class liar and has never produced most of the documents he says prove his various allegations over the years, his attack on Shaalan cannot be taken too seriously until he releases the documents he says he has. Even then, the only logical explanation for Shaalan's sudden rise from obscurity to the Iraqi cabinet is that he was a double agent, actually working for the CIA against Baath intelligence while pretending to gather intelligence for them. (If the most he told them was that Ahmad Chalabi was meeting with the British and Iranians, he was taking Saddam for a ride. I could have told them that.)

The INC is demanding that Shaalan be disallowed from running as a candidate for parliament list by the electoral commission, as a recent Baathist spy.

One implication of the article is that the lists running against the UIA, such as those of Yawir (on which Shaalan is running) and Allawi (with whom Shaalan is associated) are full of persons who had been close to Saddam until fairly recently, an association deeply resented by Shiite Iraqis. So, this campaign against Shaalan must be seen as a species of negative campaigning, Iraqi style.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.