Constitution Unfinished as Deadline Looms
17 Dead in Violence Saturday

Sunni Arab members of the constitution drafting committee are still rejecting language that would make Iraq a "federal" republic. In practice, this language would formally acknowledge Kurdistan and perhaps Shiite federations of provinces in the south as having a good deal of autonomy and a claim on petroleum revenues from Kirkuk (the Kurds) and Rumaila (the Shiites). The Sunni Arabs do not have a developed petroleum or natural gas field and so would suffer from a federal arrangement that left some of the petroleum income in the provinces rather than having the central government take it all and redistribute it. It increasingly looks as though the only way the committee can meet its August 1 deadline for informing parliament that it will be done by August 15 would be to simply over-rule the minority Sunnis with an up and down vote. The bitterness this step would leave in Sunni mouths might make it inadvisable.

al-Hayat: Sunni parliamentarian Mishaan Jiburi, on a visit to Damascus, warned that for the Shiites and Kurds to run roughshod over the Sunni Arabs and their concerns would result in civil war. He said they would be driven in even greater numbers into opposition to the government and the foreign occupation. Among the points they most cared about, he said, were that Iranians must not be mentioned as a recognized Iraqi minority in the constitution. He said it was also important to distance the government from religion.

His concerns were echoed by five clan leaders from the Fallujah area meeting with US officers. They said a federal Iraq in which the Kurds got the oil of Kirkuk and the Shiites the oil of Rumaila in the south, would leave the Sunni Arabs with "the desert sands of Anbar."

Deputy speaker of the house and member of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, Hussein Shahristani, told al-Hayat on Saturday that some combination of southern, largely Shiite provinces may form a confederation within the framework of a federal Iraq. He said as many as ten provinces or as few as two could join this confederation (which would be analogous to the "Kurdistan" formed from northern provinces by the Kurds). He said most leading politicians had already agreed to this step, with the exception of a few who thought it might prove too much of a complication in Iraqi politics at the moment.

Shahristani also said that it was absolutely unacceptable for the Peshmerga paramilitary of the Kurdish parties to remain an armed force in Kurdistan. He said that defense would be the prerogative of the central government in Baghdad.

There seems little doubt that the permanent constitution will acknowledge a leading role for Islamic law in legislation. The question is whether it will be the source of legislation or one among several. Also, it will matter if the constitution puts Iraqis under their religious law for matters of personal status like marriage, divorce and so forth, and whether a special status is recognized for the grand ayatollahs in Najaf, as it was in a draft leaked last week to al-Sabah newspaper.

Newsday says, ' "Mouafak al-Rubaie, a national security adviser and a Shiite, met al-Sistani on Saturday and said the main concern of the Shiite religious leadership is to "preserve the Islamic identity of Iraq and its people, which means preserving a united Iraq and people as a state." '

Adnan Dulaimi maintains that he has been fired as head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board by the Jaafari government because he was too outspoken a champion of Sunni causes.

Al-Hayat says that the Association of Muslim Scholars (Sunni) objected strongly to Dulaimi's firing, and the installation in his place of Shaikh Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur al-Samarra'i. They said the replacement was made by the government without any consultation with the Sunni Arab community.

On Sunday morning, guerrillas detonated a carbomb near Haswah, a half an hour's drive south of Baghdad, killing 5 civilians and wounding 10.

A roadside bomb targetting a British military convoy southwest of the city of Basra in Iraq's deep south on Saturday, killing 2 private security guards. A second bomb timed to hit rescuers instead killed two local children.

BAGHDAD - Guerrillas detonated a car bomb at a police checkpoint in the capital. They killed 7, wounded 25.

Reuters reports other casualties of Iraq's unconventional civil war:

Three employees of Baghdad International Airport, who had been kidnapped, turned up blindfolded and dead.

A roadside bomb aimed at a US military patrol in Dura instead killed an Iraqi civilian.

A member of the Sunni National Dialogue Council that is cooperating with the elected government in crafting a constitution narrowly missed being assassinated Saturday. His bodyguard was wounded.

Reuters adds:

"BAGHDAD - An Iraqi health ministry official, Eman Naji, was kidnapped by gunmen who stormed her home in the capital's upscale district of Mansour, police said."

In HIT, west of the capital, a suicide bomber hit a US military patrol, wounding 4 Marines.

In Mahmudiya just south of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi civilian and wounded 3.

The US military has established a new base in the northwest of Iraq aimed at interdicting infiltration of foreign fighters into Iraq.

You're not allowed to blog about the Iraq War critically if you are an active duty serviceman over there. This is why we know so little about what is really going on. Few will risk reporting on the reality while Don Rumsfeld wants boosterism and cheerleading.

I reported a few days ago that a US military base near Fallujah had taken mortar fire. Aljazeerah even had film showing damage to a building as US troops standing around. I noted that the wire services and other reporters appeared to have ignored the story. I heard from a relative of someone serving in Fallujah, who said that all the bases around there take mortar fire so frequently that it has become a big yawn for the troops. Now, since march the US military has conducted a vigorous propaganda campaign proclaiming how nice post-invasion Fallujah is, how life has returned to normal, with bustling traffic and trade, and how it is the safest city in Iraq. While some quarters may in fact have gotten back to a semblance of normality, not all the city has, and the area isn't safe, just as Anbar province in general is not. The reason we don't know more about the real situation is that the troops are being forbidden to tell us about it. Most of what they could reveal would not in fact endanger the US military. But it would endanger the propaganda and black psy-ops campaigns being run on us by the civilians in the Department of Defense.
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London Bombings: State of Play

After the dramatic arrests on Friday in London and Rome, it appears that the foot soldiers of the July 21 bombing are all in custody. Whether the police have been able to go up the cell structure to find handlers, bomb makers and logisticians is unclear.

This is what we know, except that one of the question marks can be replaced with the name of Somalian-British Osman Hussein, captured in Rome. He was traced using his cell phone!




The use of two distinct ethnic networks for the two operational cells was an excellent way to throw the police off the trail and prepare the way for the July 21 bombings. The police would have been looking at British/Pakistani networks after the first bombing. The question of what ties the two networks together is the real question. It would only be necessary that the two operational cell leaders-- say Muhammad Sidique Khan and Yasin Hassan Omar-- knew a third person. Or that they each had a handler who knew the third person.
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Sunnis Demonstrate in Baghdad
As Bombings Kill 28, wound 46, with 3 US Soldiers Dead
1 Million Iraqis say "US Out"!

Maher al-Thanoon of Reuters reports that one thousand Sunni Arabs staged a demonstration outside the Green Zone (barricaded government offices) against the elected Iraqi government, which is dominated by Shiites in coalition with Kurds. They accused the Jaafari government of using torture and death squads on a sectarian basis against their community, which they called "the new Iraq of fire and steel." Al-Thanoon says, "Simulating torture, they dressed up as soldiers and used drills, wooden clubs and electric wires to act out what they said were the techniques used by government forces against them."

The Muqtada al-Sadr followers say they have collected the signatures of one million Iraqis asking that US and other Coalition troops leave the country immediately. In his sermon at an East Baghdad mosque, Shaikh Abdul Zahra al-Suwaidi told the congregation, "We obtained the Iraqi signatures demanding the withdrawal of the occupation troops as asked for by Sayyed Moqtada Sadr . . . The goal of this petition is to show the world the rejection by Iraqis of foreigners in Iraq . . ."

Then on Friday evening in south Baghdad, guerrillas cut down Faisal al-Khaz'ali, a major leader of an important Shiite clan.

An individual suicide bomber walked up to an Iraqi army recruitment center in the northern town of Rabi`a, an hour's drive from Mosul near the Syrian border, and detonated his payload. He killed 25 persons and wounded 35. Rabi`a is one of those border towns into which the US alleges volunteer jihadis slip from Syria (though they also slip in from Jordan and Saudi Arabia but the Washington crew never say anything about that, and US journalists never call them on it). It wasn't clear, in any case, whether the bomber was an Iraqi (there isn't much difference among the Sunni clans on either side of that border; some belong to the same over-all tribes).

Wire services also report:

*Baghdad: A few hours after the bombing in Rabi`a, guerrillas attacked a police patrol with a car bomb but missed and killed two civilians.

*Mosul: Some eyewitnesses said that guerrillas in Iraq's third-largest city targeted a US convoy with a car bomb but missed and killed a child and wounded 11 civilians. Another report said that the target was not a US patrol but rather a man selling alcohol from a cart.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that altogether 4 Iraqis were killed and five wounded in separate attacks to the north of Baghdad, including Balad and Samarra, on Friday. Another roadside bomb killed a truck driver 30 km north of the capital.

In Samarra an Iraqi soldier was wounded and another injured by a roadside bomb.

In Baquba guerrillas attempted to assassinate the police commissioner for Diyala province, but failed, leaving two policemen wounded (one of them of high rank).

Reuters adds:

'CYKLA - Two U.S. soldiers were killed on Thursday when their unit came under attack by small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades in Cykla, about 200 km (120 miles) west of Baghdad, a U.S. military statement said.

* BAGHDAD - One U.S. soldier died on Thursday when the vehicle he was driving was involved in a single-vehicle accident off base in central Baghdad around 11:30 p.m.'

Kyodo News reports, regarding the southern Shiite city of Samawah, pop. 124,000, the capital of oil-rich al-Muthanna Province:

"Two explosions took place at a job training center for women in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah Friday morning, but no one was injured, local police said. The Japanese government provided sewing machines and computers through the United Nations Development Program to the facility, operated by a local women's group. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been involved in reconstruction activities in the city."

There have been a number of demonstrations in Samawa during the past week. Last Sunday, the Sadrists there demonstrated against the lack of electricity. There was also a bombing of a jewelry shop belonging to the Iraqi head of an Iraqi-Japanese frienship association.

On last Monday, they demonstrated again, mentioning the high price of ice and the lack of potable water, according to AP: "Hundreds of Iraqis burned a Japanese flag Tuesday and called for Tokyo to remove its troops from the country in a protest that seemed motivated by the poor state of water and electricity supplies here more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The peaceful protest in this city 240 kilometers (150 miles) south of Baghdad appeared to have been organized by followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr." They burned the Japanese flag.

Note that the Japanese contingent in Samawah is helping with local health and community development projects, so the demonstration seems particularly misplaced. Ironically, the Japanese contingent is suffering from the spillover of anti-American sentiment.

Al-Hayat reports that sectarian wrangling continues concerning key clauses of the draft constitution. Kurdish Minister of Planning said that you cannot have democracy if shariah or Islamic canon law is imposed on the constitution, which would create Taliban-like morals police in parts of Iraq.

Sunni Arab leader of the National Dialogue Council, Salih al-Mutallik, said that the Sunnis cannot "accept that Iranians will be Iraqi citizens." A disputed article in the constitution recognizes Iranian-Iraqis or Persians as an Iraqi minority alongside groups such as Turkmen and Yazidis. Iraqis of Iranian heritage are numerous in the Shiite south, and many such families have been in Iraq for centuries. They have family names such as Qazwini, Shirazi, Astarabadi, etc. (cities in Iran). They were targeted for deportation by Saddam (along with many Iraqi Arab Shiites wrongly categorized as "Iranians"), and the purpose of the article is to redress that injustice and forestall any repeat of it. Sunni Arabs on the other hand are afraid of being overwhelmed by Iranian Shiite immigrants, which would further weaken their position.

A draft given Associated Press says that it will be forbidden to pass laws that contravene the ordinances of Islam. It also specifies that provinces will keep no more than 10 percent of the receipts for petroleum exports from their territory, with the central government getting 90 percent. The Kurds had early demanded about 1/4 of petroleum income from Kirkuk, and the Shiite governor of Basra in the deep south has recently agitated for a similar deal for the southern provinces with regard to the Rumaila oil field, in al-Muthanna province near Kuwait.

A Kurdish member of the constitution drafting committee, Mundhir al-Fadl, said that the coming Tuesday is the deadline for certifying that the constitution will be finished and presented to parliament for a vote by Aug. 15, and he doubted the deadline could be met. Apparently there is still a dispute about whether Kurdish will be co-equal to Arabic as one of the two official languages of the country, as the Kurds demand.

Al-Mutallik of the Sunni National Dialogue Council was even more pessimistic, saying that the constitution can't be finished by next Tuesday, and probably cannot be finished even if the parliament takes another 6 months. Nor, he insisted, would the Sunnis accept simply being run over roughshod and having the constitution voted in even if they (a minority on the committee) object. He said Sunnis object to the Shiite plan to mention the Najaf Grand Ayatollahs as sources of authority in the constitution. "The other groups don't have a grand ayatollah," he said.

Tod Robberson reports from Basra on the increasing restrictions on personal liberties there, deriving from the pressure of Shiite militias.

There were a number of demonstrations in Umm Qasr this past week against the border barrier that Kuwait is building. Kuwait has deployed police at its border in response.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Nation Forum on Middle East

"Unintended Consequences: A Forum on Iraq and the Mideast," in The Nation is now available online. Journalists Helena Cobban and Nir Rosen, academic Middle East expert Shibley Telhami, and I all responded to questions about the state of the region.

This is my answer to the first question asked by the editors, "Wars often have unintended consequences. How has the Iraq War affected the political landscape of the region and America's standing therein?"

Cole: Helena is correct that the Iraq War has propelled negative feelings toward the United States--not just in the immediate region but throughout the Muslim world. Between the summer of 2002 and spring of 2003, the number of Indonesians who viewed the US favorably fell from 61 percent to 15 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Although Muslims already faulted the United States for lack of evenhandedness on the Arab-Israeli dispute, in recent years their estimation of the US has plummeted. According to Zogby, from summer 2002 to summer 2004, those who viewed the US favorably in Egypt fell from 15 to 2 percent. And respondents generally believed that Iraqis were worse off under American occupation.

Another consequence of the war has been that more Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere are turning away from Arab nationalism, which has been discredited, to Salafi revivalism, a very conservative form of Islam. Although most Salafis are "quietists," in that they do not enter into ordinary politics, they are also the recruitment pool for radical groups. It has also strengthened Iran's position in the region. In 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini created the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq for Shiite expatriate groups, whose members included Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the current SCIRI leader, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq's current Prime Minister. Khomeini dreamed of putting them in power in Baghdad. Bush and Rumsfeld have fulfilled that dream.

The whole forum is worth reading. Nir Rosen is an exciting young journalist who has gone all over Iraq and reported in a clear-eyed way on everything from Fallujah to Najaf. Cobban and Telhami are veteran commentators on the region who know it well. Hearing these voices in a major national publication is sort of a shock because it is an irruption of the real world into the American press, and the result does not sound like the Middle East projected Washington, DC. (Not that this irruption of the truth is unusual in The Nation, which has done among the best reporting on the war).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Attacks in Baqubah, Mansur
Train, Pipeline bombed

Reuters reports on deaths in the guerrilla war on Thursday:

In Baqubah and Khan Bani Saad northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas fought battles with Iraqi soldiers, killing six of them.

In the tony Mansur district of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber struck at an Iraqi army checkpoint. He killed six civilians and wounded 8 soldiers, and two civilian cars were left in flames.

In the oil city of Kirkuk in the north, guerrillas bombed an oil pipeline that feeds petroleum to Baiji's refineries. They also damaged a gas pipeline to Baiji's power station.

In Haditha, guerrillas assassinated the assistant police chief.

The LA Times says, "In other violence, the U.S. military said two American troops had been killed and one wounded in a roadside bombing Wednesday in Baghdad . . . Elsewhere in Baghdad, a train carrying fuel exploded when it was hit by a bomb, killing two people and wounding six, police said . . . U.S. Marine jets, meanwhile, bombed insurgent positions near Haditha, killing nine insurgents, including five Syrians, the U.S. military said."

Aljazeera reported that US troops at a base north of Fallujah took mortar fire on Thursday, but there was no word of casualties. The Western wire services either disbelieved this report or ignored it, since I can't find mention of it in English.

David Enders does perhaps the only clear-eyed English-language post-mortem of the Fallujah campaign, which has left 2/3s of the buildings in the city damaged and exiled tens of thousands for over half a year. Aljazeera ran a piece on Fallujah on Wednesday, showing people living in tents on the rubble of their former homes. All this contrasts to a fluff piece in the New York Times last spring that depicted the place as largely restored and bustling, with busy traffic and healthy happy children that were all above average. Well, maybe that quarter the reporter was allowed to see looked like that.

Speaker of the Iraqi parliament Hajem al-Hassani warned the US military against invading the northern Turkmen city of Talafar [Tel Afar] the way it had Fallujah. The existence of a sitting Iraqi parliament, which is supposed to be sovereign, may be an increasing check on the freedom of the US military to operate at will in Iraq.
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Turks threaten to Invade Iraq

Just a reminder how much of a tinderbox Iraq is, and how easily neighboring countries could be drawn into a war there:

The Kurdish Marxist party, the Kurdish Worker's Party (Kurdish acronym PKK) has been committing violence in eastern Turkey near the Iraqi border. The Kurdish guerrillas are suspected of then slipping across the Iraqi border to take refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. The latest outrage was their kidnapping of a mayor, "Hasim Akyurek, mayor of Yayladere in the Bingol Province and a member of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party . . . "

Then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan threatened to invade northern Iraq. He cited the US invasion of Afghanistan to support the legitimacy of such an action (in fact, Afghanistan had both NATO and United Nations Security Council support, which a Turkish invasion of Iraq does not, to say the least).

Then Iraqi Foreign minister Hoshyar Zebar, himself a Kurd, warned that any Turkish incursion into northern Iraq would be unacceptable.
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War on Terror Over

The Bush administration is giving up the phrase "global war on terror."

I take it this is because they have finally realized that if they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys in a gymn in Leeds. It isn't going to take very long for people to realize that a) you don't actually need to pay the Pentagon $400 billion a year if that is the problem and b) whoever is in charge of such a war isn't actually doing a very good job at stopping the bombs from going off.

The Scotsman reports on the spectacular arrest of the Somalian suspect in the July 21 failed bombing attempts, saying, "The ethnicity of the eight London bombers, ranging from Somalis, to British-born sons of Pakistani parents and an Anglo-Jamaican Muslim convert, have surprised detectives investigating the attacks."

They should not be surprised. You have to think about terrorists as units of hardware, on which software has been installed. The software is a world-view, a set of premises about the world, which then make sense of the terrorist's actions. How does the software get installed? The potential terrorist meets the installer socially and falls under his spell.

The terrorists don't have a social background in common. They aren't lumpen proletariat or working class or middle class or bourgeois. Or rather, they have in their ranks persons from all these backgrounds.

The terrorists don't have an ethnicity in common. Richard Reid and Lindsey Germaine were Caribbean. Others are Arabs. Some have been Somali or Eritrean or Tanzanian. Others have been South Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh). Still others have been African-American or white Americans. They don't even have to start out Muslim. Ayman al-Zawahiri was particularly proud of an al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan who had been an American Jew in a previous life. Ziad Jarrah, one of the September 11 hijackers, appears to have been a relatively secular young man right to the end. It isn't about religion, except insofar as religion is a basis on which the recruiter can approach his victim. Islam as a religion forbids terrorism. But then so does Christianity, and that doesn't stop there being Christian terrorists. They are a fringe in both religions.

If you try to "profile" the terrorist using such social markers as class or ethnicity, maybe even religious background, you will go badly astray.

What then do they have in common? They got the software installed in their minds. Why? Because they met the installer, and were susceptible to his worldview. That's all they have in common.

So the young man goes to the Finsbury Mosque in the old days and hangs out with Imam. And he points out that the Israelis had fired a huge missile into a residential apartment building to get at a Hamas leader, and had killed 16 civilians, including a little baby. And nobody said "boo" to the Israelis. The US actually gave them more money after that. Tony Blair deplored it, but did nothing practical. Then, the Imam will tell him, the Americans destroyed Fallujah and killed hundreds of innocents. He might even have the photograph that circulated last December, of the dead baby at Fallujah. And nobody can say "boo" to the Americans, and they go on killing Muslims. In fact, the Imam intimates, pulling the young man close, almost whispering, tears in his eyes, the West is destroying Islam. Almost nothing is left of Islam, he will say. It will be completely devastated in our lifetimes. Nobody is lifting a finger to stop it.

So the young man says, what could anyone do? And the Imam says, there is something. But it isn't for ordinary people. It isn't for mere show-offs. And the young man says, sticking out his chest, I'm not showing off! I really want to help, to do something that would make a difference. The Imam says, a person who was really committed could change everything. He could save the Muslim Ummma from destruction. But, no, you are not ready. You don't have the training, the commitment. You are useless. And the young man protests, until he is put in touch with the trainer and given the mission. His new friends all agree on this view of the world. He hangs out with them, at the mosque, at the gym, even socially. They reinforce each other. They tell each other the stories of the harm done to Muslims. They get angry. They swear. They are determined not to be like the rest, who just let it happen. The young man gains in determination. The mission inflates his ego. Maybe he had low self-esteem, maybe not. But he is about to save the world, he is told.

The software is of course a hugely distorted view of the universe. It lets the young man see Israeli atrocities, but not those of Hamas or the Aqsa Brigades. It lets him see American atrocities but not those of Saddam Hussein, Izzedin al-Duri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The software is fatally one-sided. It also exaggerates. The Muslim world is not in danger of being destroyed, least of all by the United States, a warm friend of most Muslim countries. But the software configures a dire crisis, almost apocalyptic, which can only be averted by an ethical hero who is willing to sacrifice himself. The software hides from the convert that he is to become a monster and kill innocents. It tells him he is a noble soldier, and his victims are wicked enemy soldiers, that there are no innocent civilians.

So how do you fight this form of terror? You disrupt the installation of the software in more and more minds. You adopt policies that make the story the software tells implausible. And you reach out to make sure people hear the implausibility.

It is not a war. It is counter-insurgency. Gen. Anthony Zinni tells the story about how he had been away from the Pentagon for a while and then was (as I remember) brought back to give a backgrounder. And a young soldier saluted and said he was there to fight the G-WOT. And Zinni said, "Come again?" The soldier looked puzzled and said, "Why, the Global War on Terror, sir."

It was always a poor metaphor. I can't figure out who they think they are fighting a war against. It sure isn't the Muslim world. Morocco as a country couldn't be more friendly and cooperative, and we have good trade relations with it. Algeria likewise. Tunisia? A topflight relationship. Even Libya is coming around. Egypt? A non-NATO ally. Palestine? We give them hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Jordan? A closer friend you couldn't find. Lebanon? Very friendly except for Hizbullah and even they haven't hit American targets any time in the past decade. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan.

It is incredible how good the relations are between the United States and almost all the countries of the Muslim world. They provide us with a NATO ally (Turkey) and 4 of our five non-NATO allies! The only sour notes are Bashar al-Asad in Syria (who hasn't done anything to us as far as I know) and Iran, with which our relationship needn't be different from that with Venezuela under Chavez (leaders of both countries badmouth the US, but don't seem actively to harm us in ways that are visible to me). It will be argued that Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon. But a) we don't know that for sure; and b) even if it were to succeed in doing so, how would it be different from the Soviet Union, which hated us much more than Iran does and which had thousands of warheads pointed at us? So far no two countries, both of which have nuclear weapons, have fought a major war with one another, and the reason is clear. This is not to say it could not happen, but it is unlikely. As for the Mad Cheney scenario whereby a state gives nuclear weapons to terrorists to use on the US, puh- lease. Even my five year old niece wouldn't believe that whopper. States don't share nuclear bombs with terrorists; and it is not as if a bomb's provenance could not easily be traced.

As for the jihadis, who do wish us harm, former CIA analyst Marc Sageman estimates the number of radical Muslims who can and would do significant harm to the US in the hundreds.

That's right. The old "war on terror" was a war of the world's sole superpower on a few hundred people. (I exclude Iraq because it is not and never was part of any 'war on terror,' though the incredible incompetence of the Bush administration has contributed to the ability of terrorists to operate there.)

On the issue of the sources of terrorism see recent articles by Howard LaFranchi at CSM and Jim Lobe, and James M. Wall of the Christian Century
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The Consequences of Nuking Iran

Readers have asked me about this discussion at Daily Kos. It notes that former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi wrote in the American Conservative:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. . . As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

With regard to this alleged Cheney/Pentagon plan for nuking Iran whenever another big terror attack occurs in the United States, it seems unlikely to me. But the Pentagon makes all sorts of contingency plans, and we know that Cheney's chief aide, Scooter Libby, was a liaison to the Office of Special Plans, which specialized in far-fetched schemes and intelligence dirty tricks.

In the real world, there are consequences of such actions, however.

First, the Vice President and the Department of Defense may have by now noticed that Iran is a Shiite Muslim country. There are other important Shiite Muslim communities in the Middle East that would, let us say, mind their coreligionists being turned into shadows on walls.

Among these, even the Vice President and Mr. Rumsfeld may have noticed, is Iraq. Nuking Iran would certainly produce large-scale attacks on US troops in Iraq. I suspect the Iraqi government would fall over it, insofar as it is closely connected to the US. If you think things are bad in Iraq now, you don't even want to think about this scenario, in which religious Sunni Arabs and religious Shiites would almost certainly unite in an anti-American pan-Islamism.

Some 15 percent of Afghans are also Shiites. In addition, the Tajiks or Persian-speakers in Afghanistan are closely allied to Iran. The same scenario, of attacks on US troops and the dragging of Hamid Karzai's body through the streets of Kabul, would likely ensue.

Both the Shiites and the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists of Pakistan would rise up over such an action. The government of Pakistan, led by secular Gen. Pervez Musharraf, might not mind the attack on Iran, with which it has a rivalry. But the Musharraf government is not popular and could be overthrown in such a crisis. At that point angry Shiite and Sunni fundamentalists in Pakistan might gain control of that country's nuclear arsenal.

A US nuclear strike on Iran would be absolutely unacceptable to China. The Chinese could wreak major harm on the US economy by simply disinvesting in it. They hold massive US debt.

A US nuclear strike on Iran would anger many publics in Europe. An economic boycott by Europe would also be devastating.

Although US trade with India is still small, all the attempts to build a stronger relationship with Delhi would be undone. India has a tacit alliance with Iran and would certainly be absolutely outraged, both at the governmental and the public level, by a US nuclear attack on Iran. Pushing both China and India toward postures of enmity toward the United States would greatly weaken it.

The US would suddenly find its influence throughout the world plummeting, its economy badly hurt by boycotts. It would become a pariah nation. And, if it thinks it faces a terrorist threat now, you can only imagine what kind of retribution would be exacted.

For more see Gary Leupp.

Rabid dreams are dreamt along the Potomac by persons who routinely foam at the mouth. Some, like gadfly warmonger Michael Ledeen, or wild-eyed Ghorbanifar dupes like Congressman Congressman (?!) Curt Weldon (what is wrong with Pennsylvania?), are dying to get other Americans' boys killed in the sands of Iran. For the rest of us, these reveries are nightmares. This nuclear scenario is a fleeting and insubstantial such bad dream, which can no more be implemented as policy than a Hollywood horror film could be.
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On How US Troops Aren't Coming Home Any Time Soon

al-Hayat reports that 16 Iraqis were killed in guerrilla violence in Baghdad and its environs on Wednesday, and 20 bodies were discovered in Mosul. (Typically such corpses belong to Iraqi police).

The US military imposed a curfew on Samarra, after an attack on one of its convoys that left a soldier dead and five wounded.

Here's what General George Casey actually said:

"If the political process continues to go positively and if the development of the security forces continues to go as it is going, I do believe that we will be able to make some pretty substantial reductions after these elections in the spring and summer of next year."

The draw-down of US troops in Iraq is here made conditional on two premises. One is that the "political process" goes "positively." If by that is meant that the Sunni Arab notables now fighting an unconventional civil war against the Shiite Arabs and the Kurds are drawn into the new government, that hasn't happened on any significant scale and there is no early prospect of it happening.

As for the training of Iraqi troops to take up security duties, that isn't going well even now. There are only about 3,000 Iraqi troops ready to actually fight, and I don't know how you get enough to actually provide security in only a year. Five years would be the minimum, if it can be done at all.

Since Casey's two conditions can't be met, his statement only gives the appearance of optimism on this score, with none of the substance.

It is forgotten that Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US would be down to only a division (~20,000 men) in October of 2003. Then it is forgotten that the Pentagon announced a draw-down from 135,000 to 110,000 in spring of 2004 (just before the Bush administration decided in its wisdom to "kill or capture" Muqtada al-Sadr). That draw-down didn't happen. Why? The security situation didn't allow it.

So the fact is that Rumsfeld and Casey have no idea if the situation will permit the US to withdraw substantial numbers of troops by next summer.

The plan to go down to 90,000 or so in 12 months would depend in part on stationing them on four military bases in Anbar, Salahuddin, Baghdad, and Ninevah provinces (i.e. where the Sunni Arab guerrillas are). They would be withdrawn from most cities, leaving Iraqi police and troops to patrol them. But we all remember what happened after the first Fallujah campaign, when the Baath officers were allowed to come back and try to restore order. The resulting "order" looked like Qandahar under the Taliban.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat / AFP report that Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie suggests that US troops can be withdrawn from 10 important Iraqi cities between now and December, and perhaps from some quarters of Baghdad itself. I suspect it is a priority to get foreign troops out of Najaf and Karbala, which you would imagine a Shiite government could police effectively. But what other 10 cities wouldn't just become guerrilla strongholds with the US gone? Samarra? Mosul? Ramadi? Tel Afar?

The same source indicates that Rumsfeld is seeking a formal Status of Forces agreement with the interim government, which might allow a long-term US military presence in the country. But I suspect that the moment the Iraqis feel they can stand on their own feet militarily, they will summarily toss the US troops out. A good fifth of parliamentarians want them gone yesterday as it is. SOFAs are only as good as the contemporary bilateral relations between two countries. Look at the Philippines.

Some readers have suggested to me that the Bush administration might just bring tens of thousands of our boys and girls home to create a positive atmosphere for Republicans in the 2006 congressional and senatorial elections. While Karl Rove is clearly not exactly above playing politics with the US military, such a strategy could easily backfire. What if he has the Pentagon go down to 66,000, and then the guerrilla war heats up big time and guerrillas manage to score a big attack on the less numerous contingent left behind? What if they pull off a spectacular assassination that throws the country into turmoil? You'd have to put the troops right back in. And as a campaign tactic, I doubt it would work very well to risk chaos. People like the ruling party not to look like clueless incompetents getting things blown up.

Mind you, I'm all for withdrawing US troops from Iraq as soon as humanly possible. I think they have the wrong rules of engagement and the wrong tactics for waging counter-insurgency in a clannish society like Iraq, and it is a toss-up whether they are keeping some peace or making things worse. (Fallujah last November demonstrably made things much worse). But I think you need some sort of realistic bridge from that withdrawal to the time when the new Iraqi army can stand on its own. I don't know where you get that bridge, but nature abhors a vacuum. If the US is gone and the Shiite Iraqis are under siege from Sunni guerrillas, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will certainly come in to help the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party. Even a covert Iranian military presence in Iraq would provoke even more Sunni jihadis to go fight there. A regional war could easily break out, with dire consequences for us all.

You wonder if those rightwing radio talk show hosts who went to Iraq to get the good news visited the Baghdad morgue? "Before the war we used to get maybe 250 bodies a month. Now it is 800 or 900 a month from the Baghdad area alone . . . The situation has worsened dramatically. We cannot cope." And those 800 are only the ones that come in for an autopsy. Where the cause of death is clear, as in a car bombing, they just bury the body. Reuters estimates that suspicious deaths in Iraq are 230 per 100,000, whereas in Colombia at the height of its violence it was 90 per 100,000.
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Draft Constitution Enshrines Islamic Law
At Least 27 Dead in Guerrilla Violence

Humam al-Hamoudi, the head of the constitution drafting committee in the Iraqi parliament, has called a leadership summit for Thursday and Friday to discuss the current draft. I interpret this move as a sign that the committee itself is deadlocked. The hope appears to be that the big party and clan leaders will be able to use their authority to settle otherwise intractable issues among themselves. One big stumbling block has been the rejection of federalism by the Sunni Arab delegates, want a French-style centralized government.

The Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah has published a draft of the Iraqi constitution, the language of which is very closely modelled on the Transitional Administrative Law, but which departs from it in key respects.

The draft's first paragraph is: "The [Islamic, united] Iraqi Republic is an independent state enjoying sovereignty, the form of government of which is republican, democratic, united (and federal)."

The parentheses are in the original and mark controversial phrases not yet decided upon. The religious Shiites want to call it "the Islamic Republic of Iraq." The Kurds want to call it "the Federal Republic of Iraq." But the Sunni Arabs reject the term "federal."

The second paragraph says: "Islam is the official religion of state, and is the fundamental source of legislation. It is impermissible to pass legislation that contradicts its essential verities or its laws (its essential verities about which there is consensus). This constitution safeguards the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people (in its Shiite majority and its Sunnis) and respects all the rights of the other religions.

This language, making it unconstitutional to legislate in contravention of the "laws" of Islam, is much stronger and closer to fundamentalism than the original language of the TAL. I remember debating with Faisal Istrabadi on the Lehrer Newshour in spring of 2004 about whether the TAL itself could be put to theocratic purposes, since it said that you could not legislate in contravention of Islam's essential verities. Faisal was proud of what was presumably his (and Larry Diamond's) language, contrasting essential verities with concrete laws. I pointed out that you could have judges who took those essential verities to include the laws as medieval jurists understood them. But in this draft you would not need a fundamentalist judge for that purpose-- the text of the constitution specifies that parliamentary legislation cannot contradict the shariah or Islamic canon law. This language really does make it an Islamic republic, if it is retained.

Paragraph 11 says, "Thought and practice, under whatever rubric, is forbidden that adopts racism, or declaring a Muslim to be an infidel, or terrorism . . . especially the Saddami Baath. It is not permitted for it to be part of political pluralism in the state."

The ellipses cut out language that seems to be proposed to make praising or instigating any of these things illegal. This paragraph probably is influenced by post-war German law making Nazi extremism illegal.

Racism is a horrible thing, but it may not be wise to try to make it illegal in general (as opposed to making it illegal in hiring practices and other sectors of life that materially affect people. You can only imagine the special section of police departments that would have to be devoted to keeping Iraqis politically correct. It sounds like a bad television pilot-- PC Blue. On a serious note, the stigmatization of the Baath Party is understandable. But if it spills over to a stigmatization of all ex-Baathists, it will only prolong the guerrilla war.

Paragraph 15 says "The [Shiite] religious leadership [i.e. Grand Ayatollah Sistani and his successors] has an independent character and a function of giving guidance insofar as it is an exalted national and religious symbol. (Some have reservations about this one.)"

This paragraph enshrines in the Iraqi constitution a position of giving "guidance" on the part of the highest Shiite clerical authority. The word used, "marja`iyyah", is a Shiite technical term for the grand ayatollahs. Although Sunnis have picked it up, it is not originally a Sunni term and the meaning here is certainly Sistani and his successors. In a worst case scenario, Shiite judges could use this paragraph to allow the Grand Ayatollah's fatwas to over-rule secular legislation. This move would be facilitated by the earlier paragraph that made it unconstitutional to legislate in contravention of Islamic law.

Paragraph 16 binds the government to safeguard the sanctity of the Shiite holy cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Kadhimiyah (perhaps Samarra as well) and to guarantee Shiites the freedom to engage in the rituals of visitation of holy mausoleums there.

The word used, `atabat, specifically refers to the Shiite shrines.

Section II, 6/M says, "The state guarantees basic rights for women and their equality with men in all fields, in accordance with the ordinances of Islamic canon law. The state will aid them to harmonize her duties to family with her work in society."

Since the ordinances of Islamic canon law do not actually bestow equality on women in every field, this paragraph is extremely ambiguous and could be used for patriarchal purposes.

Alissa Rubin of the LA Times notes that the new US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad has expressed reservations about some of these provisions.

I fear she has been somewhat misled about the two paragraphs concerning the place of the religious leadership and the holy cities. The word used in the former is the "marja`iyyah," which is a clear reference to the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf. The word used for the latter is `atabat, literally "thresholds" i.e. of the Shiite Imams. This can only refer to Najaf, Karbala and a few other sites. There is a different word for, e.g., Sufi shrines. Both of these paragraphs enshrine specifically Shiite leaders and sites in the Iraqi constitution.

Nathan Brown's analysis of the constitution drafting process (pdf) is available online.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports deaths in the guerrilla war:

In Baghdad, guerrillas shot up a minibus transporting factory workers near Abu Ghraib to the west of Baghdad, killing as many as 18 and wounding 9.

Also in the capital, guerrillas assassinated 3 employees of the Ministry of Health.

In a third incident in Baghdad, guerrillas injured a policeman when they attacked the Major Crimes Unit in the Karkh quarter. Two of the guerrillas were captured.

In Baquba, guerrillas assassinated Saad Yunus al-Difa`i, head of the Sadr office and a follower of Muqtada al-Sadr.

In southern Mosul, Iraqi army troops and guerrillas fought a running street battle in the mostly Arab quarter of Risala, leaving 2 noncombatants dead and 6 civilians injured.

In Tikrit, guerrillas killed a Pakistani truck driver.

In Basra in the deep south, armed men assassinated a police officer as he was driving in his car. A child was also killed, and 3 civilians were wounded.
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Sunni Arabs Rejoin Constitution Committee

The Sunni Arab members of the constitution drafting committee ended their boycott on Monday, and say they will attend Tuesday's meeting. Parliament agreed to provide them bodyguards and conduct an investigation into the killing of two of their number last week.

Reuters reports deaths in the ongoing guerrilla war:

A suicide car bomber killed 12 Iraqi civilians when he detonated his payload in front of a hotel in downtown Baghdad. The hotel suffered heavy damage.

Another suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi military compound at Nisour Square in western Baghdad, killing 3 Iraqi commandos and injuring 6 others.

In Dura, south Baghdad, armed guerrillas invaded a home, killing four persons including 2 women, and leaving 3 wounded, including a child.

Guerrillas assassinated the head of Samarra's local council, Taha Ahmad.

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times adds:

'
A U.S. soldier also was killed near Samarra when an explosive device detonated under his vehicle, the military said Monday. His name was being withheld until his family had been notified.

There were new efforts to end the violence.

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi said tribal leaders from the turbulent northern city of Tall Afar and government officials had reached an agreement under which tribal leaders would stop siding with insurgents and all armed men would leave the streets. In exchange, the government will release innocent residents from prison and provide much-needed resources such as electricity and water. '

It was announced that guerrillas combatting US troops managed to kill four members of the Georgia National Guard on Sunday.

The religious Shiites who have a majority in parliament and therefore a majority in the constitution drafting committee, are again pressing to have the country called "The Islamic Republic of Iraq." They argue that Iraqis are "Islamic" and so it is just a recognition of reality. This argument hinges on not making a distinction between "Muslim" (belonging to the religion of Islam) and "Islamic" (exemplifying the ideals and culture of Islam). The majority of Iraqis is Muslim, but the Iraqi state is not necessarily Islamic. Those who don't fall into the category of orthodox Muslims (Sunni or Shiite) probably amount to 5 percent of the population. There are 750,000 or so Christians, and smaller numbers of Mandaeans (Gnostics), Yezidis (you don't want to know), and heterodox Turkmen Shiites. And, probably 15 percent or so are secularists of one sort or another; this group includes the Communists. That is, 20 percent of the country isn't very "Islamic." It is a significant group, bigger proportionally than African-Americans or Latinos in the United States. A constitution should not lightly disregard the views of 20 percent of the population. The Kurds and the Sunni Arabs are not thrilled about this Khomeinizing language among the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The new US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, came out against shariah or Muslim canon law on Monday. The Shiite majority wants to put personal status matters under religious courts, as in Israel and Lebanon. Khalilzad said that the US would oppose this move. (How many votes does the US have in the Iraqi parliament?)

A Kurdish member of the drafting committee objected to language that offered Iraqi citizenship to anyone who was stripped of it after 1963. The passage seemed drafted to exclude Iraqi Jews who fled to Israel in the 1950s. (-al-Hayat)



A joint study by the US Departments of Defense and State concludes that the Iraqi police are infiltrated by members of the guerrilla movement because of poor vetting by the US. It also criticizes a tendency for the US to quickly "train" large numbers of police as "cannon fodder" rather than focusing on quality.


Billmon reads the New York Times cannily and points out that some reporters in Baghdad have waited a year to tell us how discouraged last year's military and civilian American officials in Iraq were. They referred to Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority neocons as "the Illusionists" for their announced faith that Iraq could be turned into a Jeffersonian democracy with a little elbow grease.

What should be noted is that Bremer's successor of sorts, John Negroponte was no less an illusionist. He appears to have thought last August that American Marines could make themselves popular with Iraqi Shiites by threatening to raze the shrine of Imam Ali. And he and the new crew at the American embassy in Baghdad seemed to think that they could shoehorn the ex-Baathist CIA asset Iyad Alawi into power by giving him the advantages of incumbency and some money and some old retired CIA guys as campaign managers. That is, their illusion was not Jeffersonian democracy but elected lite authoritarianism.

They didn't seem to notice that Allawi's Defense Minister's constant denunciations of Iran were unpopular in the Shiite south. They did not notice that Allawi's calls for ever more US bombing of Sunni cities such as Fallujah made him sound to most Iraqis like an Uncle Ahmad, not to mention a bit of a maniac. They didn't notice that his high-handed lecturing of Grand Ayatollah Sistani on the separation of religion and state made him sound to Iraqi Shiites like an atheist puppet of the US. The Illusionism around Allawi and his twin doberman pinschers, Hazem Shaalan and Naqib al-Falah, was so persuasive that many in the US embassy in Baghdad still hoped in January of 2005 that Allawi could form (perhaps a minority) government and remain prime minister after Jan. 30. In actuality, Allawi's list got 14 percent of the seats in the Federal parliament and almost nothing in the provincial elections.

It is too soon to know if the illusion well in Baghdad has run dry. No doubt we will be told about a year from now.
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Former British PM John Major Ties Iraq to Bomb Attacks


Former British PM John Major said Monday to the BBC,

' "I think what has happened is not that the Iraq war and other policies created that threat, I think it was there and growing, though it was not in full bloom.

"I think it is possibly true that it has made it more potent and more immediate, but having said that, there is absolutely no doubt that we were going to have to confront terrorism at some time.

"And what I suppose you might say about the events of the Middle East is that they have brought it forward and brought it into focus."

One of the ways that political elites deal with bad news is to develop a joint response to it that seems at least plausible, especially if it is repeated again and again by high officials on television, and which has the effect of deflecting the issue. The Bush administration adopted this tactic to deal with the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Their talking point was that it was too early to say that the WMD wasn't there. It might still be found (as if you could hide a centrifuge or a chemical weapons depot). Bush administration officials said this ad nauseum. Sometimes you still hear them say it. The spell of this talking point was first broken in August, 2003, when former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Wolf Blitzer that it was "increasingly ludicrous."

The Blair government's attempt to simply deny a link between the Iraq War and increased risks of terrorism for London was similarly ludicrous, and the spell has been broken even more quickly, as other members of the political elite refused to play along. Even Blair is said to have winced at the absolute denials of his foreign secretary, Jack Straw.

Only Donald Rumsfeld is now left denying, at least in public, a link between the Iraq War and acts of terrorism.

David Wearing writes from the UK to say that Blair and Straw had earlier acknowledged liberally that the Iraq War raised the risks of terrorism.

'In the abovementioned post, you say: "I don't know what was in Straw's mind, but the connection [between Iraq and the London bombings] is clear as day"

Here's what we know - with absolute certainty - was at least somewhere in the mind of Jack Straw, and in the mind of Tony Blair, as they categorically denied any connection between Iraq and the recent incidents here in London.

Five weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Britain's intelligence chiefs warned the government in strong terms that military action would increase the risk of terrorist attacks against Britain by groups such as al-Qaeda. As the UK Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee noted in 2003: "The JIC assessed that al-Qa'eda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq".

Later, in 2004, a joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following the train bombings in Madrid, identified Iraq as a "recruiting sergeant" for extremism. The analysis was that the Iraq war was acting as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism.

In 2005, the government was warned yet again, just weeks before the London bombings. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre - including officials from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police - explicitly linked the Iraq war with an increased risk of terrorist activity in Britain. The report said that "Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK".

Ironic that the analysis of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the police and advisers from the Home and Foreign Offices should now be so forcefully contradicted by Blair's government. During an interview with the BBC around 18 months ago, when it was becoming obvious that banned WMD would never be found in Iraq, Blair said, "You can only imagine what would have happened if I'd ignored the intelligence and then something terrible had happened". No comment required.

If Blair really does believe there's no connection between Iraq and the terror attacks, then he's changed his mind about that quite recently. In 2003, speaking to the Intelligence and Security Committee, Blair said that, "there was obviously a danger that in attacking Iraq you ended up provoking the very thing you were trying to avoid". But the risk was worth taking, he went on to say, to deal with the threat posed by WMD. Again, no comment required.

Most of us in Britain never accepted Blair's current line of argument, and never wanted to take these risks to begin with. On 15 February 2003, hundreds of thousands of us demonstrated in London against the coming war on Iraq. At the time, 79% of Londoners felt that British involvement in the invasion "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely". In the wake of the London bombings, two-thirds of Britons expressed the view that the invasion of Iraq and the attack on our capital were linked.

Now, after a second attack on London in as many weeks, which might easily have been as bad as the first, I can't help but notice (as you yourself have done) that my government's policies are putting me, my fellow Londoners and everyone else in Britain at an increased risk of falling victim to terrorists. What's worse is that in doing so they've been deliberately and repeatedly ignoring the advice of the UK's intelligence services, departmental advisers and independent experts, as well as strenuously avoiding any honest discussion of the problem, preferring to obscure the issues with self-serving mendacity. As far as I'm concerned, New Labour is clearly failing to uphold its basic duty of care towards us and as such has rendered itself unfit to govern in the most fundamental sense. '

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Cole in Bay Area, Mid-October

I'm going to be giving a talk in northern California in mid-October. I often get requests to let organizations know when I'm in the area so they can have me speak. So, I'm letting you know.
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Massive Baghdad Bomb Kills up to 40
Consensus collapsing on Constitution

Al-Zaman/ AFP:

A suicide car bombing killed 40 persons and wounded 25 when the driver detonated his payload near the al-Rashad Police Station in the Mashtal district of southeastern Baghdad, according to sources in the Minsitry of Defense. Among the dead and wounded were a number of policemen. See also Alissa Rubin in the LA Times.

Other incidents: A mortar attack killed a policeman on a Baghdad street near the Ministry of the Interior.

Guerrillas assassinated Captain Imad Hatim Khalaf, the police chief of the middle class Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiyah in Baghdad while he was driving to work.

Likewise, guerrillas in the northern oil city of Kirkuk assassinated Capt. Nur al-Din Muhammad, an officer in the city's police corps.

Guerrillas killed a US soldier in West Baghdad.

Guerrillas assassinated Khalis al-Hulub, a member of the provincial governing council of Salahuddin (Tikrit).

In Mosul, guerrillas killed two bodyguards of the Minister of Industry, Usamah al-Najafi.

Near Hilla, guerrillas detonated a bomb, killing a young man and wounding 6 other persons.

In Baiji, US troops arrested four Iraqi policemen, including a first lieutenant, after a roadside bomb exploded near a US convoy at the city gates of southern Baiji.

In Musayyib, 300 Iraqis came out to demonstrate and to demand that US troops not enter their city. Musayyib was the scene of a huge blast that killed nearly a hundred persons two weekends ago.

Not only have the Sunni Arabs not actually ended their boycott of the constitution-writing process, but now the secular Shiites around Iyad Allawi are threatening to drop out. As Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari pointed out, the religious Shiite majority and its Kurdish allies on the committee can report out the draft for a vote by parliament without the support of the Sunni Arabs or Allawi's list. And, they also have the votes to approve it in parliament. But steamrolling over the Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites just guarantees that resentments will blaze for years to come, fueling the guerrilla war. Moreover, any three provinces can veto the constitution, and the Sunni Arabs could just turn it down. Apparently Zebari is convinced that to delay the finalization of the new constitution until January 15, which is permitted by the Transitional Administrative Law, might create an impression that the political process has stalled and provide an opening for increased activity by the guerrillas. (This sort of thing happened during the months it took to form a government after Jan. 30.) Pressure is also coming from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to finish the constitution by August 15. And I suspect the Americans want this deadline to be met, as well. But is it really reasonable to expect a deeply divided political class to craft an entire constitution in only a month or two? And what if the Sunni Arabs do reject it in the referendum? Won't that be even a bigger check on the political process than delaying the finalization of the text for 6 months?

Xinhua reports that

' The Sunni Arab deputy head of Iraq's constitutional committee expressed his astonishment over a draft constitution text on Sunday. "I have received yesterday an initial document of a draft constitution. I am astonished. I don't know who wrote it," Adnan al-Janabi said in a statement. Janabi said he had sent a letter to Humam Hamodi, the Shiite head of the committee, asking for clarification. He accused the committee leadership of violating the principle of reaching agreement by consensus. '

If the deputy head of the drafting committee had not even seen the present working draft, you know the fix is in and that backroom deals have already produced the final text. The committee, and the charade of including the Sunni Arabs, is just window dressing.

The Algerian Salafis for Missionizing and Warfare, which is connected to al-Qaeda, called upon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to kill Ali Bi'l-`Arusi, 62, and Izz al-Din Bi'l-Qadi, the two Algerian diplomats abducted on Thursday from a Baghdad restaurant. The authenticity of the communique could not be verified. The Algerian government fought a civil war with the radical Muslim fundamentalists in that country from 1992 until just a few years ago, a struggle in which over 100,000 persons are estimated to have been killed. My suspicion is that in the 1990s the radical fundamentalists and the government shared the killing equally. The secular-leaning military won, and recent elections have installed moderates. Their message suggests that the Salafis are sore losers. The Salafi group mentioned is probably an iteration of the Armed Islamic Group (French acronym GIA), to which Ahmed Rassam belonged; he attempted to come into the US with a powerful car bomb, intending to blow up LAX, in December of 2000 but was caught at the Canadian border).

A high-level Egyptian commission arrived in Baghdad to help look for the body of Egyptian diplomat Ihab el-Sherif, who had been kidnapped and killed earlier.
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London and Sharm el-Sheikh Investigations

British police made a third arrest in their investigation of the July 21 attempted bombings of the London transportation system. They are attempting to reconstruct an al-Qaeda cell that recruited and facilitated the operation of the bombers.

The investigation has now been complicated by the killing Friday of an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, who was living legally in the UK and working as an electrician. He lived in an apartment block that was under surveillance and was followed by plainclothes police. When he headed into the Underground, they commanded him to stop. He ran instead. Because he was wearing a jacket in the middle of the summer, they feared he was a bomber and shot him in the head five times. In fact, it was in the 70s that day in London and one of my correspondents from that city said there was a cool breeze, and he might have put on a jacket to go out himself. I suppose for a Brazilian the weather might have called for a wrap.

The tragedy of the death of Menezes is a deliberate outcome of al-Qaeda tactics. The organization is attempting to spread fear and hatred, and knows that the Western security agencies and military will often over-react, helping discredit them with Muslims and perhaps others. (The racial profiling aspect of Menezes' death is clear, and has cast a chill on the UK Muslim community). That British police have received training in Israel in stopping suicide bombers with the technique of shooting the suspect in the head has not made things easier in that regard. (PM Tony Blair attempted to deflect criticism in this regard by sourcing the technique to Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers virtually pioneered the suicide bombing as tactic).

In contrast to the British police, who admit that they are looking for an al-Qaeda cell, the Egyptian authorities initially maintained that the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings were the work of a small, isolated cell based in the town of El Arish. This characterization makes no sense.

Al-Jazeera is reporting that some analysts are now considering the possibility that a Pakistani terrorist cell struck at Sharm el-Sheikh. They are showing the identity papers of two Pakistanis found at the scene. At this point, I don't know how seriously to take this report, which may just be speculation.

It also reported a big demonstration in Sharm el-Sheikh by townspeople against terrorism and the killing of innocents.

The defense lawyers for those charged in the Taba bombings argued Sunday that there could be no connection between Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh because the former targeted Israeli tourists in specific, whereas the latter targeted tourists in general. (I saw the video on al-Jazeera). I take it the defense strategy is to argue that there are several terrorist cells active in the Sinai, with various goals, and that therefore there are plenty of suspects out there besides their clients.
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Straw Backs Down on Iraq Link

On Sunday, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw backed off his categorical denial that the Iraq war had increased the likelihood of terrorist action against the UK. The assertion was not plausible and cost Straw and PM Tony Blair credibility with the British public.

Former foreign secretary Robin Cook was scathing:

' Yesterday he claimed that the invasion of Iraq had "undoubtedly" boosted terrorism around the world. The former foreign secretary also warned that the government would have to acknowledge that link if ministers wanted to bring young British Muslims on side. Intelligence agencies had warned the Prime Minister ahead of the war that the invasion would increase the threat to Britain, Mr Cook said. "The problem is that we have handed al-Qaeda an immense propaganda gift, one that they exploit ruthlessly," he told the BBC News 24 Sunday programme. "There have been more suicide bombings in the two years since we invaded Iraq than in the 20 years before it. Yes, it has happened around the world. "I don't think you can make a simple link between any one event and Iraq, but undoubtedly it has boosted terrorism." While Mr Cook refused to say that the bombings would not have happened if Britain had stayed out of the war, he stressed that the problem of terrorism had worsened. '

You will never, ever, hear Robin Cook's statements at any length on American television, even though he has been among the more perspicacious observers of the Iraq guerrilla war. He predicted, for instance, that the Fallujah campaign would have no effect in ending it. His invisibility in the US is easily explained: he disrupts the manufactured consensus that Noam Chomsky warns us about.

There isn't any doubt what drove the Leeds bombers. It is not as if they are any longer anonymous or as if you couldn't just ask people who knew them what was making them so angry. In fact this has been done. Shehzad Tanweer's former hometown newspaper reports what people said in the ancestral village in which he spent time November-February of this past year: 'Tanweer – whose ancestral home is in the village – is said to have been particularly upset about the deaths of civilians in Iraq. '

After the July 21 attempted bombings, the Abu Hafs al-Misri Brigades (i.e. al-Qaeda), which claimed responsibility, 'delivered a grim warning that the attacks would not stop until troops were pulled out of Iraq. It read: "Our only message to other European governments is that we will not relent and sit idle before the infidel soldiers leave the land of the two rivers." '

So I don't know what was in Straw's mind, but the connection is clear as day.

Given how easy and inexpensive it is to conduct a terrorist attack such as July 7, the cost of terrorism must increasingly be factored into major foreign policy initiatives like the Iraq War. That isn't to say it should be a decisive factor. But it is a potential cost.

Look, if the US and the UK decide to do something and it is the right thing to do, and they can get a United Nations Security Council resolution for it so that it is legal, then they should do it. If there is a terrorist response, too bad. Cost of doing business. But where they are doing things that are illegal in international law, where their own publics are divided, where there is an air of adventurism about the enterprise, then the cost in terrorism may well be seen as intolerable by the public.

There is also a cost in terrorism of making bad policy or doing nothing with regard to other hot spots. Why can't some reasonable accommodation be found for the perennial Kashmir problem, which has been involved in 3 conventional wars between India and Pakistan and almost produced a nuclear holocaust in 2002? Can't the sole superpower and its European allies get some movement here?

What about Palestine? Why put up with the irresponsible policies of both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, if they are going to help get Americans and British killed? Can't the US and the UK knock some heads together here? Some might point to the unilateral Israeli withdrawal of colonists from Gaza as progress. But no unilateral action is really part of a peace process. And if the Palestinian Authority is not involved in guaranteeing security after the withdrawal, Israeli troops will just reinvade and the place will remain a sort of slummy penitentiary. Abbas is being kept completely in the dark about the details of the Gaza withdrawal, and is obviously bewildered that he is being treated this way.

The Bush administration has not put enough effort into resolving flash points such as Kashmir and Palestine. It wouldn't be easy, but the net effect on the peace of the world would be enormous. And just doing the right thing is not 'appeasement' of terrorists. Doing the right thing is its own reward. If it reduces terrorism, that is a bonus.
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Is Bin Laden Ordering the Bombings around the World?

The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock quotes counter-terrorism experts who are beginning to wonder if Usama Bin Laden is ordering the terrorist attacks in places like Baghdad, London and Egypt.

The consensus last spring was that al-Qaeda's command and control structure had been extensively disrupted by the war on terror. The feeling was that al-Qaeda leaders in hiding could still incite and provide models, but could not just get up in the morning and order a hit.

Evidence coming out of the London bombings in particular suggests some al-Qaeda comand-and-control is still in place. Al-Qaeda worked through its Pakistani affiliate, Jaish-i Muhammad, to recruit the British Muslims in Leeds. But in November of 2004, Muhammad Sidique (Sadique, Siddique, Siddiq) and Shehzad Tanweer were brought to Karachi. The two were put up in a very nice hotel for a week. Who were they meeting there? (Although Jaish-i Muhammad has cells there, that group is centered nowadays more in the Punjab).

Karachi, a sprawling port city of 9 million, has been a hide-out for al-Qaeda. In September of 2002, Ramzi Binalshibh was apprehended there after a three-hour gun battle at an apartment building.

There is even a suggestion that Sidique and Tanweer slipped over into Afghanistan after leaving Karachi, and before they went to the Punjab, where they stayed until February. While in the Punjab, Tanweer was in contact with Jaish-i Muhammad, the operatives of which used to train in Bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

In other words, it is entirely possible that Osama Bin Laden and/or Ayman al-Zawahir did in fact order the hit on London. Bin Laden has threatened Britain a number of times since 2002, over its role in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On the other hand, I'd be surprised if Bin Laden had any direct role in Iraq.

The Madrid bombings were in the main done by a Moroccan group of expatriates, some of them with roots in the Shaikh al-Fizazi group at a mosque in Tangiers. But one member of the group was a man called "al-Sayyid al-Masri", an Egyptian who had lived in Germany and Milan, and who visited the Moroccan group in the months before the Madrid bombing. Was al-Sayyid al-Masri an operative of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami? Was he still in some sort of shadowy contact with al-Zawahiri?

Al-Zawahiri is still in contact with the Egyptian al-Jihad al-Islami cells in Egypt, and my guess is that EIJ somehow ran the El Arish and possibly other Sinai cells for which the Bedouins provided foot soldiers. It is not impossible that al-Zawahiri ordered or at least indirectly encouraged the Taba and Sharm El Sheikh bombings.

The virulence of EIJ sentiment in Egypt can be gauged by the interview CNN did with Muhammad Atta's father, recently, who proclaimed a 50-year war, praised his son's act of mass murder, and offered to finance further attacks on the West. The interview did not make much of a splash in the Western media but it should have. (The senior Atta pretended to be a moderate when interviewed in fall of 2001, when the Egyptian secret police had him under surveillance, but now is revealing his true sentiments, which he likely has had for decades).

I think it would be a mistake to see al-Qaeda as a corporation where the CEO just gives orders to lower-level employees. It is mainly "a way of working," as a London policeman pointed out. It is intended as a model to inspire local groups, and as a global network to encourage them.

But occasionally the top leaders do intervene to order specific attacks, where they still have that organizational capacity. It is entirely possible that both London and Sharm El Sheikh were two instances where they could and did.

The worrisome thing is that al-Qaeda and its affiliates are obviously able to use the increasing anger in the Muslim world over Palestine and Iraq to recruit "newskins", who are not known to intelligence organizations in the countries where they operate.

Strategically, it is increasingly clear that if you wanted to wage a "war on terror," letting Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri alone while you invade and destabilize Iraq and let the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just fester was a very bad idea.

Many commentators are putting out the straw man argument that the Iraq War cannot be blamed for terrorism because September 11 and Bali, e.g., happened before the Iraq War.

This argument is so dishonest that it should make your blood boil when you hear it. No one is alleging that all the instances of radical Muslim terrorism can be traced to the Iraq War. What is being argued is that the Iraq War provided the already-existing terror networks with an enormous propaganda and recruiting windfall. Would Hasib Hussein, who was 14 in 2001, really have agreed to kill himself and 20 others on a London bus if Bush and Blair had acted responsibly and declined to bog the West down in a guerrilla war in the Muslim country of Iraq? What if instead they had captured Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, put $200 billion into rebuilding Afghanistan, and used their enormous diplomatic and military weight to resolved the Israeli-Palestinian and Kashmir issues?

The Guardian has a remarkably thoughtful article on the backlash against Muslims in Britain because of July 7. It is worth reading to the end. But these two paragraphs stood out:

' Blaming Bush and Blair to justify terrorism is not the majority view among Muslims across the country - but it is the passionate belief of a significant minority. Almost one in four British Muslims sympathise with the motives of suicide bombers, according to a YouGov poll published in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. More than half say that, whether they sympathise or not, they understand why some people behave in the way they do.

The research also showed that nearly one in three thinks that Western society is decadent and immoral and should be brought to an end. Sixteen per cent of British Muslims told the survey that they do not feel loyal towards Britain and 6 per cent went as far as saying the London bombings were justified. '

Obviously, then, the issues are bigger than Iraq. But that does not mean Iraq is not an issue. The Iraq War had many costs. It made the blood of Muslims boil all over the world, including in Europe and the US (with the exception of Kurdish and Shiite expatriate Iraqis). It was an opportunity cost because it forestalled real progress on the al-Qaeda/Afghanistan/South Asian front. Its aftermath was so badly managed that it has bogged the US down in an ugly guerrilla war, leading it to carry out actions such as the virtual razing of Fallujah, which further angered Muslim publics. And the war was illegal and wrong given the lack of a UNSC resolution, which makes all the trouble it has caused even more regrettable.
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Sharm el-Sheikh Deaths rise to 88
Al-Qaeda Claims Responsibility

The death toll at Sharm el-Sheikh had risen to 88 by late Saturday, with 200 wounded. Most of the dead were Egyptians.

The attacks took place on a national holiday to commemorate the 1952 nationalist revolution. The young officers' Revolutionary Command Council banned the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in 1954 after it attempted to assassinate Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser. The regime of Hosni Mubarak, an air force general trained in Moscow, stands in a direct line from that of Abdel Nasser, and his government maintains restrictions on political Islam. Abdel Nasser's first successor, Anwar El Sadat, made a peace treaty with Israel in the late 1970s and was assassinated by the Gamaa Islamiyyah and al-Jihad al-Islami in a joint operation in 1981. The Mubarak regime has jailed tens of thousands of radical Muslims and killed some 1500 in running street battles in the 1990s. Until the collapse of the Oslo peace process in Israel and Palestine and the Iraq War, Egypt had succeeded in quelling the radical Muslim movements (admittedly the methods used were not often nice).

According to al-Jazeera.net, "Al-Qaeda in Greater Syria and the Land of Kananah [Egypt]-- The Martyr Abdullah Azzam Brigades" claimed responsibility on the internet. The group said it had attacked "the Crusaders and Zionists," i.e. Western Christians and Israelis vacationing at the resort. The statement said that the attack came "in response to the crimes of the evil world Powers, which permit the shedding of Muslim blood in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Chechnya." They also claimed to have taken revenge on behalf of "the martyrs of Sinai"-- a reference to the militants killed in gunfights with Egyptian police in the aftermath of the Taba bombings in October. The bombings come two days before the resumption of the trial of two suspects in the Taba bombings (scroll down). The authenticity of the communique could not be verified. A competing claim was made by the Mujahidin of Egypt, naming the five perpetrators of the bombings. The group was previously unknown and its claim could not be verified either.

AP ties the bombing at least vaguely into a videotape of the interrogation of kidnapped Egyptian diplomat Ihab Sherif:

"Meanwhile, the group al-Qaida in Iraq released an Internet video that appeared to highlight one reason why militants might have targeted Sharm: the presence of Israeli tourists.

The video did not mention the Sharm bombings nor claim responsibility, but it showed the interrogation of Egypt's top envoy to Iraq, Ihab al-Sherif, whom the group kidnapped and said it killed earlier this month. In the video, the diplomat was asked about Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which allows Israelis to travel without visas to a zone known as "Part C," along the Sinai's eastern coast.

"From which point does Part C start?" a questioner asked al-Sherif. "From Taba to Sharm el-Sheik," he replied.

"If you seek an evidence on how the Jews are desecrating the land of Muslims, contemplate the words of the Egyptian ambassador," said a statement, posted with the video on an Islamic Web forum." '

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the Egyptian experts it is talking to say the most likely culprit in the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings is Muhammad Ahmad Fulayfil. He is wanted for the Taba bombings of last October, in which is brother died as a suicide bomber. Fulayfil [Fulaifel], an Egyptian of Bedouin background, is being tried in absentia (scroll down). Reuters had reported Fulayfil killed in a gunfight with police in western Sinai last winter. But if he is being tried in absentia, I presume the Egyptian authorities retracted the report of his death. As I said yesterday, I don't find it plausible that a big, well-planned attack with powerful explosives was a mere repeat of Taba, done also by car smugglers, metal workers and small town bureaucrats. Al-Sharq al-Awsat is alleging that the explosives used at Sharm el-Sheikh are of the same sort as at Taba but are of local manufacture. If so, the Bedouin have learned someting about bomb making in the meantime.

This para. from al-Sharq al-Awsat is right, though: "According to the experts, it appears clear that al-Qaedah--or its satellite affiliates--has established a network in the Sinai Peninsula, the fingers of which reach into Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh. It is certain that there is an organization active in the Sinai." In a sense, Sinai is natural al-Qaeda territory. It is vast, lightly populated, not particularly closely governed, and the local population, of Bedoin background, already has resentments about marginalization in the Egyptian polity. That is, it resembles some of the provinces of Afghanistan where al-Qaeda operated so successfully.

Our world is turning into a horror film. I never particularly cared for horror movies, especially after I had lived in Beirut off and on during the opening years of the Civil War. Once you've seen real blood, the Hollywood ketchup just isn't that much of a hoot.

The horror is captured in this para. from al-Sharq al-Awsat: "Eyewitnesses said that a man was sitting in the cafeteria watching three of his sons play soccer on the plaza in front of the bazaar. Then the bomb exploded and they were blown to bits. The father, hysterical, ran around gathering up their body parts, shrieking and weeping."
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Aljazeera.net reports that the Sunni Arab walk-out from the constitution drafting committee appears to be ending. The talk is positive that remaining issues can be resolved by August 15.

The Jaafari government will provide security to the Sunni members of the constitution writing committee, just as it does to members of parliament. Two Sunni Arab members were gunned down last Wednesday, provoking a crisis.

The Kurds tried to put into the constitution a provision that would allow them to conduct a referendum on whether Kurds want to remain in the Iraqi state or not. The other deputies on the committee rejected the demand.

Aljazeera.net adds:

' # A series of attacks against Iraqi police and civilians continued on Saturday, leaving at least six dead. Among those killed were three Falluja police officers, found dead about 10km east of Falluja, police said.

# Gunmen travelling in two cars shot and killed a Ministry of Interior employee on Friday night, police said. A Ministry of Transportation employee was also killed in a drive-by shooting, police said. '

An Iraqi also died in US custody under mysterious circumstances, according to this report.

Dexter Filkins demonstrates that the guerrilla movement in Iraq, far from being in its last throes, has grown more sophisticated in it attacks, which it launches regularly.

Some in the US military who have served in Iraq are wondering why they only Americans who appear to make significant sacrifies for the war effort are the soldiers themselves.


Prominent Columbia U. economist Jeffrey Sachs argues for a political solution in Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn goes and brings up history:

' The war in Iraq is now joining the South African War (1899-1902) and the Suez crisis in 1956 as ill-considered ventures that have done Britain more harm than good. It has demonstrably strengthened al-Qaeda by providing it with a large pool of activists and sympathisers across the Muslim world it did not possess before the invasion of 2003. The war that started out as a demonstration of US strength as the world's only superpower has turned into a demonstration of weakness. Its 135 000-strong army does not control much of Iraq . . . There have been more than 500 suicide attacks in Iraq during the past year. It is this campaign that has now spread to Britain and Egypt. The Iraq war has radicalised a significant part of the Muslim world. '

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State of Play in Taba Trial

Some commentators are wondering if the Taba bombings of last fall are related to the Sharm el-Sheikh atrocity. I thought I'd archive this article about the Taba trial (which begins again on Sunday) below. al-Sharq al-Awsat for July 24 has an article quoting Egyptian Minister of the Interior Habib al-Adli saying there are some indications that there is in fact a link between the cell that did Taba and this action in Sharm el-Sheikh.

I suppose it is possible that the city of El Arish is playing Leeds here, as a place where a local set of radical cells grew up that reworked their grievances in global terms and adopted al-Qaeda tactics. A city of 115,000, it has a large Bedouin population and some Palestinian refugees, and is far from Cairo. It was under Israeli occupation 1967-1982, which has left behind resentments. It is on a bus route that takes tourists from Egypt to Israel, or at least it was last I knew.

But personally I think it is more likely that al-Jihad al-Islami has regrouped inside the country. The allegation was that Taba was done with the use of old munitions left in Sinai by the Arab-Israeli wars. But this Sharm el-Sheikh operation seems much more professional and obviously involved high-powered explosives. This wasn't, in my view, some amateur operation out of El Arish done by Bedouin and a stray Palestinian. The Egyptian government has its own reasons for denying that al-Qaeda or its affiliates are still operating in the country.

' Egypt: Trial of Taba Bombers To Begin 2 Jul
MENA (MIDDLE EAST NEWS AGENCY)
Wednesday, June 8, 2005 T19:14:29Z

CAIRO, June 8 (MENA) - The State Security Court in Ismailia set July 2 as a date for the trial of three defendants accused of the Taba bombings which took place in northern Sinai on October 7 last.

Mohamed Sabah and Mohamed Abdullah Rabaa will stand trial in a state security court for the bomb attacks which killed 34 people, including nine Egyptians and injured another 24 Egyptians and 124 Israelis. Mohamed Ahmed Fulayfel, fugitive, will be tried in absentia.

The prosecutor charged all three in March with murder, attempted murder and unauthorised possessing of weapons.

Investigations indicated that seven suspects were accused of being responsible for the attacks. Four were killed in the blasts which targeted another two beach resorts in Sinai.

The Investigations also revealed that the incident was individual and planned and carried out by Iyad Saeed, Palestinian, and other elements in Arish city in retaliation for Israeli practices against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories.

Investigations revealed that the defendants made circuits operating through remote cellular phones and time bombs.

The probe found that the explosives were obtained from land mines of past wars in Sinai desert.

It said a pick-up loaded with 30 time-bombed gas cylinders was left by defendant Mohamed Abdullah Rabba outside the Taba hotel entrance.

Other defendants, Soliman Mohamed Fulayfel and Iyad Saeed Saleh operated the time bombs and were killed in the shuddering explosion.

Al-Badiya resort camp blast was jointly carried out by Mohamed Saleh Fulayfel and Mohamed Abdel Rahman Badwan, who was killed in clashes with police.

The camp was devastated by a car bomb that was detonated by a cellular phone.

The explosion of Jazerat Wadi Al-Qamar resort camp was carried out by Mohamed Gamaan, who was killed in clashes with police while trying to resist his arrest, through a pick-up loaded with explosives.'

This article is also perhaps worth archiving here, concerning protests in El Arish last March over the Taba detentions:

' Protesters arrested in Egypt
11/03/2005 18:09 - (SA)

El Arish, Egypt - Police on Friday arrested seven activists protesting against the mass detention of suspects in last year's Sinai resort bombings, police officials said.

Hundreds of Bedouin men and women led the demonstrators gathered in this northern Sinai town to protest against the detention of their relatives, taken into custody after the October 7 hotel bombings in Taba and Ras Shitan that killed 34 people.

The protesters shouted anti-government slogans and demanded release of the detainees. Seven people were taken into custody, a police official said on condition of anonymity.

Human rights groups claim Egyptian authorities have arrested some 2400 people in the wake of the bombing, the first significant terror attacks in the country since 1997.

The Egyptian government has since released some detainees, but has never revealed how many people it has in custody.

The group of about 400 men and women began their protest after Friday Muslim prayers, congregating in El Arish's main square. Police intervened to stop them from gathering and later scuffled with the male protesters. El Arish is 350km northeast of Cairo.

"You, the government of our country, where are our sons?" demonstrators demanded as they marched through streets in the desert town which borders the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Men in traditional Bedouin robes and red chequered headdress and black-clad women also called for an international probe into the arrests, claiming their relatives were innocent of any involvement in the attacks.

It was the third organised demonstration in three months by the relatives; they marched through the streets last Friday, and during a protest in January three policemen and about ten protesters were injured in clashes.

Last month Human Rights Watch said the government had yet to release the detainees' names, their locations, or whether they'd been charged. The human rights organisation also accused police of torturing some of the detainees.

Eleven detainees were released this month, and 90 were freed last month.

Egyptian authorities have cracked down on Bedouins living in the Sinai since the October attacks to try and find those responsible.

Egyptian security forces engaged in shootouts with militants in the Sinai hills last month, killing three suspects. The government has said that five others implicated in the bombings are in custody.'

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