Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Friday, September 30, 2005

85 Shiites Dead at Balad in Carbombings
5 US Troops Killed at Ramadi


Friday morning, al-Jazeerah is reporting at least 10 dead and more wounded in a market in the Shiite city of Hilla south of Baghdad, as a result of a car bombing. This incident probably involved Sunni Arab guerrillas from the mixed Babil province targeting Shiites.

Three car bombs in the city of Balad, just north of Baghdad in the Sunni Arab heartland, killed at least 85 on Thursday and wounded 115 persons. The bombs targetted districts with a concentration of Shiite Muslims. Balad is near the Shiite city of Dujjail, the prospective site for the trial of Saddam Hussein.

Anthony Loyd, reporting from Baghdad for the London Times, argues that a sectarian war is already underway in Iraq. The attacks in Balad certainly seem to be part of this phenomenon.

In addition, guerrilla violence elsewhere killed 5 American GIs and 12 Iraqis.

US military forces raided the homes of two Sunni Arab politicians who had been willing to advise the interim government, infuriating them.

Patrick Cockburn reports that at a meeting in Baghdad of nearly 1,000 former Iraqi army officers and an adviser to the Iraqi president, the officers expressed disgust at the lack of security, clean water, electricity and other essentials in Iraq, which they said lacked any sign of a government.

CBS News reports that:

"a roadside bomb killed five American soldiers Wednesday during combat in the western town of Ramadi, the military said. It was the deadliest single attack on U.S. troops since a roadside bomb killed 14 Marines near Haditha in western Iraq on Aug. 3. The five dead Americans were assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force and were hit Wednesday while "conducting combat operations" in the insurgent hotbed, a statement by the Marines said. The deaths brought to 13 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq in the past four days. According to an Associated Press count, 1,934 U.S. troops have died since the war started in 2003."


The bomb blast in Najaf on Wednesday evening turns out probably to be a case of the bomb-makers actually blowing themselves up. But then Muqtada al-Sadr's movement had said that the house that was blown up belonged to one of Muqtada's bodyguards. Were they mistaken or is the Mahdi Army busy making bombs for a future showdown with the rival Shiite Badr Corps?

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Jawad al-Maliki, a parliamentarian and member of the Dawa Party, complained bitterly on Thursday that Iraqi diplomatic missions abroad were plagued with corruption and still staffed by supporters of Saddam Hussein.

Speaking of corruption, the Ministry of Electricity was a hotbed of corruption under former minister Ayham al-Samarrai, according to his successor, who claims that "hundreds of millions of dollars" have gone missing. Samarrai has recently represented himself as being the target for death squads from the new government, but maybe he is just a target for auditors.

The Sunni Arabs are still agitating for changes in Iraq's constitution at this late date. It has already been reported out of committee to parliament and sent to the UN for printing, though nobody outside government seems to have seen it. It cannot be changed now. It ought to be, of course. As Fred Kaplan recognizes, the constitution is a guarantee of long-term guerrilla violence in Iraq, since it cuts the Sunni Arabs out of a fair share of the country's resources. On the other hand, since it is backed by the Kurdistan Alliance and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the two biggest and most influenntial political blocs in the country, it is likely to pass. It is also not clear that its rejection would lead to peace, either, since the Kurds and Shiites would be perhaps fatally disillusioned with the democratic process if all their work and aspirations were now torpedoed.

Fallujah does not sound to me as though it is really subdued, from this Slate article (it is a series, and worth following).

South Korea on Thursday thanked Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for advising Seoul not to send combat troops to Iraq. What? Pakistan in summer of 2003 was close to sending troops itself, but insisted they be under a United Nations command, which was unacceptable to Bush, so the deal fell through. So now it turns out Musharraf was warning other American allies not to get centrally involved, as well. Washington will be furious, but I fear that they haven't got a leg to stand on. Whichever way you look at it, Musharraf was perfectly correct.

Evan Lehmann writes,
"Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, a Vietnam veteran, said the invasion of Iraq alienated America's Middle East allies, making it harder to prosecute a war against terrorists. The U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, he said, and reposition its military forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border to capture Osama bin Laden and crush al Qaeda cells. “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” said Odom, now a scholar with the Hudson Institute."


With the Hudson Institute? That is Neocon Central. Now they're supporting Odom to say this?

But his evaluation is correct. The greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.
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Fayyad in Baghdad: It is no Longer Baghdad

Al-Sharq al-Awsat carries a long, anguished and meditative piece by Maad Fayyad, an Arab journalist normally based in London, on the occasion of his return to Baghdad for the third time since the US invasion.

I don't have time to translate the entire thing, but perhaps he will publish it in English.

He says from Baghdad, "Here is Baghdad . . . But which Baghdad is here? The Baghdad that we do not know and which we do not want to be like this. I wonder-- did the Mongols descend on it only yesterday, led by the captain of catastrophe and devotee of death, Hulagu Khan, such that it was transformed into debris?"

He says he is looking out of a helicopter window. He sees buildings below that look like the peaks of a historical city, except that circulation in the streets is lazy and mournful. But then the rubble stretches into the distance, punctuated by mountains of garbage clearly visible from the air. Even the formerly upper class districts were mired in fetid lakes of rancid water, swirling around once proud mansions. In the 1980s, Baghdad had once received an international award as the world's cleanest city.

He says, "I search for Baghdad in Baghdad, and do not find it." Once the snooty capital had given birth to a verb, "to baghdad it up" [tabaghdada], meaning to put on insufferable airs and act superior. Today the only persons bagdading it up in Baghdad are those breaking civil, religious and tribal law with impunity.

"As for the law, it does not exist here. Most of the persons I've met in Baghdad say frankly, 'Iraq is living without a state . . . without a rule of law . . . with power going to the strongest . . ."

He says that the last time he was in Baghdad, during the election season at the end of January, he only heard about bombings when he read about them in the newspaper. Now things are different.

"When some friends heard that I had arrived, they warned me not to go out into the streets: "We don't want to know your location, and you must not tell anyone where you are residing. There is more than one group that kidnaps and kills nowadays."

An official of the Iraqi government tells him, "I am a prisoner in my office and my house, which lies in a secure district, but I canot visit the house where my family lives for fear that I will be abducted."

The government is nowhere to be seen, he says. The government does not control the streets, the militias do. You cannot tell the guerrillas from the police and the army, since all of them wear the same uniform.

Cole: The piece is a shocking indictment of American misrule. Bush has turned one of the world's greatest cities into a cesspool with no order, little athority and few services.
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You will be Democratic, Or Else!

Nearly 3/4s of Americans are now skeptical about the use of force to spread democracy. The idea that the US should simply invade countries, overthrow their governments and impose "democracy" on them was championed by a coalition of American nationalists and rightwing Zionists in Washington in 2001-2003, was promoted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (the think tank for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Project for a New American Century, and other rightwing think tanks and journals. The targets of this social engineering on a vast scale were never, however, authoritarian regimes friendly to Washington, but rather a handful of governments that had bad relations with the US and/or Israel. As Ret. Col. Pat Lang points out, however, armies are good for killing people and destroying things, and not very much else. Lang lived a decade in the Middle East doing military and intelligence work, and knows whereof he speaks. The American public is coming around to the same view.

The Neocon notion of aggressive war as productive of Jeffersonian democracy reminds me of the joke about the difference between Christianity and Soviet communism. The surprised commisar, on being challenged as to what communism stood for, explained that it was just Jesus's Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The only difference, he allowed, was that "othervise ve vill shoot you."
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Thursday, September 29, 2005

The American Street Speaks

My article is out in Salon.com, The "American street" speaks: Will the Democratic Party listen? The lede is:

"As more and more Americans turn against Bush's Iraq war, Democratic politicians remain silent. Their play-it-safe strategy isn't just cowardly, it also won't work."

Excerpt:


' In a mid-September CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, about a third of respondents wanted to bring at least some troops home, and another third wanted a complete withdrawal. Only 26 percent wanted to just keep the same number of soldiers there, while a gung-ho 8 percent were in favor of sending yet more troops. Many of the protesters on Saturday were similarly divided between those who wanted immediate withdrawal and those, like MoveOn.org, that advocate beginning a phased withdrawal next year.

The American movement to withdraw from Iraq is being called "the American street" on the Arabic satellite news networks. Although many Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis have mixed feelings about it, other Iraqis have taken heart. Khalida Khalaf, 52, told the Los Angeles Times of Cindy Sheehan, "Of course she's a mother, and just like our people are hurting, she's hurting too ... Just as she wants America out of Iraq, so do we." Khalaf, a Shiite of Sadr City in Baghdad, lost her Iraqi son, Majid, to the same clashes between the U.S. military and the Mahdi Army that took the life of Casey Sheehan. About 120 members (out of 275) of the elected Iraqi parliament have called for a short timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The Sunni Arab political elite wants the U.S. to get out of Iraq yesterday, as does the puritanical Shiite Sadr movement. There may be an increasing convergence of opinion on the prospect of the U.S. troops staying in Iraq, between the Iraqi public and the American.

As her supporters chanted, "Not one more," Ms. Sheehan thundered, "We're going to Congress, and we're going to ask them, 'How many more of other people's children are you going to sacrifice?' We're going to say, 'Shame on you.'" The necessity of going to Congress was underlined by the virtual absence of sitting legislators at the protest. Only Rep. Cynthia McKinney among Democratic representatives addressed the rally, though Rep. John Conyers of Michigan attended. '


The rest is at Salon.com.
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Bombings in Tal Afar, Baghdad, Najaf
Iraq is not World War II


Someone detonated a bomb outside the house of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf around 7 pm Wednesday Iraq time. The blast killed six, including a security guard.

Among the bombings and shootings on Wednesday was a bombing in Dora, a district of Baghdad, that killed 2. Dora from all accounts appears to be virtually guerrilla-held territory. Sweeps of Sunni Arab districts, called Operation Lightning, were attempted in June, but to little long-term effect.

Reuters adds:


" TAL AFAR - At least seven people were killed and 37 wounded when a female suicide bomber attacked a large crowd of people outside an army recruiting centre in the town of Tal Afar west of Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

TAJI - Seven bodies of people who had been shot dead were found in Taji, 20 km north of Baghdad. Police said they were bound and blindfolded.

*SAFWAN - A U.S. soldier and an airman were killed and another soldier wounded when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb near Safwan, in southeast Iraq near the Kuwait border."


There were other attacks in Baghdad, including the kidnapping and murder of six person in the Huriyah District.

The US military withdrew from the city of Karbala on Wednesday. This is the second city from which Coaltion troops have withdrawn in favor of local police and militia. The US left Najaf in August. Both are holy cities, with substantial numbers of pilgrims and local seminaries.

Al-Hayat reports that a major set of military campaigns is being jointly planned by the US military and Iraqi Minister of Defense Saadoun al-Dulaimi against guerrilla strongholds in Anbar Province.

Al-Zaman reports that large numbers of rockets were discovered Wednesday in Nasiriyah. It is believed that guerrillas planned to use them to disrupt the referendum on the constitution now scheduled for October 15.

Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder is on the ground in Baghdad and gets the scoop that Muqtada al-Sadr has probably decided to remain neutral toward the new constitution. If al-Sadr had called on his followers to reject it, he might have helped the Sunni opposition defeat it. He is said to fear opposing the religious establishment in Najaf, which generally favors the constitution, lest he lose the contest and end up looking weak. As reported here, Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad, the number 2 Shiite cleric in the country, has issued a fatwa urging adoption the the constitution. Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the chief clerical authority for the Shiites, is variously said to support the constitution or to want to avoid ordering Shiites to vote for it lest he impose his views on them at a time when they should be exercising individual choice and popular sovereignty.

Al-Zaman says that professional drivers of trucks and other vehicles, large and small, in Kirkuk went on strike on Wednesday to protest the lack of gasoline. Iraq is one of the world's major petroleum producers under ordinary circumstances. But it seems wherever George W. Bush goes, the gas gets expensive or even hard to get hold of.

Marine Sgt. Alisha Harding gives an eyewitness account of the June 23 attack on her convoy by a suicide bomber near Fallujah, in which five marines and a sailor were killed.

Reuters news agency has formally complained that the behavior of US troops toward independent journalists has become a serious impediment to getting out the story of what is happening there. (It is worse. Reuters typically lists 5 or 6 deadline "security incidents" in its daily roundup, but we know that there are more like 60 or 70, about which the US military knows but of which the rest of us are kept in the dark).

Heritage Petroleum of Canada has signed a memorandum of agreement with the Iraqi Kurds to do exploration and development. Hey, I thought the Canadians sat this one out. You mean, they get the contracts anyway? Quick, someone alert Wolfowitz (didn't he promise to punish all French-speaking countries?) Ooops, I guess he isn't in the Pentagon any more.

Gen. Richard Myers, outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned Wednesday that winning in Iraq was as important to the US as winning WW II had been, and that a withdrawal would lead to another 9/11- style attack.

With all due respect, Gen. Myers is wrong on both counts. For the US to stay massively in Iraq, occupying a major Arab Muslim country, for very much longer is what will provoke another attack on the US mainland. Gen. John Abizaid, who actually knows the Middle East, warned against a large, long-term occupation of Iraq in spring of 2003 and he was right. As for the WW II analogy, puh-lease. National Socialist Germany and its allies had large, well-equipped armies and occupied all of continental Europe, West and North Africa save Egypt, and (via Japan) Korea, much of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, and Indonesia among other territories. The German military was 20 million strong, the Japanese nearly 10 million. Italy's military was 3 million.

The guerrilla movement in Iraq is typically estimated at around 30,000 strong, though I suspect it is twice that. The total number of persons in the jihadi movement outside Iraq who could and would commit violence such as bombings against the mainland United States is probably in the hundreds, and is at most a couple thousand. They can't even seem to muster more than a couple thousand volunteers to fight the biggest Western incursion into the Muslim world since the Soviet invasion of Aghanistan, which is pretty pitiful if you think about it. I teach World War II in the Middle East, Gen. Myers. This is no World War II.

Jim Lobe covers the debate on a US exit strategy for Iraq. Kudos to Jim for getting my position exactly right and stating it succinctly and clearly.

Ron Kampeas explores the dilemmas of American Zionists who oppose the Iraq war, given an atmosphere in the antiwar movement that tends to see the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as just as objectionable as the US occupation of Iraq. The article is good in recognizing the antiwar attitudes of a majority in the general American Jewish community, which contrasts with the generally hawkish views of the major Jewish lobbies and organizations influential in Washington. Kampeas does not, however, make any distinction between Jews and Zionists, or between those who support Israel and those who support the colonization and annexation of the West Bank.
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Iran and Iraq
Muhsin al-Hakim "Horrified" at British Assault in Basra


Muhsin al-Hakim, the son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, spoke out in Tehran about the British attack on a Basra jail. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is widely underestimated, but he is the leader of the majority party coalition in parliament as well as of one of its constituents, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. His party controls 9 of the 18 Iraqi provincial governments as well as key cabinet posts. He is among the more important leaders in Iraq. His son Muhsin is probably expressing views more frankly than his father could afford to. The Financial Times reports Muhsin as "horrified" at the British military demolition of the central Basra jail to free two undercover SAS officers. Muhsin says that the two shouldn't have been out of uniform in a sovereign Iraq, and that they forfeited their legal immunity when they put on civilian clothes. He also called on the Blair government to stop thinking in the old Sunni Arab way about Iraq, that Kurdish and Shiite rights equal a break-up of the country.

His last point would be more convincing if his father hadn't insisted on a provision in the constitution allowing the southern Shiite provinces to form a confederacy that would own a hundred percent of all future petroleum finds in that area.

Meanwhile, Iran says it supports a free and fair referendum on the new Iraqi constitution on October 15. Major Iranian figures have said that they hope the constitution, which privileges Islamic law, is adopted.

And the Iraqi ambassador in Tehran, Muhammad Shaikh, praised Iran's positive role with regard to Iraq and called for even greater cooperation between the two countries.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Guest Editorial: Achcar on "Iraq Developments"

"Iraq developments"

by Gilbert Achcar



' 1) The Saudi Kingdom and Iraq

The last weeks and days have seen intensive campaigning by the Saudi Kingdom on the issue of Iraq, preceding US decisions on cooperation with the Kingdom. The campaign’s highlight has been the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faysal’s visit to the US and his statements blaming the US for failing in Iraq and giving the upper hand in that country to Iran, the arch-enemy of the US and its Saudi protectorate.

The campaign also included the release of a Saudi-sponsored (and co-written) study by the CSIS, an unofficial think-tank in Washington, titled “Saudi Militants in Iraq: Assessment and Kingdom’s Response.” (Much case was made of this study because it said that foreign fighters were only a minority of the “insurgents,” as if it were a scoop.) It “estimated” (more a guessing-game than anything else) the proportion of foreign fighters in Iraq at 4-6% of a total of “insurgents” put at 30 000, of whom 12% from the Saudi Kingdom (1-2% of the total).

Al-Hayat for 9/28 reports figures given by Iraqi officials on the foreigners detained in Iraq: according to the officials quoted, US forces in Iraq hold in detention over 10,000 persons, of whom only 210 are foreigners. Of those, the largest group by far is made up of Saudis (35%). Syrians, Tunisians and Libyans together amount to 15%, Palestinians and Jordanians are 10%, and Egyptians and Sudanese 5%.

Al-Hayat also announces that G. W. Bush sent a memo to C. Rice on Monday 26 saying (I am translating from Arabic, because I couldn’t find the original; Al-Hayat probably got the news from its Saudi sponsors): “I assert that Saudi Arabia does cooperate with the efforts to fight global terrorism and that the proposed aid will help facilitate these efforts.” In the meantime, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, on a visit to the Kingdom, has “questioned,” in breathtaking boldness, the Saudi ban on… driving by women!

2) Muqtada al-Sadr’s consults Sistani on sectarian violence

Some days ago, followers of Muqtada al-Sadr from the Iraqi city of Al-Kufa had addressed a letter to him asking his advice to the “followers of the Sadrist line in particular and the Shiites in general” regarding the recent declaration of war against the Shiites by Zarqawi. (This chilling declaration — a voice message broadcast through the Internet — was announced in retaliation for the US-Iraqi onslaught on Tal Afar and accompanied with new massacres of Shiites).

Al-Sadr — who is the most popular Shiite figure among Arab Sunnis and is accused by some forces in the Shiite community, especially in SCIRI circles, of cozying up to the enemies of the Shiites — did not want to take it upon himself to call for Shiites to refrain from launching reprisals. His reply came in three points: 1) “Refer in this regard to your noble references, who naturally, as is well-known, are Sayyed Sistani (may his shadow last) and Sayyed Ha’eri (may his shadow last), they must be referred to first, and if they do not intervene, please get back to me with a new request.” 2) Print books and other educational material against “each of the occupation and its suite, the brigands [designating anti-Shiite Wahhabi forces, like Zarqawi’s group] and the Ba’athists.” 3) Call on the Imams at Friday’s prayers to stigmatize them. In conclusion, al-Sadr asked his followers to remember that “the unity within Islam and the [Shiite] sect is the major weapon” against the “brigands and their masters,” as well as the Ba’athists.

The Sadrists of Al-Kufa wrote accordingly to al-Sistani, asking his advice. The latter replied with a long official communiqué, now posted in Arabic on his website, with the following main points: Those who try to divide the Iraqis and push them toward civil war want to prevent Iraq from “recovering its sovereignty and security.” Iraqis should not and will not fall into this trap whatever horrors occur to them. Shiites should keep restraining themselves and cooperate with the competent services to protect their areas. All Iraqis should call, in words and deeds, to repel the deviants (an indirect call on Sunni religious leaders to issue condemnations of sectarian attacks). The Iraqi government should provide security to all Iraqis and “prevent them from being hurt, to whatever ethnical group or religious sect or thought they belong.”

3) US military campaigns and the forthcoming vote in Iraq

Commenting on the November 2004 assault on Fallujah prior to the January 30 election, I had written: “The US occupation could not have any illusion -- at this point in time -- about its ability to stop the violence in the country by resorting to such violent means. Instead, there is serious reason to believe that the real purpose was precisely to aggravate the chaotic conditions in Iraq in order to diminish the legitimacy of the outcome of the January 30 elections.”

I had written this because of the fact that the very brutal assault on Fallujah had led to such a deterioration of the conditions in Iraq and to such an outcry among Arab Sunnis, that it compelled most major political forces belonging to this community to revert their stand and boycott the election. (The Islamic Party, the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, had even registered its electoral slate, before withdrawing from the race.)

This scenario seems likely to be repeted. Up until recently, the ranks of the Arab Sunnis were divided on the issue of the October 15 referendum. Not that any major force among them is calling to approve the draft constitution: as is well known, there is a large consensus among Arab Sunni representatives on rejecting the draft. (The sectarian polarization in Iraq is such that the majority of Arab Shiites support the draft and the vast majority of Arab Sunnis oppose it, while the Kurdish forces try to arbitrate preserving their interests.) However, the majority of Arab Sunni forces had called their constituencies to register on the electoral lists (which they did massively) to try to defeat the draft constitution by gathering two-thirds of No votes in the three main Arab Sunni provinces. Only two forces had adopted a long-standing call for a boycott of the referendum: the Ba’ath Party (very officially by a formal statement published on its website) and Al-Qaeda followers (they forbid any vote on a constitution anyhow, since there should be no constitution but the Koran in their view).

Today’s Al-Hayat reports that two main figures of the Arab Sunni community in Iraq, Saleh al-Mutlak, the man leading the campaign against the draft constitution, and Issam al-Rawi, a member of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, have accused US occupation forces and Iraqi governmental forces of trying — by the full-fledged offensive they launched in the Arab Sunni province of Al-Anbar, starting with the assault on Tal Afar — to prevent the participation of Arab Sunnis in the referendum, thus pushing them to call for a boycott. Al-Mutlak said that a call for boycott could be announced after consultations among the opponents of the draft.

If the referendum were to be held with a massive participation of all Iraqis, the result would be, whether the draft passes or fails, that this first all-encompassing electoral test would likely be followed by all-encompassing elections for a new National Assembly (with the possibility of getting there a majority in favor of the withdrawal of occupation forces). If the referendum were boycotted massively by Arab Sunnis, as were the January elections, then it is highly likely that the same would occur for the parliamentary elections scheduled to take place before the end of this year. The present tragic situation would be prolonged indefinitely, if not very much worsened actually.
'

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Car Bomber Penetrates Green Zone
33 Deaths in Guerrilla Violence


The Washington Post reports that "A car bomber penetrated the heavily fortified Green Zone in the center of the capital on Tuesday but was stopped by U.S. Marines at a checkpoint before he was able to detonate the vehicle, the military said."

He got all the way into the Green Zone. That is where the US Embassy is, where the parliament meets. This car bomb could have done enormous damage. And it got past the outer gates! The Green Zone is not safe-- it has received mortar shells, and there have even been circulars warning of the danger of insurgents kidnapping people from it (!). But to get a whole car bomb in there . . .

Now the guerrillas are just shooting down school teachers. Earlier their main target had been Iraqi soldiers & police and recruits. Guerrillas did kill 9 police recruits on Tuesday and wound 21 in the eastern city of Baqubah. But now simple school teachers are apparently considered "collaborators." Or maybe they were killed for being Shiites.

Speaking of Shiites, Iraqi authorities on Tuesday discovered the bodies of 22 persons, probably Shiites, over near the Iranian border. They were probably pilgrims from Baghdad on their way to the Iraqi holy city of Karbala, who had tried to avoid the ambushes that frequently befell such pilgrims by Sunni Arab guerrillas based in places such as Latifiyah.

A member of the Baqubah council was assassinated.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, guerrillas bombed the HQ of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, wounding three guards. The KDP is led by Massoud Barzani, and doesn't have a significant presence in the Shiite south, so it is sort of odd that they have a party office in Najaf or that Sunni Arab guerrillas would target it there.

Congress is giving Bush another $40 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, taking the total for both to $400 billion.

By the way, in Afghanistan the old warlords appear to have won big time. This is not good.

The United Nations is urging member states not to send Iraqi asylum seekers back to Iraq, since it is too dangerous.

Saudi Arabia has spent $1 billion to secure its borders with Iraq so far this year.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Conyers on Arrest of Antiwar Protesters

Congressman John Conyers writes:



' September 27, 2005

Office of the Chief

United States Park Police

Dwight E. Pettiford

1100 Ohio Drive S.W.

Washington, D. C. 20242

Dear Chief Pettiford:

I am writing to request information regarding the treatment of individuals arrested on September 26, 2005 in front of the White House and processed at the United States Park Police Anacostia Station.

Yesterday 384 protestors, including peace activist Cindy Sheehan, were arrested outside the White House and were brought to United States Park Police Anacostia Station. I was very surprised to learn that many of those arrested were kept handcuffed in vans and buses for up to 12 hours before they were charged and released. Some of those were released at 4:30 in the morning after being arrested at 4:00 the previous afternoon. Many of those held captive the longest were grandmothers and senior citizens. Those released after midnight were unfamiliar with Washington, DC and had no means to travel back to their hotels once the metro had closed. Anacostia is not frequented by taxicabs after midnight.

I have the following questions regarding the treatment of those arrested yesterday:

1. Why was the Anacostia Station chosen as the sole location to process all 384 arrestees when there were several other Park Police stations in the greater Washington, DC area?

2. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police for periods exceeding twelve hours before being charged with a crime?

3. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police, and kept handcuffed on buses for periods exceeding ten hours?

4. What is the established U.S. Park Police procedure for processing large numbers of arrestees in the Washington, DC area?

Please respond to the Judiciary Committee Minority Office at 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, telephone number 202-225-6504, fax number 202-225-4423.

Sincerely,




John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking Member
House Committee on the Judiciary '


Via Jonathan Godfrey [jonathan.godfrey a_t_ mail d o t house.gov, Conyers's Internet Communications Director


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Sunnis Seek Last-Minute changes in Constitution

Shiite teachers in Baghdad and Iraqi police and 10 passengers on a government bus were killed in violence on Monday

The Sunni National Dialogue Council and other Iraqi politicians meeting in Amman have complained that Iraqi Sunni Arabis are facing genocide and said they are mulling a campaign of civil disobedience. (Since the Sunni Arab areas are in flames, a campaign of civil disobedience would be a big improvement). The same group, along with the Iraqi Islamic Party, expressed approval of Saudi Foreign Minsiter Saud al-Faisal recent cautions about Iranian influence in Iraq. Al-Hayat says that the National Dialogue Council (Sunni) asserted that it had been in contact with the Americans about the possibility of making last-minute changes in the constitution that might mollify the Sunni Arabs.

The International Crisis Group [Word doc.] argues that the process by which the Iraqi constitution was crafted, and several provisions whether vague or specific, have exacerbated sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq and bode poorly for the future.

Cindy Sheehan and several other antiwar protesters courted arrest Monday with a sit-in near the White House, and succeeded in being arrested.

Al Franken at Air America covers this weekend's protests, including the mock trial.
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Kos Diaries

Daily Kos Diaries on US troop withdrawals from Iraq:

"Quit Your Bellyachin'".

and

"Juan Cole says now is the time to leave Iraq"

Stirling Newberry at BOP also has a good discussion.

I should clarify that as several diarists noted, I do believe that the US has a duty to manage the withdrawal so as not to provoke a massive civil war. I suspect that can be done with a combination of continued training and arming of the new Iraqi army and air power. For those who say there is no way to prevent massive civil war and a million dead, I'd just suggest that that level of fatalism is not helpful or necessary or even perhaps moral. American liberals tend to believe that no form of military force is ever useful, which is rather an odd belief for non-pacifists and in light of the obvious usefulness it has had on a number of occasions in dealing with fascists, thugs and other people who use force and need to be opposed with force.
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De-Baathification Statistics

Gilbert Achcar kindly shares his translation of the following from Al-Hayat:



' Ali al-Lami, member of the De-Ba’athification Commission, told Al-Hayat that the number of Ba’athists that were affected by De-Ba’athification “does not exceed 100,000 leading members out of 1 million Ba’athist in Iraq, of whom 80% were members of the first echelon [firqa] and are entitled to get back to their positions as ordinary civil servants without holding leading positions.”

Al-Lami added that “5,000 Ba’athists of those who were members of the 2nd echelon [shu’ba] and above are wanted because of crimes they have committed against the Iraqi people, including high-ranking members of the previous regime, some of whom fled the country after the regime fell while others have joined armed groups active within Iraq.”

He also said that “over 80% of those affected by the De-Ba’athification decree are instructors, teachers and other salaried from the Ministry of Education, where 18,000 Ba’athists were affected, 11,000 of whom were later exempted from the law.”

The Ministry of Industry and Mining comes second with 13,000 affected by De-Ba’athification, followed by the Ministry of Higher Education and the Interior Ministry, other Ministries having much lower proportions. He pointed to the fact that the De-Ba’athification Commission brought 50 actions in criminal courts against Ba’athists accused of crimes. '


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Monday, September 26, 2005

British Spies in Basra Fighting Weapons Smugglers
27 Killed, 62 Wounded in Violence


Those two SAS special operations troops captured by the Basra police last Monday were one of 8 such teams charged with disrupting weapons smuggling from Iran into southern Iraq. The Iranian weapons smugglers are organized and powerful throughout the world.

Among the more powerful Iranian arms merchants is Manucher Ghorbanifar, this one with friends in high places in Washington, who is trying to pull the United States into a war against Iran. War is good for arms merchants.

Guerrilla violence left at least 27 dead and 62 wounded on Sunday. One bomber killed 9 persons including police commandos on a highway in Baghdad; 9 commandos were wounded. Shiites were targeted in Musayyib. In Hilla someone blew up a music store.

Iraqi guerrillas robbed an armored convoy carrying large amounts of cash on Sunday, killing two guards and making off with almost $1 million.

Those wingnuts who circulate the talking points about all the good things happening in Iraq should add, ' Becoming more and more like a bad noire film, resembling in some ways the endlessly diverting "Oceans 11" movies. '

Iraqi bureaucrats concerned to fight embezzlement and corruption related to the oil industry have faced assassination attempts and at least one had a son killed. American observers in Iraq have commented to me that it is now the most corrupt system on earth. Al-Sharq al-Awsat quotes parliamentarian Hadi al-Amiri today saying that literally billions are missing from the Defense Department and with regard to reconstruction contracts. Al-Amiri is from the Badr Organization, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has asked his fighters to stand down and not reply to the US/ Iraqi-government attack on Sadr City, which left ten Mahdi Army militiamen dead. Shaikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji characterized the incursion as a "direct provocation." US officials maintained that the mission had gone in search of elements that had attacked multinational forces.

It also says that the Kurdish cabinet members have sent a second note to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari complaining that he is acting too high-handedly in making decisions all on his own that concern their portfolios.

The United Nations has finally managed to get some food and water to thousands of displaced Tal Afar families living in tents in the desert because they were kicked out of their city by a joint US/Iraqi assault. The US military assertion that no innocent civilians were killed in the attack is contradicted by local physicians. (Such blanket denials are not a good rhetorical strategy for the army. Can't they say, "we have no information on . . . "?)

Iraqi physicians are fleeing the country in droves, leaving Iraqis with inferior health care at a time of national crisis and guerrilla war.
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Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad's Fatwa in Favor the Constitution

KarbalaNews.net [Arabic] publishes a copy of the fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad in favor of the Iraqi constitution:

Fayyad, an Afghan Hazara by birth, came to Najaf at the age of 10 and has risen to be among the 4 top ayatollahs in Iraq. He is slightly junior to Sistani, and reputedly more pro-American.


' The Office of His Excellency Grand Ayatollah Shaikh Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad (long may his shadow persist).


Q. Peace be upon you, and the mercy and blessings of God. Give us, the abject, your considered opinion on this question:

What is the opinion of your excellency concerining participation in the referendum on the draft constitution?



A. In His Name, May he be Exalted.

The draft of the permanent constitution for Iraq, even though it falls short of being appropriate to the Islamic, civilizational and religious status of Iraq throughout history, nevertheless answers the aspirations of the Iraqi people of all stripes, strata, and religions. In addition, this is the feasible result yielded by the strenuous efforts exerted by the sincere children of Iraq. For this reason, we call upon the iraqi people of all kinds and sects to participate in force in this referendum on the constitution, and to vote "yes" in order to safeguard their rights, liberties and the future of succeeding generations, and in order to close ranks and defeat terror and the terrorists, and to end the Occupation. We ask God, may He be Exalted, to take the hand of all with regard to whatever is good for Iraq and its people. Peace be upon you and the mercy and blessings of God. '



So far I am unaware of such an explicit, written fatwa from Sistani himself. But having the number two or three man issue it may be a way of signalling the desire of the Shiite religious establishment without appearing to tie the hands of democratic citizens in their voting behavior.
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Cole on "The Issue"

"The Issue," a web-based interview show at Evolvetv.tv launches today with interviews of Juan Cole on Iraq.

Given the meltdown during the past week of the mainstream television news organizations (apparently hurricanes outdraw Iraq by 30 to 1 in the ratings) with regard to world news, we will increasingly be dependent on organizations like EvolveTV for real news.

The interview is reviewed here by Markinsanran, who had earlier done his own video interview with me.
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Rebuttal by Achcar

Gilbert Achcar replies to my response. I think we've reached the point where our positions are clear and I'm disinclined to respond further, despite my respect for the seriousness of the points made.



' Dear Juan,

Many thanks for your friendly and stimulating reply. Here are a few comments on your rejoinder, as a follow-up to our exchange.

1) You wrote: “I think the US peace movement will be more effective, and more useful to the Democratic Party, if it adopts a realistic and nuanced position rather than just chanting "US out Now!"”

Well, I don’t think that the US peace movement, which is a mass movement of citizens of various views and creeds, should be concerned with being “useful to the Democratic Party.” If anything, it is the Democratic Party – if it were ever to live up to its claims – that ought to be concerned with being useful to the mass movement and to the true interests of the US social majority. The US peace movement started chanting “US Out Now” many years ago, as you certainly recall: the Democratic Party was then in power under Lyndon B. Johnson, presiding over one of the most vicious wars in US history. (And, mind you, Johnson and his “Great Society” look quite “progressive” compared to the present Democratic leadership!)

2) You wrote: “The US has very possibly set Iraq on a course to civil war that will run regardless of whether the US is there or not. The question now is not just occupation (which will end sooner or later), but who will rule Iraq and how.”

I surely agree with the first sentence (as long as it states only a possibility, which is alas far too real). It is in itself a strong indictment of the US occupation. As for “who will rule Iraq and how,” I don’t believe that that it is the business of the US. The fact is that US management of Iraq has planted the seeds of civil war in that country and is cultivating it day after day. The demand for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq is but an attempt at limiting the damage.

3) “If the US just up and leaves now, the Sunni Arabs will consolidate their military assets and attempt to take and hold territory. This move will create a condition of dual sovereignty, i.e. a revolutionary situation and possibly large-scale civil war.”

I don’t need to repeat my own arguments regarding the possible scenarios in case of US departure from Iraq. The key difference between us on this issue is not the likelihood of this or that scenario. It is encapsulated in this sentence of my letter: “I believe it is only fair to acknowledge that no one can really tell what would happen after the occupation ends.” No one, including the top brass in the Pentagon, nor, for that matter, any of the Iraqis themselves, is able to predict with any certainty what would happen in case of US evacuation of Iraq. Many scenarios are possible. There are already different predictions regarding the possible consequences of an announcement by the US of a withdrawal timetable. Some people claim that it will embolden the “insurgency” (from which they conclude, like Bush, that no timetable should be announced); others believe it will make true political reconciliation possible, given that even the hard-line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars has repeatedly stated that, as soon as this condition is fulfilled, it will join wholeheartedly the political process.

Two things are certain on this specific issue: a) no one can be certain about the outcome; b) the situation has not stopped deteriorating in Iraq ever since the occupation began. If one adds to these two certainties the three points I made with regard to the same issue in my previous letter, there is only one sensible conclusion in my view: unless one harbors imperial designs over Iraq, one should call for “Out Now.”

4) “I was in Lebanon 1978-79 and aside from the brief Syrian bombardment of East Beirut in fall of 1978, which did not involve much in the way of casualties, there were no big battles going on then. So in two years the hot civil war had indeed subsided substantially. It is often now forgotten that by 1981-1982 the Lebanese economy was roaring back and the country was moving toward normalcy, when the Likud government in Israel launched a brutal and largely unprovoked attack on the country, throwing [it] into more years of instability.”

First, let me remind you that I myself have written that after “the political accord concluded between the Syrian regime and Yasir Arafat under Saudi sponsorship in October 1976 … Lebanon enter(ed) into a prolonged period of truce with Syrian forces deploying peacefully in the areas that were controlled by the Palestinian-Lebanese alliance.” When you referred to Lebanon, your point was to explain that the “the Syrians came in and stopped the big battles” – not, as you put it in your rejoinder, that “local militias can grow into armies that fight for territory on a national scale.” My reply was to say that the Syrian military intervention did not stop anything by itself: it only made things worse, until a political agreement opened the way to a prolonged lull. As I said already, an agreement of this kind, including acceptance of the presence of US forces, is hardly conceivable in Iraq.

Second, one more time, your record of Lebanese events proves faulty (you can be excused since you were there only in 1978-1979). You write that in 1981-1982, before the Israeli invasion in June 1982, Lebanon “was moving toward normalcy.” The truth is that heavy clashes occurred between Phalangist militias and Syrian troops in the spring of 1981, and the confrontation between these two forces remained on very tense standby until the Israeli invasion. Since the Israelis started a campaign of air raids from April 1981 onward, actually preparing the ground for their invasion, the Phalangists preferred to wait until their powerful allies occupied the country and installed them in power, instead of continuing to get pounded by Syrian missiles. The only real protracted period of peace in the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon (1990-2005) was made possible, above all, by the October 1989 political agreement, concluded again under Saudi sponsorship.

5) Your last argument is about “the consensus of the elected Iraqi leadership” as being “fairly similar” to your position on the immediate withdrawal of US troops. Well, I believe the issue to be more complex than that. Let’s put aside the Arab Sunni community who has not taken part in the January election and is not properly represented in the elected bodies. (Strangely, you put the Arab Sunnis now at 15 % of the Iraqis — way below the common estimation of 20 %, which they dispute vehemently as underestimating their true proportion of the Iraqi population.) To be sure, the elected officials that you mention, namely Talabani and Jaafari, are supportive of extended US presence in their country. But let’s move, if you please, beyond the surface of things.

I don’t doubt for one second that Talabani’s constituency in Kurdistan backs his position. But even this Talabani looked really pitiful when he had to contradict himself in the US on the issue of the withdrawal of US troops after Bush reprimanded him. This showed that on this issue, the so-called “sovereign” government of Iraq is politically hostage to US forces, as it is physically within the Green Zone. The same fact is demonstrated much more blatantly by Jaafari’s behavior: every honest person in Iraq will tell you — and I am sure you have read enough testimonies to this regard in the Iraqi and Arab press — that the so-called “sovereignty” of the “elected Iraqi leadership” is a very limited one. On many sensitive issues, especially everything related to security and military issues, the Iraqi government is tightly controlled, and often steered by US occupation representatives – who have become great experts at arm-twisting. The recent behavior of British troops in Basra was a clear illustration of how the occupiers respect Iraq’s “sovereignty.”

Since Jaafari’s stand is contrary to the electoral program of the mostly-Shiite United Iraqi Alliance that designated him as the head of the government — a program that included the demand for a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops — there is much less certainty that he represents his constituency in this regard than for Talabani. It is the contrary that is certain as a matter of fact: you recalled yourself, Juan, the fact that about 120 Iraqi MPs have called for the withdrawal of US troops. To be more accurate, they signed a petition (put forward by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr in the Parliament) demanding that the official request made by the Iraqi government to the UN Security Council to extend the presence of multinational forces be rescinded, that such issues be deferred to the Parliament and not decided by the government, and that a withdrawal timetable be set immediately.

Now let’s make a very simple calculation. There were 275 MPs elected to the Iraqi national Assembly. Out of those, there are little over 70 members of the Kurdish Alliance and little less than 40 MPs of the pro-US Allawi’s list. As you know, it is highly unlikely that any of those roughly 110 MPs signed the petition. This means that the overwhelming majority of the remaining 165 MPs, most of them UIA members, signed it. In other words, an overwhelming majority of the UIA, to which Jaafari belongs, has disavowed him on this issue. For a democrat (with a small d), no “consensus” involving the likes of Jaafari — i.e. members of an executive betraying the parliamentary majority which has designated them — can be regarded as representative of a people’s will. That’s why invoking this kind of support as an argument for the continued presence of US troops in Iraq — as Bush & Co. do regularly — is not acceptable in my view, and in the view of millions of Iraqi and US citizens.

With my best regards,

Gilbert '


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Sunday, September 25, 2005

Why we Have to get the Troops Out of Iraq

The hundreds of thousands of protesters who came out throughout the world on Saturday were demanding a US and British withdrawal from Iraq.

The protesters are right that we have to get US ground troops out of Iraq.

The issue is not the rights and wrongs of the war. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no nuclear program, and the mushroom clouds with which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice menaced us were figments of their fevered imaginations, no more substantial than the hateful internal voices that afflict schizophrenics.

But that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.

The issue is not the lack of operational cooperation between the secular, socialist, Arab nationalist Baath Party of Iraq and the religious fanatics of al-Qaeda. There was no such operational involvement. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Abu Zubaydah were captured before the Iraq War, and told their American interrogators that al-Qaeda had refused to cooperate with Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration deliberately hid this crucial information from the American people, and puzzled US intelligence officials who knew about it were astounded to see Cheney and others continually go on television and assert that Saddam and Bin Laden were in cahoots in the build-up to the war.

But that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.

That US soldiers are dying in Iraq, with the number approaching 2,000, is a tragedy. But it is not in and of itself a reason to get the troops out of Iraq. We lost some 1700 at Guam alone in World War II. The question is whether a war is worth fighting, not its human toll, since a much worse human toll may result from giving up the fight (if the US could have launched D-Day in 1940, the Holocaust might never have happened).

So that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.

The first reason to get the ground troops out now is that they are being fatally brutalized by their own treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Abu Ghraib was horrific, and we who are not in Congress or the Department of Defense have still only seen a fraction of the photographs of it that exist. Sy Hersh learned of rapes, some of them documented. Human Rights Watch has documented further prisoner abuse by US troops in Iraq. Sometimes the troops just go in and break arms or legs out of frustration. It has long been obvious that the Abu Ghraib scandal was only the tip of the iceberg, and that the abusive practices were allowed and encouraged by Rumsfeld and high officers, and weren't some aberration among a few corporals. (Even Senator Frist may be involved in a cover-up of the torture.) There is also no reason to think that the abuses have ceased. The denials of the US military, based on its own internal investigations (which apparently involve looking at official reports filed and talking to officers in charge) are pretty pitiful. The brutalization of the US military and of its prisoners is a brutalization of the entire American public. It is an undermining of the foundational values of the Republic. We cannot remain Americans and continue to behave this way routinely. The some 15,000 Iraqis in American custody are all by now undying enemies of the United States. Some proportion of them started out that way but perhaps could have been won over. Some of the detainees were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a time in US prison camps, they will hate us forever. And they know where thousands of tons of hidden munitions are.

The second reason is that the ground troops are not accomplishing the mission given them, and are making things worse rather than better.

When Saddam Hussein first fell, the Sunni Arab elites were mostly quiet, and were waiting to see what their relations with the US would be like. Fallujah was less troublesome than Shiite Najaf in the first weeks of April. But the US insisted on garrisoning troops in a local school, which alarmed parents that their children might be endangered. They mounted a demonstration, and green US troops panicked and shot 17 civilian demonstrators. That began a feud between the clans to which the dead belonged and the US army, which, in the way of feuds, grew over time. By March of 2004, anti-American feeling was so virulent that crowds attacked, killed and mutilated four private security guards, one of them a South African. George W. Bush took the attack personally, and ordered an assault on Fallujah. (Norman Mailer thinks the Iraq War is about white guys making it clear that brown guys are not going to be allowed to lay a glove on them.) The spring attack on Fallujah, however, was extremely unpopular among Iraqis, and members of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council began resigning or threatening to resign. Even the Shiites in Kufa sent aid. The US backed off Fallujah.

In summer of 2003, there had been a growing, low-intensity guerrilla conflict in the Sunni Arab areas. But large areas were relatively quiet, including the city of Mosul (with a population of about a million). A lot of Sunnis were still on the fence.

Then after Bush won reelection, in November of 2004, Bush sent the Marines into Fallujah. He emptied a city of 300,000, turning the residents into refugees and the homeless no less surely than the hurricanes have done to the inhabitants of New Orleans more recently. The American assault damaged 2/3s of the buildings in Fallujah and left it a ghost town. In the past few months, some Fallujans have been allowed to return, and a few neighborhoods are functioning (shown, like the facade in the Jim Carrey vehicle, The Truman Show, to gullible Western journalists as evidence that everything is hunky dory). Other Fallujans are living in tents atop the rubble of their former homes. There are still bombings and daily mortar fire in the area. I noted an Aljazeerah report of a mortar shell falling near a US position not so long ago, and asked here why the US press did not report it. Someone with a relative serving in the US military in that area wrote to say that they take mortar fire all the time and it was unremarkable. The propaganda line was that "Fallujah is the safest city in Iraq." But US troops have been killed there not so long ago, and the slogan is clearly not true.

The reaction among the Sunni Arabs to the Fallujah campaign was immediate and explosive. They mounted large-scale urban revolts and rebellions virtually everywhere. Ramadi, Samarra, Qaim, Heet, you name it. The coup de grace was Mosul. Some 4,000 Iraqi policemen abruptly resigned. Masked men appeared on the streets and set up checkpoints. Mosul went over to the guerrilla movement, and substantial portions of it are still unstable.

Mosul contains about a fifth of the Sunni Arabs! It had been quiet. It was a model, under Gen. Petraeus. Now it had exploded. It became unsafe.

The Great Sunni Arab Revolt of November-December 2004 was a direct result of the Fallujah campaign.

It was a disaster, and not just on security grounds. The Great Revolt made it impossible for the Sunni Arabs to participate in the January 30, 2005 elections. Their areas were too insecure, or too sullen, to vote. The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group descended from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had announced a slate of 275 candidates for parliament. They were withdrawn. The cooperation vanished.

The Sunni Arabs only managed to elect 17 deputies to the Parliament on Jan. 30, out of 275 seats. Three of the 17 were gifts from the major Shiite coalition (which led the more hard line Sunnis to decline to cooperate with those 3). The Sunni Arabs were virtually absent. Who was present? The election was won by the religious Shiite parties, especially the Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Even the Sadrists, most of whom were lukewarm about involvement in politics under Occupation, had more deputies than did the Sunnis! The Shiite religious parties despise the ex-Baathists (i.e. most of the Sunnis). The other winners were the Kurds, who wanted to safeguard their semi-autonomy and if anything hated the Sunni Arabs more than did the religious Shiites.

And now the elected parliament drafted the constitution. The Sunni Arabs were included in the negotiations, rather as an eccentric uncle might receive a half-hearted invitation to stay for dinner, but would then be politely ignored, as he twittered on about some conspiracy theory, or sometimes greeted with giggles by the ruder children.

The constitution that was fashioned by the religious Shiites and the Kurds unsurprisingly contains all sorts of goodies for Shiites and Kurds, but cuts the Sunni Arabs permanently out of the deal. Substantial proportions of the oil income will stay in the provinces (i.e. Kurdistan and the Shiite South) rather than going to Baghdad. All future oil fields that are discovered and developed will be the sole property of the provincial confederation in which they are found. Most such likely fields are in the Shiite areas. (There are rumors of a field off Fallujah, but it is not a sure thing).

All the major Sunni Arab organizations and respected political and clerical figures have come out against the constitution.

In the meantime, the US has now attacked another Sunni city, this time the Turkmen stronghold of Tal Afar. In the continued "scorched earth" policy of the US military in the Sunni areas, a joint US/ Iraqi (mostly Kurdish) force appears to have levelled entire neighborhoods in Tal Afar, a northern Turkmen city, making most of its 200,000 inhabitants refugees living in squalid tent camps or with friends and relatives elsewhere. The operation yielded relatively few arrested terrorists. There is a news blackout on Tal Afar imposed by the US and the Iraqi authorities. This move is draconian and anyway unnecessary, since the American cable news channels have already imposed a global news blackout in favor of playing "Weather Channel" 24/7. Members of a Red Crescent delegation reached Tal Afar, but had their cell phones confiscated, were told to distribute aid in a remote and little known part of the city, and ended up mainly giving help to the displaced persons in their tent settlements: ' Hasan Bal, a member of the Red Crescent team that went to Tal Afar, stressed that theirs was a very difficult mission. ''The people and especially the children in Tal Afar are living in miserable conditions. Their conditions are indescribable. It is practically impossible not to cry for them,'' noted Bal. '

Basically, if all the US military in Iraq is capable of is operations like Fallujah and Tal Afar, then they really need to get out of the country quick before they drive the whole country, and the region, into chaos.

Even as they are chasing after shadows in dusty border towns, the US military is allowing much of Baghdad to fall into the hands of the guerrillas.

And that is why we have to get the ground troops out. Counter-insurgency has to have both a military and a political track. Even as the enemy is being pressed, you have to reach out to the civilian leadership and try to draw them into a truce.

The US military has had no political successes in the Sunni Arab areas. Mosul and some parts of Baghdad could have been pointed to in summer of 2004. In summer of 2005, these earlier successes have evaporated like a desert mirage toward which thirsty soldiers race.

The situation in the Sunni Arab areas was worse in summer of 2004 than it had been in summer of 2003. It is worse in the summer of 2005 than it had been in 2004. Even the Iraqi political groupings that had earlier been willing to cooperate with the US boycotted the Jan. 30 elections and are now assiduously working to defeat the new constitution.

Things in the Sunni Arab areas are getting worse, not better.

I conclude that the presence of the US ground troops is making things worse, not better.

Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.
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Tens of Thousands Demonstrate Against Iraq War
Al-Hakim Calls for "Yes" on Constitution
Arrest Warrant in Basra for British


Over 100,000 protesters rallied in Washington, DC, against the Iraq War on Saturday. Protests were also held in London, San Francisco and other cities.

US troops entered Sadr City or Eastern Baghdad on Saturday in search of Mahdi Army elements they suspected of having launched guerrilla attacks. They encountered armed Sadrists and killed 8 of them. Earlier press reports that things were 'quiet" in Sadr City required that we ignore what people there actually believe and say in Arabic in private.

Ian Mather reviews the situation in the Sunni Arab heartland, the Shiite south and the Kurdish north. He finds that only the situation in the last is at all encouraging.

Judge Raghib al-Mudhafar, chief of the Basra Anti-Terrorism Court in Basra, has issued a murder warrant for two British SAS officers who were arrested in that city last Monday and then freed by the British military. British Defense Minister John Reid rejected the move on the grounds that British soldiers in Iraq are not under Iraqi judicial jurisdiction and would have to be tried by British courts-martial instead. Judge al-Mudhafar dismisses this argument, saying he suspects at least one of the SAS undercover operatives of being Canadian and so not covered by extrajudiciality provisions. The British military is denying rumors that the two SAS men were attempting to obstruct Iranian operations in Basra. They rightly point out to the Independent that there are enough munitions in Iraq, and enough organized local militias, that one simply does not need to posit the Iranians as the troublemakers.

I find it difficult to believe that they two were simply gathering information, as suggested by their disguise of ordinary Arab clothing. They obviously could not really pass as Basrans. My suspicion is that they were on a mission of extraordinary rendition, i.e. capturing or killing some local leader they felt was endangering the British mission but who could not be detained through ordinary means. I don't think it makes much sense to suggest that they were planning to blow up British soldiers and blame it on Shiites, so as to allow British troops to stay in Iraq (this is a conspiracy theory that has been alleged).

I'm afraid that the Great Basra Jailbreak looks to be the Dinshaway Incident for 21st century Iraq. It was acting high-handedly that got the British kicked out of Egypt, and acting high-handedly is likely to unite the Iraqi elite and masses against them, too. An unscientific poll [with a small "n" and lacking attention to getting a representative sample] by the Times of London found that 23 out of 40 Basrans polled said that the British troops should stay for the time being. They were afraid that without them the security situation would deteriorate in a major way. Members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq apparently were delighted to see Muqtada al-Sadr's militiamen taken down a notch. But I'm not confident that the Times of London asked the slum dwellers, and I suspect a majority of Basrans now want the British out. Certainly, that sentiment seems to be growing.

Angry Shiite militiamen fired Katyusha rockets at several British targets in the city, though not to much effect.

The Guardian reports that the British government has quiet plans to begin significantly reducing British troop presence in Iraq next May. The government denies the reports, which had surfaced in leaked Defense Ministry documents earlier in the summer.

This article in the Scotsman is an excellent overview of what has gone wrong in Basra. But the interviewees have several inaccurate impressions. First, the puritanical attitude in Basra does not derive from the influence of Muqtada al-Sadr, who just has a few hundred followers in this city of 1.3 million. Rather, the puritanism has been imposed by the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major party in the province; and by the paramilitary of the Fadila Party, an offshoot of the Sadr Movement led by Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi. Second, the article neglects to mention that the Shiite religious parties won the Jan. 30 elections in Basra Province. The elected provincial government is responsible for hiring militiamen as policemen. The idea of creating a whole new police force not controlled by the civilian political parties, which some British observers have put forward, fails to reckon with the fact that there is already an elected federal and provincial government whose deputies would have something serious to say about any new gendarmes force.

James Glanz of the NYT explains what is at stake in the Shiite South.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim the Shiite cleric who leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the United Iraqi Alliance (which dominates the federal parliament), has called supporting the new constitution a "spiritual duty." Since the constitution was negotiated by SCIRI, its support is unsurprising. SCIRI controls 9 of Iraq's 18 provinces, so it can play a major role in helping pass the constitution.

Al-Hayat [Arabic] reports that the rumors that Sistani would give a fatwa urging the faithful to vote for the constitution may have been overblown. The interviewees in the article maintain that the four grand ayatollahs in Najaf would not want to rob their followers of the prerogative of deciding for themselves which way to vote. The article does imply that they are encouraging people to vote. The problem here is that Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad has in fact already said that Shiites should vote for the constitution. It is admittedly not a formal fatwa.

In contrast, 150 Sunni Arab leaders met in Amman to sketch out a strategy for defeating the constitution in the October 15 referendum. They reject it in part because it allots them relatively little of Iraq's oil wealth, which would rather go to the Kurds and the Shiites.

Iran's foreign ministry rejected charges by the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, Saud al-Faisal, that Iran was meddling in Iraq.

Saud al-Faisal had accused Iran of moving substantial numbers of men, as well as goods and materiel, into Iraq. The charges mirror those of hard line Iraqi Sunnis, who have never reconsiled themselves to the Shiite majority in Iraq and so are always positing big Iranian population transfers into the south. This charge is frankly silly. Saud al-Faisal also let it it slip that Saudi Arabia and the United States actively helped Saddam Hussein to put down the Shiite uprising in spring of 1991. He said, "We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason." ' How else can this statement be interpreted?

Many Iraqi Shiites are still furious at the US for allowing the Baath regime to suppress the Shiite uprising, since some 60,000 lives were lost in the repression.
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Reader Response on Cole/Achcar

Billmon carefully considers the pros and cons and finally decides to call for US troops out now because otherwise there is a real danger of the US becoming a progressively more fascist society, and because the only way for the US to prevent an all-out Iraqi civil war is to kill on a massive scale.

Jonny Bakho writes



'I read your column daily and I especially enjoyed your exchange with Gilbert Achcar.

Lost in the Exchange: Your position and Gilbert's position are much closer to each other than to the policy of Mr Bush. I find it troubling that Bush policy in Iraq is undiscussed and unmentionable? by the press.

Apparently (he never discusses details), Mr Bush believes US troops will still be in Iraq 10 years from now in permanent basis we are constructing in Iraq. Mr Bush has NO intention of calling for a "withdrawal on a short timetable of almost all US and Coalition ground troops from Iraq" as you suggest. Unfortunately, most Americans do not realize that Bush has no plan to leave Iraq this because the press rarely/never mentions it.

Even IF Mr Bush were to take the extreme position of "bring them home now", it would take a year to bring about the orderly withdrawal of US troops. In practice, your call for a "short timetable" and Gilbert's call for "get out now" are little different from each other given logistical considerations. Each would require a change in Bush Political Policy. Each would elevate potential Political solutions to Iraq above the military solution Bush is trying to impose.

Both of you are calling for a major reversal of current Bush Iraq policy (which is not working). The failure of the Bush policy and his unwilliness to consider changes needs to be the primary focus, not minor quibbles between "out now" and "short timetable". If you would compare your Policy Proposal to Bush Policy and the Achcar Proposal, this would be more clear to your readers, especially those who prefer to highlight the differences in those opposed to Bush policy than the similarities. Either your Proposal or Gilbert's would require change in direction and move US policy in the same direction. The US really needs to have an open debate about Iraq policy but it is difficult because Mr Bush NEVER reveals the details of his policy. '

Jonny Bakho


Another reader writes:



' Gilbert Achcar is naive as to what it takes to achieve a war of movement, as you insist. In Afghanistan the vehicle of choice of the Taliban were 4x4 pickup trucks, which could hold a few armed men or sometimes had a heavy weapon mounted. These were called "Afghan Panzers," because they were much more useful and ubiquitous than the Soviet armored vehicles left lying around.

Another good example was the Japanese "Sitzkrieg" in Malaya in 1941-2, where they invaded on the cheap by cramming infantry into innocuous-looking cargo ships and dumping them on the beaches. They proceeded to outmaneuver the British infantry and vehicle-riding troops by purloining thousands of bicycles, which like the Afghan Panzers were all-terrain vehicles. On good roads they outran the retreating British in the jungle and were able to bypass many strongpoints instead of waiting for their few tanks to come up.

It's foolish to measure armies of the Third World by Great Power standards. A lot of prognosticators wound up with egg on their faces when the Arab Nations were unable to defeat Israel in 1948, despite the British and French weapons that their militaries had been supplied with. As Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest said, the primary requirement for victory is to, "Get there first with the most men." It doesn't matter how you do it, so long as you're able to do it. '


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Saturday, September 24, 2005

Cobban Critique of Cole

My good friend Helena Cobban offers her own critique of my position on the need for some way of forestalling massive conventional civil war in Iraq in the aftermath of an Anglo-American withdrawal of ground troops.

She asks where a plan like mine has succeeded. I answer, Kosovo.

I don't want to be thin-skinned, but I have to object to the ad hominem approach of both Cobban and Achcar (below) in asking about my credentials to propose such plans. First of all, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, who headed the Department of Defense during and after the Iraq War, supposedly have such credentials, but they clearly had no idea whatsoever what they were doing. So security credentials are no guarantee of anything. Second, my thinking on these things generally tracks with that of scholars such as Barry Posen at MIT's Security Studies Program, with which I have an affiliation, by the way. Third, the details of how the US military would accomplish a task would of course be left to the military people, who are experts in their own world; but over-arching goals can usefully be suggested by civilian analysts. Finally, I'm not exactly innocent of military history.

Cobban mischaracterizes my plan insofar as what I propose is giving the new Iraqi army close air support of a sort that would allow it to face down conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone. There are now about 3000 Iraqi army troops that could and would fight in such a battle, and US air support would ensure decisive victories. The point of the US air forces and special ops is simply to support the Iraqi army; the special ops would have to be there to rescue any US crews that were shot down. The air bases could be in Kuwait in the south and in Kurdistan in the north. They would not be permanent. There are no such things as permanent bases. All of the bases I grew up on are gone. Bases are a political artefact, and depend on political agreements. If the Iraqis want them they will be there, if they don't, they won't. Look at the Philippines.

My plan does indeed suggest an abandonment of much of the country for the time being to local forces. The Anglo-American forces aren't able to stop local forces from taking over, anyway, though they can destroy the cities taken over, which is unlikely to make the people there pro-American or happy with the government in Baghdad, to say the least. The Shiite religious parties that control the central government also control much of the Shiite south, which is not therefore problematic. The problem with just letting go of a city like Mosul, with 80 percent Sunni Arab population and over a million inhabitants, is that it can become a base for the guerrillas and ultimately with enough bases they could close in on the government in Baghdad with conventional armies. At that point they look like the Serbian armies in Kosovo and I am saying we know what to do about such a threat and know we can do it.

My plan assumes that the unconventional guerrilla violence, with bombings and assassinations, will go on for some time and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Withdrawal of Coalition ground troops might put the Shiites and the Kurds in more of a mood to compromise with the neo-Baathists, Salafis and tribal forces now waging the guerrilla war, which could help.

The bottom line is that Iraq is fractured politically and militarily and a precipitate and complete withdrawal of Coalition forces would allow the outbreak of full-blown civil war among armed factions, which in turn would certainly pull in neighbors like Iran and Saudia Arabia. This scenario is not certain, but it is highly likely and the Iraqis I have brought it up with say the same thing. It is a potentiality that must be guarded against, since its consequences would be horrific. Simple withdrawal is not prudent because it does not so guard.
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Fadilah Calls for Defeat of Constitution


Ayatollah Muhammad Ya`qubi, the leader in Najaf of the Fadilah (Virtue) Party--which has a big political and social base in the southern port city of Basra--has called on his followers to reject the new constitution because it does not go far enough toward consecrating Islamic law as the law of the land. The Fadilah Party is a branch of the Sadr Movement, founded by Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999), which is known for its puritanism and zealotry. Ya`qubi is a rival of Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of the slain Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who leads a much bigger branch of the Sadr movement.

Fadilah did well in the Jan. 30 elections in Basra, and at one point, at least, had put together a coalition that gave it 21 seats on the 41-seat provincial council. The Telegraph seems to say that Fadilah was subsequently outmaneuvered and that Ya`qubi has been somewhat marginalized. (His main rival in the city is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary, the Badr Corps). Ya`qubi has a serious and somewhat bitter rivalry with Sistani and the Telegraph is mistaken to suggest that Sistani might talk him out of his opposition.

The British appear to be viewing Ya`qubi's opposition to the constitution, along with the recent crisis over the captured British military spies, as a sign that Basra could turn into another Fallujah and become a hotbed of anti-Coalition activities. I'm not sure when exactly the Anglo-American forces are going to realize this, but the entirety of Iraq outside Kurdistan is already more or less a "Fallujah" in the sense that they hate us and organize local militias and at most some proportion are putting up with foreign forces only out of Machiavellian calculation. Where any major political grouping finds the Coalition inconvenient, it would turn on them in a split second.

Nancy Youssef and Mohammed al Dulaimy of Knight Ridder report that


' The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods is proceeding at an alarming and potentially destabilizing pace.

Some Shiite Muslim residents in predominantly Sunni Muslim Baghdad neighborhoods are fleeing their homes because they say the country's violence and sectarian tensions have reached their front doors, forcing them to move into more homogenous communities.

Government officials and academic experts agree that the virtual expulsion of some ethnic groups from mixed communities is troubling and threatens the nation's stability, which depends on a degree of ethnic harmony. Some worry the purges are setting the early stages of civil war, saying that homogenous neighborhoods could become future battlegrounds in the capital.

Indeed, some government officials concede that insurgents, mainly Sunnis, are controlling parts of Baghdad.

"Civil war today is closer than any time before," said Hazim Abdel Hamid al Nuaimi, a professor of politics at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. "All of these explosions, the efforts by police and purging of neighborhoods is a battle to control Baghdad." '


The article, among the few in the mainstream press to recognize how bad things are in Baghdad, confirms the report I received from Baghdad last weekend about Sunni Arab guerrillas taking over entire districts of the capital.

Only between 4 and 10 percent of the fighters in Iraq are foreigners, and they are mostly Algerians, Syrians, Yemenis and Sudanese, not Saudis.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is shocked at the level of "fanaticism" in Iraq, which he did not expect, says Geoffrey Hoon. In the old days of the British Empire, the "fanaticism" in "natives" meant that they objected to being invaded and ruled by the British.

Reuters surveys guerrilla violence in Iraq on Friday
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Abdul Amir Younes Hussein Not Charged 5 Months Later

Arianna Huffington explores the case of CBS cameraman Abdul Amir Younes Hussein, who was detained by the US military after a car bombing in Mosul over 5 months ago. The US military maintains that he had a connection to the guerrilla movement. That may or may not be, but we cannot know unless he is charged, indicted and tried. The Pentagon is refusing to bring him to any kind of trial or even reveal the charges against him. He was briefly turned over to an Iraqi court, which did not find enough evidence to prosecute him. But then the US military reasserted its jurisdiction over him.

The severe weakening of the Bill of Rights under the Bush administration is a more fateful policy than the Iraq War or dealing with the hurricanes. The Republic can survive those disasters. The Republic cannot survive if its very foundation, the Constitution, is undermined. Bush has been kicking the pillars out from under it assiduously for nearly 5 years now, and soon nothing will be left but the imperial presidency. Even if Hussein is not a US citizen, it is un-American to hold him forever with no formal charges or trial.
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Achcar Replies

Gilbert Achcar replies to my posting of 9/23 on the undesirability of an immediate and complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq:



' Let me begin this second open letter to you by thanking you, first of all, for welcoming my previous one on your blog in a most democratic and friendly spirit. The reason why I am reacting for the second time to your comments is twofold. On the one hand, of course, it is because you are addressing again the issue of the withdrawal of US forces, to which, as a dedicated antiwar activist, I am very sensitive. On the other hand, if I do feel the need to reply to you in particular, while there are so many other articles posted or published every day with stands close to yours, it is because I take your arguments more seriously than most, as do many of your readers.

I have read today your reply to Michael Schwartz’s piece, which I regarded also as an indirect response to my previous rejoinder. To tell you the truth, I am even more surprised than when I read your ten points a month ago. The reason for my surprise relates, of course, to the arguments which you put forward. But it is also due to the fact that you chose the eve of an antiwar demonstration that promises to be extremely large (in light of the change of mood of the US population on the Iraq issue) to make points that – unwillingly, I am sure – echo Bush’s speech at the Pentagon yesterday (Sept. 22) trying to pre-empt the antiwar movement.

You point one more time to your experience in the region – “I lived in Lebanon in the early years of the civil war. … I have seen how these situations go out of control, with my own eyes” – in a way that may sound like an “appeal to (your own) authority.” Let me then reply to you, in my capacity as a Lebanese-born colleague, having a first-hand experience of the war in his country of origin from its very first sparks in 1975, through the Syrian intervention and up to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut, and their immediate aftermath. I shall start with your arguments about Iraq itself.

You wrote: “Iraq is not now having a conventional civil war, in which you’d have militias fielding 2,000 or 3,000 men against one another and vying over territory. If such a civil war broke out, of course the US military could stop it. A few AC-130s and helicopter gunships could scatter the infantry battalions.”

I am rather baffled at your confidence in asserting opinions on military issues. But let me assume that your expertise on military matters matches your expertise in Middle East history and politics. Even then, since you admitted, in your reply to Hitchens, your “lack of experience in Iraq,” you ought to be more cautious, I believe, in asserting opinions that require, at the very least, some knowledge of the terrain. Any person that has been to Iraq would tell you that, aside from the mountainous Kurdish area, this country is as flat as can be, made of cities and villages separated by vast stretches of desert or semi-desert land. In such terrain, you cannot have “infantry battalions” moving to invade an enemy’s territory unless they are equipped with appropriate military vehicles, especially tanks, and benefit from air cover. None of the Arab Sunni militias seems to have these capacities: only the Kurdish forces and the Iraqi regular army possess them to a certain degree (more the vehicles than air means, since the US purposely refuses to equip the Iraqi army with such weapons in order to remain “indispensable”).

Your scenario whereby “Ramadi and Samarra mount a large militia that marches on Baghdad (and) hooks up with Sunni Arab fighters in West Baghdad” is irrelevant to Iraqi conditions. This kind of “war of movement” is very unlikely in present-day Iraq, precisely because it takes not “militias fielding 2,000 or 3,000 men,” but very regular-like land-air military forces with a centralized command. Arab Sunni forces, which are highly heterogenous, would be crushed if they tried to get into a war of movement, having to fight on two fronts against the Kurds and the Shiites, taking hold of the “regular” army. What is much more likely and already happening in Iraq with respect to “civil war” (putting aside attacks against occupation troops) – either in a low-intensity or in an increasingly intensive form – are two kinds of violence: stealth attacks of the suicide-attack type, already at their utmost; and urban warfare in mixed areas.

Occupation troops have proved completely ineffective in preventing the first type and one can easily argue that their very presence makes suicide-attacks much easier to organize, as Michael Schwartz convincingly argued. And if ever some Sunni militia were planning “to kill the leaders of the elected government or Grand Ayatollah Sistani,” as you put it, it is definitely not the presence of US troops that would prevent it from trying, as suicide-attackers have proved capable of inflicting heavy casualties on US forces themselves within their own military camps!

As for the second type, it has dramatically increased and is still increasing day after day under the occupation: Arab Sunni militias are taking hold of some of the key Sunni-majority areas, and committing exactions against Shiite minorities. Arab Shia militias have also begun – though on a lesser scale due to Sistani’s strict attitude against sectarian retaliations – to commit exactions against Sunnis in Shia-majority areas. US methods for dealing with this second type of violence in Sunni areas, whether applied by US forces alone or along with Iraqi forces acting as their auxiliaries, rank among the clearest examples of counterproductive measures, as the experiences of Falluja and now Tal Afar prove. Both operations were followed by a dramatic increase in the level of daily violence in Iraq.

One could reasonably argue, as many already have, that the overall effect of a withdrawal of occupation forces would not be more violence, but less violence and an incentive for conflicting factions to settle for a compromise. Nevertheless, I believe it is only fair to acknowledge that no one can really tell what would happen after the occupation ends. If we admit that we cannot prophesy the future, we cannot then support a continued occupation on the basis of a purely hypothetical assumption, given that what we do know is that: 1) the worse-case scenario would only be a result brought by the occupation itself, and gets more likely the longer the occupation continues; 2) “divide and rule” is the oldest imperial recipe of them all; and 3) imperial powers have a terrible historical record in “pacifying” other lands.

Anyone aware of the record of imperialism, especially citizens of the occupiers’ countries who ought to know what their governments have been up to, should be demanding the withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq, and surely not giving credence to the pretexts used to prolong the occupation – under whichever form. This last remark refers, of course, to your assertion that “the US [or somebody, and unfortunately that means the US] has a duty to maintain a couple of air bases in the area along with some Special Ops forces to forestall a Himalayan tragedy in the near to medium term.”

Let me now come to the “lessons of history” part of your arguments. You write that when it seemed like “Phalangists were about to lose” in Lebanon, in 1976 “Syria came in and stopped the big battles and saved the Maronite Christians. … The Syrians used their tanks to stop the fighting.” Your memory is faulty here. When Syrian troops entered Lebanon in June 1976, with a US and Israeli green light, they indeed saved the Phalangists and their allies from defeat in the mountains, but that was at the cost of adding the much heavier war between Syrian forces and the Palestinian-Lebanese coalition to the continued war between the Phalangist forces and that coalition, without stopping the latter.

Instead of your simplistic summary – “the Syrians came in and stopped the big battles” – the truth of the matter is that the Lebanese war saw, from then on, some of its biggest battles – in the mountains, the Beqaa and the South – and some of its worse massacres. For example, the one in the Palestinian camp of Tell Zaatar in August 1976, which Phalangists invaded, thanks to the Syrian intervention (a precedent to Sabra and Shatila, committed under Israeli cover).

Syrian forces were headed into a quagmire in Lebanon, proving unable to suppress the resistance of the Palestinian-Lebanese alliance, had it not been for the political accord concluded between the Syrian regime and Yasir Arafat under Saudi sponsorship in October 1976. Only then did Lebanon enter into a prolonged period of truce with Syrian forces deploying peacefully in the areas that were controlled by the Palestinian-Lebanese alliance. The equivalent for Iraq would be an agreement to be concluded between the contending Iraqi forces, accepting the indefinite presence of US troops in their country (putting aside the huge difference between the perception of fellow Arab Syrians in Lebanon and the utterly alien US troops in Iraq). Such an agreement is very unlikely, to put it mildly!

You then add: “When civil war broke out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it left a million dead, displaced 5 million persons from the country, and left millions more displaced internally. Iraq is similar in population size and in ethnic and ideological complexity to Afghanistan. A full scale civil war could be equally devastating to Iraq.” There is definitely a problem, here again, with your record of events: it was not the “civil war” that was most devastating to Afghanistan in the 80’s, but the Soviet occupation of that country trying to “pacify” it! This is a most boomeranging argument. In light of the “civil war,” Taliban rule, etc., that continued after Soviet troops were out, should one have argued, in your view, for the continued Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, as preferred by the Kabul government? Or maybe did you want them replaced by US troops already back then? Of course, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, reparations and international assistance under UN supervision might have been helpful, but surely we wouldn’t have called for the Soviet Union to continue its occupation.

Most surprising is your conclusion: “But frankly I think it would be selfish to just bust into Iraq (which 75 percent of Americans supported), turn it upside down, set it on a course toward civil war, and then abruptly pick up our marbles and go home altogether. We did that in Afghanistan after 1989, and it did not turn out well for us.”

Since “we” in your final sentence only makes sense if it refers to Soviet troops, I am wondering, Juan, if you were some kind of hawkish anti-Gorbachev Stalinist in 1989? Joke aside, I find it odd that you worry about being selfish, but yet raise the argument about the dangers of $20 a gallon gasoline in order to justify the continued presence of US forces in Iraq. At no point did you refer to the will of the main people concerned: the Iraqis themselves. On this score, if we assume that the overwhelming majorities of the Kurds and the Arab Sunnis have symmetrically opposed positions on the presence of occupation troops, this would leave us with the Arab Shiites who are clearly divided on the matter, between those who agree on the temporary presence of foreign troops and those who want them out immediately.

I won’t try to assert that an increasing majority of the Shiites are for the latter position, not due to a lack of arguments, but because it amounts again to a vain guessing game. It should be sufficient that there is definitely no consensus on the occupation among Iraqis, and that a very substantial portion of the Iraqi population, at the very least, wants occupation forces out – including the overwhelming majority of those in whose territory occupation forces are most active militarily – to induce every democratic-minded person to join the marchers in demanding that occupation troops be brought home now.

With my best regards,

Gilbert '




Cole Responds

Dear Gilbert:

I am deeply in your debt for all your kindnesses, sharing of important translations, and critique of my own work. As Proverbs 27:17 says, "Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens his friend's countenance." As with cutting oneself shaving, having one's countenance sharpened isn't always painless, but one has to be grateful for anything that ends up making one sharper. Certainly, your experience, knowledge and acumen make you a pleasure to debate on these crucial issues.

I suppose I do want to underline that what I have called for is the withdrawal on a short timetable of almost all US and Coalition ground troops from Iraq. The difference between that and calling for all US military presence to leave is not insignficant, but it is also not perhaps the most important gulf that could be imagined. As for my having reiterated my position on the eve (now the day) of a major peace rally in Washington, I am not sure what it has to do with anything. I am speaking to everyone at my web log, not just the peace movement. I am not a pacifist. I believe in collective security, which involves the judicious use of force where there is UNSC consensus on the need for it. And I think the US peace movement will be more effective, and more useful to the Democratic Party, if it adopts a realistic and nuanced position rather than just chanting "US out Now!"

As with all major disputes, our disagreement has to do with premises rather than the details of historical analogies. Basically, I do not accept that the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq would suddenly result in peace. This is because of my own analysis of what the fighting is about. Whatever its past as a hotbed of Arab nationalism, Iraqi political identity has now become increasingly fractured and based on sectarian and linguistic markers. The Sunni Arab elites believe that they have been unjustly demoted to the lowest of the low in Iraqi society. They believe that they are the majority, and that a lot of the supposed Shiite Iraqis are really just Iranians who flooded across the border. They believe that the new constitution will leave them with 5 percent of the country's oil and other natural resources, which is completely unacceptable to them.

The United States precipitated the demotion of the Sunni Arabs with its invasion. Mr. Bremer abetted it by dissolving the Iraqi army and acquiescing in the firing of some 17,000 former Baath Party members from government positions (including simple school teachers). Having precipitated a Shiite-Kurdish ascendancy in Iraqi politics, the US has very possibly set Iraq on a course to civil war that will run regardless of whether the US is there or not. The question now is not just occupation (which will end sooner or later), but who will rule Iraq and how. The current answer is that the Shiite religious parties will do so, with the Kurds as junior partners and their own semi-autonomy, and that virtually all Iraqi petroleum proceeds will be in the hands of the Da'wa Party, SCIRI, and the two Kurdish parties.

This answer is unacceptable to the Sunni Arabs, whether they are neo-Baathists or Salafis or just local tribesmen. The Shiite religious parties and the Kurds have shown no ability or willingness to reach out to and reassure any significant group among the Sunni Arabs. The Sunni Arabs include the former Baath officer corps. They have access to plenty of money and they know where 250,000 tons of missing munitions are stashed. They can fight for a decade or more, and have every reason to do so.

If the US just up and leaves now, the Sunni Arabs will consolidate their military assets and attempt to take and hold territory. This move will create a condition of dual sovereignty, i.e. a revolutionary situation and possibly large-scale civil war. I don't believe, by the way, that they will seek or accept partition. They want a significant role in Iraq as a whole. They may settle for something less than dominance, but they are simply not going to accept being reduced to a poor, powerless and despised minority.

I disagree with you entirely that Sunni Arab militias cannot or will not move out from the Sunni cities in the west and the north to hook up with those in Baghdad because they lack armored vehicles and air cover. In the absence of the US, the Sunni Arab militias would not need air cover because the Iraqi government has no functioning air force. Moreover, they do not need armored vehicles because the new Iraqi military has only a rudimentary set of armored units. They could easily descend on the capital (in used cars!), and the flatness of the terrain would aid them to do so. There would certainly be a "war of movement" as you put it, and it would be happening even as we speak if the US military did not forestall it. Neighborhood-based militias in conditions of civil war attempt to take over more districts of their city and also expand to take territory outside it. As you know better than I, the Palestinians in West Beirut went down to Damour, a Christian town south of the capital, and conducted a massacre there in January of 1976. Sunni Arab militias in Iraq would behave in exactly the same way if the Americans were not there to stop them. As it is, the ones in Latifiyah have targetted Shiites in the area.

Without the US, I fear I believe that Ibrahim Jaafari, his cabinet, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and other elected Iraqi officials would be simply taken out and shot by the Sunni Arab militiamen. I have not heard any convincing arguments as to how the Shiites could prevent that development (they cannot even assert control over Baghdad districts near the Green Zone!) or as to why the Sunni Arab fighters would not or could not accomplish it.

As for our disagreements about Lebanon and Afghanistan, they have to do with the exact timeline of which one speaks. The Syrians invaded in 1976, and they prevented a Palestinian/Sunni/Druze victory over the Phalangists. It is true that they did not stop the fighting overnight. Indeed, they never did stop all the fighting (I am quite bitter toward Hafez al-Asad because I believe he deliberately kept the Lebanese pot boiling). But I was in Lebanon 1978-79 and aside from the brief Syrian bombardment of East Beirut in fall of 1978, which did not involve much in the way of casualties, there were no big battles going on then. So in two years the hot civil war had indeed subsided substantially. It is often now forgotten that by 1981-1982 the Lebanese economy was roaring back and the country was moving toward normalcy, when the Likud government in Israel launched a brutal and largely unprovoked attack on the country, throwing into more years of instability.

Anyway, the point of the analogy to Lebanon is precisely the one that you refuse to admit, which is that local militias can grow into armies that fight for territory on a national scale. There is enough sectarian will, enough militia organization, and enough munitions and money in Iraq for these purposes. That the terrain is flat is irrelevant or even enabling.

As for Afghanistan, I see it differently from you. The problems began not with the Soviet Occupation (which was horrible) but with the Communist coup. It began a decade-long struggle among Afghans over whether their political identity would be based on Marxism or on Islamism. These ideologies intersected linguistic, regional and class divisions, with Marxism appealing mainly to Uzbeks and Tajiks and especially in urban areas, and Islamism organizing Pushtuns and especially rural populations in the south. The Soviets supported the former, the Americans the latter. The Americans put at least $5 billion into Islamist coffers and ensured that the civil war would be prolonged. That is why I say that "we" were a party to the Afghan civil war, and that "our" walking away from the country in the late Bush senior period was irresponsible and (as it turned out) dangerous. The US should certainly have worked with the UN to at least try to see that Afghanistan was rebuilt and stabilized, rather than surrendering it to the tender mercies of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and Usamah Bin Laden. To be fair, one reason for which the Bush administration walked away was that it was a quid pro quo in the agreement they reached with the Soviets, who only consented to leave if the US would stop funding the Mujahidin.

As for the Iraqis' desires with regard to a continued US military presence, they clearly have mixed opinions, as you say. But the elected leaders have not called for a precipitate withdrawal. I have no reason to believe that Massoud Barzani, Jalal Talabani, Ibrahim Jaafari, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim came to power through fraud in the January 30 elections. The Iraqi political elite more surely represents is public than any other government in the Arab world. Talabani speaks of a two-year timetable for US presence in the country. Jaafari has repeatedly said that it is not time for the US to leave, but one of his advisers has proposed a gradual withdrawal of Coalition forces from the cities. If Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wanted the US out, he would give a fatwa, and I believe that the US would not be able to stay if that happened. So far, the Sunni Arabs (15? percent of the population) and the Sadrists (hard to know what percentage they represent) want the US out immediately and completely. As you yourself have kindly pointed out, about 120 parliamentarians have called for it out of 275 last I heard.

So my position, that it would be irresponsible of the US to simply abandon Iraq altogether and immediately, is actually fairly similar to the consensus of the elected Iraqi leadership. If anything, I am more eager to see US ground troops out on a short timetable than they seem to be.

cheers

Juan
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