Cole in Salon and Truthdig

In Salon.com today, I ask "Did Bush plan to Bomb al-Jazeera?" And present new evidence that Rumsfeld considered the Arabic satellite station's reporting to be a form of murder.

My article on Rumsfeld's complicity with Saddam Hussein when he was using chemical weapons is at Truthdig.com, a new site, the force behind which is veteran journalist and truth-teller Bob Scheer.


Cole will be travelling the next week or so. Blog entries will be made, but perhaps at unpredictable times. Email contact chancy. I've saved the Achcar & Shalom editorial, for which I'm grateful, for Thursday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wilkerson: Cheney May be a War Criminal

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Colin Powell, told the BBC that Vice President Dick Cheney may be guilty of war crimes for arguing that all restrictions on torturing prisoners should be done away with.

The Wilkerson transcript is here. Money grafs:

>BBC: But you're talking about the abuse - the alleged abuse - by American forces aren't you?

I am, and I concluded that we had had an impassioned debate in the statutory process. And in that debate, two sides had participated: one that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions and the other which said no, Geneva should prevail and the president walked right down the middle.

He made a decision that Geneva would in fact govern all but al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda look-alike detainees. Any other prisoners of course would be governed by traditional methods, international law, Geneva and so forth.

>BBC: Who was calling for doing away with all the normal practices if you like?

Who is right now very publicly lobbying the congress of the United States, advocating the use of terror? The vice-president of the United States . . .

>BBC: And that question of detainee abuse - are you saying that the implicit message allowing it to happen was sanctioned by Dick Cheney - it came from his office?

Well you see two sides of this debate in the statutory process. You see the side represented by Colin Powell, Will Taft, all arguing for Geneva.

You see the other side represented by Yoo, John Yoo from the Department of Justice, Alberto Gonzales - you see the other side being argued by them and you see the president compromising.

Then you see the secretary of defence moving out in his own memorandum to act as if the side that declared everything open, free and anything goes, actually being what's implemented.

And so what I'm saying is, under the vice-president's protection, the secretary of defence moved out to do what they wanted to do in the first place even though the president had made a decision that was clearly a compromise . . .

> BBC: If what you say is correct, in your view, is Dick Cheney then guilty of a war crime?

Well, that's an interesting question - it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is - for whatever it's worth - an international crime as well.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Militiamen Terrorize Sunni Arabs
Khalilzad Agrees to Talk to Sunni Guerrillas

Now terrorists are killing Christian (Chaldo-Assyrian) politicians.

The New York Times seems to have become convinced of the credibility of Sunni Arab charges that Shiite religious militiamen have infiltrated the new Iraqi army and security forces, and are conducting a campaign of murder against Sunni Arabs. Since the Bush administration is heavily depending on the Iraqi army and security forces to make Iraq safe as US troops withdraw, the implication is that the Sunni Arabs don't have much of a future. The same militia-infiltrated forces in Najaf and Karbala have now taken over security details from the Marines, who have departed those cities.

On the other hand, Sunni Arab guerrillas are killing and kidnapping Shiite pilgrims.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in an interview on ABC on Tuesday, said that he was willing to talk to leaders of the Iraqi guerilla movement save for two groups. One was Saddam loyalists and the other was followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Since there are virtually no Saddam loyalists, that exclusion is not important. Since the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wouldn't talk to Khalilzad, and are a small group, that doesn't matter much either.

Most of the 36 guerrilla groups in Iraq are Iraqi nationalists, Sunni Arab natioanlists, or local Salafi fundamentalists. If Khalilzad can open lines of communication to them, that would be all to the good. Coming on the heels of his announcement that he has been authorized to talk to Iran, it suggests a new pragmatism by the Bush administration in Iraq. These policies sound more like traditional State Department policies, and not at all like the kind of hard line that the civilian leadership of the Defense Department keeps pushing. Khalilzad is making all the right announcements. Let us see how the actual negotiations go.

As Robert Dreyfus implies, Khalilzad is building on the momentum of the Cairo Conference, which made concessions to the Sunni Arabs.

The US military has been planting stories with a positive spin in Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers, and paying for the placement via the Lincoln Group. The Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, has a newspaper called al-Mu'tamar, which has run the articles as though they were news. Other editors could tell that they were editorials, but did not know they were coming from the Pentagon.

Of course, some of these "positive" articles in Arabic (which are not inaccurate in detail but simply grossly one-sided) may then get translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the CIA, the articles from which in turn are often picked up by BBC World Monitoring; or Iraqi bloggers may put out the information and perspective so that it gets into English. The Pentagon is forbidden from planting articles in the US press, but this method gets around the prohibition.

The other thing that can be done is to pass an idea for a psy-ops article over to the British military, which then places it in the US press covertly, not being forbidden by UK law from doing so. The Guardian reported that the British military had placed newspaper articles in the US press in the run-up to the Iraq war. The same arrangement gets around laws barring the USG from spying on Americans; they can just have the British MI6 do it and then share the information back with the US government.

Too bad Jeff Jarvis, who is always insisting on having good news from Iraq, can't read Arabic-- these articles are just what he seems to be looking for. Maybe the Lincoln group would agree to send him the English originals. Oh, but Jarvis has already denied that Iraqi writers might be being manipulated by US psy-ops . . .

By the way, Jarvis now claims he did not support the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, and for proof he offers an NPR item that he quoted. OK, if he says so, I accept it and am sorry if I pegged him wrong.

I take it he now regrets that Bush appointed Allawi transitional prime minister, and is hoping that Allawi's list does poorly in the Dec. 15 election. He hasn't said so.

But he is being typically over-dramatic when he says I had no basis for the inference. I went back and read his blog for summer-fall 2004 when Allawi was in power. There are constant demands that the press do "positive" stories about Iraq then. Wouldn't you conclude that that was a sign he was happy with the transitional government? And then he says thank God for the blogger, Omar.


And Omar publishes this guest opinion in November of 2004:

On November 8, 2004, the Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi rightfully realizing that there could be no political or diplomatic solution with the insurgents in Fallujah, he ordered the Iraqi armed forces to storm Fallujah and he called upon the coalition forces to assist.

Allawi and the majority of Iraqis, including a great number of Fallujan citizens know that the Zarkawis and the Iraqi insurgents must be eliminated in order to pave the way for a successful and democratic election process in January 2005.

. . . In the week leading to the American election, the Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan remarked that Fallujah should not be resolved through military action but through a political process . . . Once again, Kofi Annan is on the wrong side of the Iraqis. The Iraqi-American military operation must continue to the bitter end of ridding Fallujah of the extremists and enemies of Iraq, and thereby sleuth once and for all the anima of Saddam.

Dr. Joseph Ghougassian was US Ambassador to Qatar and Advisor in CPA/DoD. His email is Zena92029@yahoo.com

Posted by Omar @ 19:31

So Jarvis is pushing this site, and this site is publishing praise of Allawi for his complicity in leveling Fallujah. But Jarvis now says he didn't approve of Allawi. But he doesn't mention the Fallujah campaign, that I could see, at his blog. And he has only bile for Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend who were anti-Allawi. But he praised sites that praised Allawi. But he was against Allawi.

In fact his blog is deliberately hard to decipher as to its politics, except that he announces himself in sync with Andrew Sullivan and Bill Safire but then he says he is a Democrat but the Democrats complain to him when he blasts Kerry as indecisive . . .

If I'm accused of not being able to get a clear picture of where he stands, I plead guilty. But it is because he is his own unreliable narrator.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Khalilzad to talk to Iranians

Monday in Iraq was characterized by the usual mayhem, much of it with a dark sectarian character. Two prominent members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and a third politician from the Association of Muslim Scholars (hard line Sunni) were assassinated in Baghdad. South of the capital, two Britons of South Asian heritage who had gone on pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbala were killed in an ambush. northern Iraq, 6 Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped.

In Baqubah four US troops were wounded by a suicide bombing. In Baiji, US troops opened fire when a bomb went off, and they killed a leader of the Shamar tribe, among the larger and more powerful in Iraq. Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir is from the Shamar. So too was one of the suicide bombers who blew up the Radisson SAS in Amman recently. Killing Shamar shaikh = not good.

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad is going to start direct talks with the Iranians.

Say what? Wasn't Scott Ritter saying only last winter that a Bush military attack on Iran was in the offing? What has changed?

Well

1. The security situation in Iraq is deteriorating over time.

2. The Shiite religious parties won the Jan. 30 elections, which was not what Bush had hoped for.

3. The Neocons are going to jail or given sinecures, and their star is falling faster than the Chicxulub meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

Veteran journalist Jim Lobe has put it all together in a tight analysis I haven't seen elsewhere.

It is the return of Realism in Washington foreign policy. You need the Iranians, as I maintain, for a soft landing in Iraq? So you do business with the Iranians. This opening may help explain why Ahmad Chalabi went to Tehran before he went to Washington, and why he was given such a high-level (if unphotographed) reception in Washington.

Likewise, it helps explain the Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League, the results of which were an effort to reach out to the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Iraqi government even recognized that it was legitimate for the guerrillas to blow up US troops! This is a startling admission for a government under siege with very few allies. But it recategorizes the Sunni Arab leaders from being terrorists to being a national liberation force. You could imagine dealing with, and bringing in from the cold, mere nationalists. Terrorists are poison.

The Neocons began by wanting to destroy the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and their Baath Party, and then going on to overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran. They inducted Bush and Cheney into this over-ambitious and self-contradictory plan, which depended on putting the Shiite Iraqis in power in Baghdad. But wouldn't the Sunni Arabs violently object? Wouldn't the Iraqi Shiites establish warm relations with Tehran.

Of course. The Neocons kept getting their promoters to proclaim how brilliant they are. But Wolfowitz isn't exactly well published as an academic, and Feith is notoriously as thick as two blocks of wood. Their plan was stupid. It is hard to escape the conclusion that they are, as well.

And now the stupid plan has collapsed, as anyone could have foreseen (I did, in 2002). And Realism is reasserting itself.

The two beneficiaries of the 180 degree turn by Bush's ship of state toward the fabled shores of Reality? The Neo-Baath of Sunni Iraq and the ayatollahs in Tehran.
But who cares? If the US dealing with them can get our troops home and prevent a regional war that screws up the whole world, it will be well worth it.

Ambassador Khalilzad has all along been the most pragmatic of the Neocons. There was even a time in the mid-1990s when he was willing to deal with the Talaban to get a gas pipeline built from Turkmenistan. His pragmatism (which the Neocons may well castigate as a lack of principle) will stand him in good stead in his talks with Tehran. The thing you always worry about is that it is already too late.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Air Power to Replace Infantry in Iraq;
Distant President Trapped in Utopianism

Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh is reporting in the New Yorker that the Bush administration has decided to draw down ground troops in Iraq. Knowledgeable observers strongly suspect that this step would produce a meltdown and possibly even civil war in Iraq (which could become a regional war). Bush's strategy may be to try to control the situation using air power.

Readers and colleagues often ask me why a Shiite majority and the Kurdish Peshmergas couldn't just take care of the largely Sunni Arab guerrillas. The answer is that the Sunni Arabs were the officer corps and military intelligence, and the more experienced NCOs, and they know how to do things that the Shiites and Kurds don't know how to do. The Sunni Arabs were also the country's elite and have enormous cultural capital and managerial know-how. Sunni Arab advantages will decline over time, but they are there for this generation, and no one should underestimate the guerrilla leadership. If the Americans weren't around, all those 77 Hungarian T-72 tanks that the new Iraqi military now has would be in guerrilla hands so fast it would make your head spin.

Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim complained to the Washington Post that the US itself was holding back the Iraqi army (which seems to be mostly Kurds and Shiites) from going after the Sunni Arab guerrillas in a concerted way. But this prospect is the other reason that the Shiites and the Kurds can't just take care of the Sunni Arabs. If one isn't careful, it would turn into a hot civil war on ethnic grounds (I don't mean 38 dead a day, I mean it would be ten times that). And if the Shiites and Kurds massacre Sunni Arabs in the course of fighting the guerrillas, the Saudi, Jordanian and Sunni Syrian publics are not going to take that lying down and volunteer fighters would flock to Iraq in real numbers.

This diary over at Daily Kos discusses both Hersh's reporting on this military issue and what his sources are saying about Bush and the White House.

Hersh reports that US Air Force officers are alarmed by the implication that Iraqi targeters may be calling down air strikes using US warplanes. I remember that Iraqi troops (mainly Kurds) were allowed to call down airstrikes in Tal Afar last August, and if my recollection serves, the Tal Afar operation may even have been conceived as an opportunity for Iraqi troops to get practice in doing so. They levelled whole neighborhoods of the Sunni Turkmen (many of whom had thrown in with Saddam in the old days).

The Air Force officers are right to be alarmed. It has been obvious to me for some time that US air power will be used to try to keep the guerrillas from taking over Iraq as the ground troops depart. This is why last August I argued for keeping some US Special Operations forces embedded with the new Iraqi army, since I felt that the US military should remain in control of the use of American air power (i.e. the laser targetting should be done by Navy Seals and others, not by Iraqis).

Likewise, I argued that the US should only make this airstrike capability available for defensive operations. Say that the 1920 Revolution Brigades got up a militia force to march on Hilla from Mahmudiyah, and the brigade made short work of the Iraqi infantry sent against it. In such a situation, the US should use air power to stop the neo-Baathists and Salafis from massacring the Shiites of Hilla. But the US Air Force should not be a toy in the hands of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who will most likely be the most powerful politician in Iraq come Dec. 16. If one keeps some Special Ops forces in Iraq, it would require a continued ability by the US to rescue them if anything went wrong, which is one reason both I and Congressman Murtha envisaged a continued over-the-horizon US presence in the region for a while.

But Hersh's sources in Washington strongly give the impression that George W. Bush is incapable of making coherent policy in Iraq, and is fixated on his legacy there 20 years down the line.

Even Bush allies such as former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, however, are already bringing his legacy into question. Allawi asserts that governmental abuse of human rights in Iraq today is even worse than in the time of Saddam. If yours truly had said something like that, Jeff Jarvis would have called me pond scum and Andrew Sullivan would have given me a Sontag award. Jarvis and Sullivan were big supporters of Allawi (who is alleged to have been involved in a terrorist attack in Baghdad in the 1990s that blew up a school bus full of children). So what do they have to say now that the bad news is coming from the secular, pro-American politicians and they aren't playing pollyanna any more? By the way, President Jalal Talabani rejected Allawi's charges, but then he heads the government that Allawi is critiquing.

Bush's legacy as a builder of democracy and promoter of rights in Iraq, all he has left going for him, was dealt another black eye by the emergence of a video that appears to show private security guards in Iraq firing at civilian vehicles for sport out on the road to the airport.

Hersh appeared on Wolf Blitzer on Sunday, and Wolf read out this quote from the New Yorker piece by Hersh:

" 'The president is more determined than ever to stay the course,' the former defense official said. 'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances." ' He said that the president had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said."

Hersh goes on to tell Blitzer that Bush disparages any information about Iraq that does not fit his preconceived notions, and that he feels he has a (perhaps divine) mission to bring democracy to the country. Hersh's inside sources paint a president who is detached and in the grip of profound utopian delusions, which Hersh charitably characterizes as "idealistic."

Congress really has to step in here. Senators and representatives should demand that Bush get the ground troops out without turning control of the US air force over to Shiite clerics like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Presidents cannot do anything without money, and Congress controls the money. The wiser and more knowledgeable heads on both sides of the aisle have to start telling Bush "No!" when he comes to them asking for another $100 billion so he can level another Sunni Arab city. He is counting on the public punishing "no" votes on military affairs. But the American public would at this point almost certainly be grateful for it. And apart from telling him "No!" they should put strict reporting requirements on how the money is used. For instance, only defensive operations should any longer be funded.

Let me finish with a word to W. As for your legacy two decades from now, George, let me clue you in on something--as a historian. In 20 years no Iraqis will have you on their minds one way or another. Do you think anyone in Egypt or Israel is still grateful to Jimmy Carter for helping bring to an end the cycle of Egyptian-Israeli wars? Jimmy Carter powerfully affected the destinies of all Egyptians and Israelis in that key way. Most people in both countries have probably never heard of him, and certainly no one talks about the first Camp David Accords anymore except as a dry historical subject. The US pro-Israel lobby is so ungrateful that they curse Carter roundly for all the help he gave Israel. Human beings don't have good memories for these things, which is why we have to have professional historians, a handful of people who are obsessed with the subject. And I guarantee you, George, that historians are going to be unkind to you. You went into a major war over a non-existent nuclear weapons program. Presidents' reputations don't survive things like that. Historians are creatures of documents and precision. A wild exaggeration with serious consequences is against everything they stand for as a profession. So forget about history and destiny and the divine will. You are at the helm of the Exxon Valdez and it is headed for the shoals. You can't afford to daydream about future decades.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rubaie: US will Withdraw Completely from Some Areas
Muqtada offers National Pact

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, national security adviser to the Iraqi government, said Saturday that "The American forces will soon turn over complete and total responsibility for security in a number of areas of the country to Iraqi forces." He said that a joint working committee was formed last summer toward that end. He expressed hope that there would be further turn-overs before the Dec. 15 elections, to deprive the guerrilla movement of its pretext for rejecting the political process, i.e. that it is unfolding under the shadow of foreign military occupation.

It is little noted in the US press that US troops have already withdrawn from the cities of Najaf and Karbala. American forces are also withdrawing from military bases in favor of Iraqis. The somewhat ill-fated US hand-over of Saddam's palace complex in Tikrit to the Iraqi government last week was part of this series of withdrawals (the ceremony took mortar fire).

Coalition forces are likely to withdraw from some 15 other Iraqi cities fairly soon. They appear to initially pull back to a garrison outside the city. But if things stay quiet, it is apparently envisaged by al-Rubaie and other Iraqi government figures that they will depart entire provinces. This process is probably problematic only in about 7 or 8 of Iraq's 18 provinces, where an American withdrawal might well result in a takeover by the neo-Baath and the Salafis, or in a civil war among Sunnis and Shiites. What to do about that in the absence of a well-trained, functioning Iraqi army, none of us really knows.

Al-Hayat: Shaikh Bashir Najafi, one of four Grand Ayatollahs in the Shiite holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad, expressed his support on Saturday for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite religiious coalition. Najafi, a Pakistani, is slightly junior to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who endorsed the UIA in the elections of last January, but who appears reluctant to do so this time around. Al-Najafi's endorsement is probably a way for the religious leadership in Najaf to make its preference known without having it be binding as a religious duty on the millions of Iraqi Shiites who are pledged blindly to obey (taqlid) Sistani on matters of religious law and comportment.

Ammar al-Hakim, the son of the UIA leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, said that if this list dominates parliament, it will form a government of national unity. He said that it was essential that the Sunni Arabs participate this time to produce a balanced government.

The General Congress of the Iraqi People [Sunni] called on Sunni clerics to support the Iraqi Concord Front, which comprises the most prominent Sunni Arab forces contesting the elections on December 15.

The Washington Post reports that gunmen in Basra kidnapped and killed Shaikh Nadir Karim, a Sunni cleric in the southern port city that is largely Shiite. He is the second Sunni cleric to be killed in a week. There are tens of thousands of Sunnis in Basra, and they have ever since the fall of Saddam felt extremely exposed. Many Shiites see them as having been Baathist supporters of Saddam.

Bombings in Samarra and Baghdad killed and wounded over a dozen persons.

Al-Hayat [Arabic URL]: Young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr on Saturday announced his "National Honor Pact" (Newt Gingrich has nothing on this guy). The pact included working to end the foreign military occupation of Iraq, gaining the release of the "sons of the noble Resistance" now in US custody, rejection of normalization of relations with Israel, and implementation of the debaathification law. Other planks are implementation of Islamic law, distribution of Iraq's wealth in accordance with need, and rejection of foreign interference in Iraqi affairs. He said that a Saturday-Sunday weekend off from work should be rejected [in favor of Thursday-Friday, which suits some Muslims better]. The sovereignty and unity of Iraq must be preserved. Judicial and security institutions must be independent. Iraqi loans must be forgiven, and any move to implement a loose federalism must be postponed.

He urged all of Iraq's political parties to adopt the Pact.


Ed Wong of the NYT has a super article on the state of play with regard to Muqtada. Having become part of the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, he had become a pivotal political voice. Muqtada wants a swift US withdrawal from Iraq. Although he speaks the language of pan-Islam and Sunni-Shiite ecumenism, his militiamen often kidnap an d/or kill Sunni Arabs they view as having been close to the Saddam regime.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Qaeda Plot Against Tourist Hotels in Morocco Busted Up
2 Suspects had fought in Iraq

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Moroccan security agencies said Saturday that they had foiled a attempt by al-Qaeda to attack buildings belonging to the government as well as hotels frequented by foreign tourists. Two of the plotters had Belgian citizenship but were of Moroccan heritage. They were Khalid Ouzigh and Muhammad Raha, and both of them had fought in Iraq against US forces there! Two others, Ibrahim Bin Shakroun and Muhammad Mazouz, had previously been held in the US detention center at Guantanamo.

One of the 18 was released. Those arrested were between 22 and 25 years of age and have been sent to a prison in Sale.

One security official said, "If it were not for the vigilance of our service and the cooperation with European nations, Morocco would have witnessed a bloody month . . . This is the most dangerous terrorist case in Morocco since the string of attacks that struck Casablanca in May 2003, since elements from abroad attempted to infiltrate the kingdom to prepare the assuaults."

The two Belgian Iraq veterans were apprehended in Casablanca. They had traveled to Morocco "to enlist members for the sake of creating a terrorist structure." The official alleged that Muhammad Raha had fought in Iraq, then lived in Syria, and maintains close relationships with radical Muslims in Morocco and in Europe." They wanted, he said, to create a cell of al-Qaeda in Morocco, then to head toward Algeria to contact the terrorist movements there.

Malikah Azara, the mother of one of the detainees, Umar Takhsawi, expressed surprise at his arrest. She said that there had been nothing in his comportment to provoke suspicion. But she admitted that he had changed recently, had grown a beard and begun buying "religious books."

Police said that the two former inmates at Guantanamo had been arrested when they were observed helping a member of al-Qaeda sneak into Morocco. (One supposes that it was one of the two Belgians. One suspects that former Gitmo prisoners in Morocco pretty much have live-in secret police, and if the jihadis coming from Iraq had one of these former prisoners as their contact, they were doomed the moment they set foot in Casa.)

It is really good news that the arrests were apparently made possible in part because of good cooperation between Morocco and European anti-terror agencies.

Reuters has a few more details.

A Moroccan judge remanded the 17 Muslim radicals arrested earlier in November for further depositions in early December. This is presumably an Agence France Presse report.

At least according to google.news, very few US newspapers picked up this story. I fear that nothing has been learned at all from September 11, and the failures of the US media pointed to by Tom Fenton are continuing on their merry way. The arrest of 17 al-Qaeda-type plotters who may have been going after tourist hotels should have been front page news in the United States. That they got combat experience fighting in Iraq is extremely worrisome and probably is a harbinger of the next generation of terrorist threats to the US and its allies. The sooner the US can get its gound troops out of Iraq, the sooner it will stop unwittingly training terrorists. This is one of those stories about the canary dying as the miner descends into the mine. If the rest of us miners don't hear about it, we're likely to go on down; and not come back up.

La Gazette du Maroc [in French] interviews Abdellatif Amrine, a Salafi arrested in a sweep after the May, 2003, bombings in Casablanca by al-Salafiyah al-Jihadiyah. He has recently been pardoned, and, like everyone in prison, says he was innocent. He is interesting on how it is a mistake to lump the various small radical Muslim groups together or to assume that they are linked. I had assumed that there were links between the Casablanca bombers and the Madrid cell, but he seems to be denying this. I found it interesting that in French Amrine refers to suicide bombers as "kamikazes." It is worth thinking about as a term of art that gets away from any connotation of it having some special link with Islam.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Guerrillas Made Key Demands of CIA at Cairo Conference


Al-Hayat says that [Arabic URL] informed sources maintained to it that the intelligence services of the Arab states, of Iraq, of the guerrilla movement in Iraq, and of the US, conducted discussions on the sidelines of the National Reconciliation Conference for Iraq held recently in Cairo, on how to isolate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his radical Salafi (fundamentalist Sunni) faction in Iraq.

Iraqi guerrilla groups such as "The Islamic Army," "The Bloc of Holy Warriors," and "The Revolution of 1920 Brigades" conveyed their conditions behind the scenes. (Despite the Islamist names of these groups, they are probably mostly neo-Baathist.) Among their demands are 1) working to end the foreign occupation, 2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising from the American invasion; 3) the release of prisoners; and 4) building political and military institutions that are not subservient to American and regional influence.

These guerrilla groups said they would never turn al-Zarqawi over to the Americans even if Washington promised to leave Iraq completely. They might, however, turn him over to a legitimate Iraqi government if the Americans were no longer there.

The Iraqi guerrilla groups maintain that al-Zarqawi's group is fabulously wealthy, and that he uses his wealth to entice other guerrilla groups to share their intelligence with him. He then bankrolls their operations against US troops.

They said that many Iraqi guerrillas are deeply dismayed at the al-Zarqawi group's tactic of targetting civilians and Shiites, and that significant numbers have deserted him to join the Iraqi group, The Islamic Army. Al-Zarqawi's "Qaeda in Mesopotamia" is angry about the desertions and refers to such Iraqis as "apostates." Nevertheless, The Islamic Army provides security to those who have left Zarqawi. Zarqawi is also deterred from killing the "apostates" because it would set the Sunni Arab guerrilla groups to fighting one another and "open the gates of hell." In fact, there had in the past been a few instances of reprisal killings by Zarqawi's men of those who switched groups, and the resulting tensions were so severe that Zarqawi concluded an agreement not to pursue and punish those who left his group to join another one.

The sources say that Zarqawi's ability to provide suicide bombers derives from his missionaries among the Jihadi Salafi groups. It also derives from his vast wealth.

The sources say that the guerrilla movement has not yet taken a stance toward the Cairo Agreements, and is waiting to see if they are implemented.

Cole: It struck many observers as very strange that the government of Ibrahim Jaafari accepted the demand for a timetable for Coalition troop withdrawal, and also acquiesced in the principle that guerrilla attacks on US troops were legitimate as a form of resistance to foreign occupation. Three important developments may explain Jaafari's flexibility here. First, his list has an election on Dec. 15, and he needs to burnish nationalist credentials. Second, his list now included the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who wants a quick US withdrawal and whose Mahdi Army has clashed with GIs. Third, we now know that back channel negotiations with the guerrilla movement were taking place in Cairo, and these provisions may have been an attempt to reach out to them and bring them in from the cold. Such a move would be in the interest not only of Jaafari, but also of the United States, and the latter may therefore not have protested very much about what were after all pretty painful agreements. (It seems to me unprecedented for a government fighting a guerrilla movement actually to acknowledge the legitimacy of the guerrilla group's attacks on it and its allies!) Al-Hayat thought that the timetable leading to US withdrawal in 2007 was actually put forward by Ambassador Khalilzad.

The tensions, over policy toward civilians and Shiites, and over defections from Zarqawi's group to Iraqi neo-Baathist ones, revealed in the al-Hayat article ring true; there have been some indications of these problems in previous press reporting.

I'm afraid, however, that the neo-Baathists want to take over Iraq, and are ruthless about the means, and that they will continue to want to do this after the US leaves.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ministry of Interior Moles Busted
Wave of Kidnappings, Killings in Mosul, Tikrit

Al-Zaman: American forces killed Shaikh Abdullah al-Ani, the preacher at the mosque in the town of Qaim, near the Syrian border. [This killing of a respected cleric will be causing us trouble for years to come.]

DPA: Iraqi authorities announced that they had busted up 3 terrorist cells operating in Baghdad. Two of them were being run by 2 officials of the Ministry of the Interior! The MoI in Iraq is equivalent to the US FBI, so this would be like having J. Edgar Hoover unwittingly employ at a high level members of the Weathermen bombers back in the 1960s. The third was being run by the head of an investment firm. You wonder if he was manipulating the market with his bombing targets. The cells were operating in the Ghazaliyah and al-Jihad districts of the capital. Although the announcement was probably made to show progress in identifying and breaking up terror cells, I don't find the news that the Baathists continue to penetrate the Iraqi government very hopeful. It reminds me too much of the ARVN officers who were secretly working for the other side in Vietnam.

Al-Zaman: Guerrillas killed a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party after kidnapping him in Mosul. The police commander of Ninevah Province announced that bombings had declined 80 percent in Mosul, whereas there had been a big jump in the number of kidnappings. On Wednesday guerrillas had kidnapped a cosmetic surgeon and his wife while they were on their way home.

In Suwayrah, Kut Province, two car bombs were discovered before they could be detonated. (Kut is in southeastern Iraq and has an overwhelmingly Shiite population, who are on the lookout for Baathist saboteurs and willingly turn them in. This willingness is the main difference in the number of bombings in the south as opposed to the center-north of the country.)

In Baghdad Kadhim Talal Husain, assistant dean at the School of Education at Mustansiriyah University, was assassinated with his driver in the Salikh district. Guerrillas killed an engineer, Asi Ali, from Tikrit. They also killed Shaikh Hamid 'Akkab, a clan elder of a branch of the Dulaim tribe in Tikrit. His mother was also killed in the attack. Two other Dulaim leaders have been killed in the past week and a half.

Guerrillas near Hawijah launched an attack that left 6 dead, including 4 Iraqi soldiers. One of them was from the Jubur tribe and was deputy commander of the Hawijah garrison.

Two hundred members of the Batawi clan of the Dulaim demonstrated in Baghdad on Friday, protesting the killing of their clan elder, Shaikh Kadhim Sarhid and 4 of his sons, by gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms. (This is a largely Sunni Arab clan, and some Sunni observers have accused Shiite elements in the government of being behind the assassination; it is more likely the work of Sunni Arab guerrillas punishing the Batawi leaders for cooperating with the Dec. 15 elections.)

Al-Zaman: The Iraqi High Electoral Commission on Friday denied a request of the Debaathification Commission to exclude 51 individuals from running on party lists in the Dec. 15 elections on grounds of having been sufficiently involved in Baath activities to warrant their being excluded from civil office. The Commission said it had no legal grounds for such an exclusion.

This item is a small one and easily missed. But in my view it is highly significant. The Debaathification Commission had been pushed by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress very hard, and had pushed many Sunni Arabs into the arms of the guerrillas. Chalabi has been increasingly marginalized within Iraq, however, despite his ties of clientelage with Washington and Tehran. He is no longer in the dominant Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance, and won't have many seats in the new parliament. Some 2,000 junior officers of the old Baath army have been recalled to duty in recent months, something Chalabi would have blocked if he could have. Now the Electoral Commission is refusing to punish people for mere past Baath Party membership. The situation in Iraq is only going to get better this way. If someone committed a crime against humanity, prosecute the person. If he or she did not, then they should have all the same rights as other Iraqis.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a key eyewitness in the trial of Saddam Hussein for a 1982 massacre at Dujail has died. A team from the court managed to take his deposition before he died. The trial begins again Nov.28.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Britain: Israel Breaking Law, Spreading Terrorism by Jerusalem Policies

The British government presented a secret report to the European Union in which it accused Israel of violating international law and its obligations to the Roadmap by its aggressive annexationist policies in Jerusalem. The Guardian got hold of the document and reports:

"A confidential Foreign Office document accuses Israel of rushing to annex the Arab area of Jerusalem, using illegal Jewish settlement construction and the vast West Bank barrier, in a move to prevent it becoming a Palestinian capital.
In an unusually frank insight into British assessments of Israeli intentions, the document says that Ariel Sharon's government is jeopardising the prospect of a peace agreement by trying to put the future of Arab East Jerusalem beyond negotiation and risks driving Palestinians living in the city into radical groups. The document, obtained by the Guardian, was presented to an EU council of ministers meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on Monday with recommendations to counter the Israeli policy, including recognition of Palestinian political activities in East Jerusalem."

This news item makes it worthwhile for me to repost this oldie but goodie. The British report is if anything too conservative in only considering the effect on the Palestinians of their being ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem. When the last Arab is gone and the city is 100 percent Jewish, there is going to be a howl of outrage from the Muslim world that will make September 11 look like a minor incident.

------------------------------------

Monday, July 11, 2005

Jerusalem and Terrorism

The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!)

This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility.

And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it.

You want to know what causes terrorism? Well, in part it is caused by deviance, by people so warped that they will take innocent lives in a wicked quest to achieve some political or religious goal. In part, terrorists are like bank robbers. Bank robbers desperatedly want to be rich, but for one reason or another think they are very unlikely to get rich through their ordinary activities. Likewise, terrorists, break the law, both moral and civil, to get what they want. In that sense they are criminals, or, as I say, deviants. But they are not motiveless and do not act out of free-floating generalized hatred for the most part. They have a specific goal in mind.

Terrorism is also caused when one country militarily occupies another country. That is, it is the military occupation that provides a lot of terrorists with their goal (i.e. to free their country from foreign military occupation). Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has shown that the vast majority of suicide bombings in the past 30 years have come in response to foreign military occupation (or what the terorists perceived as such). Back in the late 50s and early 60s, the Algerians and the French were locked in such a struggle. The French killed nearly a million Algerians (in a population of 11 million), and the Algerians blew up a lot of French. When the French recognized Algeria as an independent country in 1962, the struggle quickly subsided and by 1963 Algeria wasn't even a big subject in French newspapers.

The Israeli military occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza from 1967 has caused an enormous amount of terrorism in the world. It hasn't been the only such source by any means. The Tamil Tigers, a group based in Sri Lanka (used to be called Ceylon), blew up Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and engaged in many other terrorist operations in Sri Lanka and India. It is a Marxist group and in some ways pioneered the suicide bombing. Because Sri Lanka and its concerns seeem so remote to most Americans, most people here don't even know about the Tamil Tigers. But if the US went in and militarily occupied the Tamil parts of Sri Lanka, all of a sudden we'd be seeing bombs go off against US targets. I guarantee it. That is not to say it would be right. But it is to say that that is how reality works (reality cannot be simply manufactured in the White House, contrary to what Scooter Libby thinks).

The Israeli Jerusalem Barrier project will have similar effects. It keeps inside itself a major Israeli settlement on Palestinian land that Sharon has recently announced he will greatly expand (probably using American money at least in part).

Because al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers do not speak in the language of Palestinian nationalism, it has been possible for certain quarters to obscure to the US public that they are absolutely manically fixated on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. This is what Bin Laden meant way back in the 1990s when he denounced the foreign military occupation of "the three holy cities." Here is what Bin Laden wrote in 1998 when he declared war on the US:



' Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula. '



If this is a big part of what is driving the radical Muslim fundamentalists' violence, then Sharon's announcement on Sunday is guaranteed to produce a terrorist strike. If what Sharon is doing were the right thing, morally and politically, then he should do it anyway and we'll just soldier on against the terrorists. But it is wrong in the first place, wrong morally, and wrong in international law and an insult to the United States in completely departing from the roadmap.

How obsessed Bin Laden & company are with what goes on in Palestine is obvious, as I said last week, in the 9/11 commission report:



' According to KSM [Khalid Shaikh Muhammad], Bin Ladin had been urging him to advance the date of the attacks. In 2000, for instance, KSM remembers Bin Ladin pushing him to launch the attacks amid the controversy after then-Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. KSM claims Bin Ladin told him it would be enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets. KSM says he resisted the pressure.

KSM claims to have faced similar pressure twice more in 2001.According to him, Bin Ladin wanted the operation carried out on May 12, 2001, seven months to the day after the Cole bombing. KSM adds that the 9/11 attacks had originally been envisioned for May 2001. The second time he was urged to launch the attacks early was in June or July 2001, supposedly after Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House. On both occasions KSM resisted, asserting that the hijacking teams were not ready. Bin Ladin pressed particularly strongly for the latter date in two letters stressing the need to attack early.The second letter reportedly was delivered by Bin Ladin's son-in-law,Aws al Madani. '



That is why our press and politicians do us an enormous disservice by not putting the Israeli announcement about the Jerusalem Barrier on the front page. This sort of action is a big part of what is driving the terrorists (and of course Sharon himself is a sort of state-backed terrorist anyway). The newspapers and television news departments should be telling us when we are about to be in the cross-fire between the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud Coalition and the paranoid, murderous, violent al-Qaeda and its offshoots.

Eisenhower called up DeGaulle and told him to get the hell out of Algeria, on a short timetable, or else. I wish Bush had Eisenhower's spine when it came to dealing with Ariel Sharon.

posted by Juan @ 7/11/2005 11:06:00 AM
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cruel Thanksgiving in Iraq
Over 50 Dead

Over 50 Iraqis were killed and 47 wounded in separate attacks on Thursday.

In Mahmudiyah just south of Baghdad, a bomber detonated his payload outside a hospital, killing some 30 persons and wounding 27. Among the wounded were 4 US GIs.

AFP reports, "Also, the US military reported the deaths of two servicemen in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad, while four American soldiers were killed in a series of incidents on Wednesday."

Shootings and bombings in Hilla, Baghdad, Baiji and Hawijah accounted for the rest of the day's death toll.

Former National Security Council staffer Daniel Benjamin, among the more knowledgeable observers of al-Qaeda in the US, argues that VP Richard Bruce Cheney's nightmare of an al-Qaeda-dominated Sunni Arab heartland in Iraq is just not plausible. All I would add is that the longer US ground troops occupy Sunni Arab territory, the slightly more likely Cheney's scenario becomes. That is, Cheney is making the argument as a reason to keep ground troops in Iraq. It is the other way around, Dick.

Cheney's hard line speeches are no longer playing well in the hustings, in any case. His approval numbers in polls are even lower than Bush's, and Bush's are very low for a president at this stage of his second term.

The Guardian explains more of the background of Bush's plot to bomb the Aljazeera offices in Doha. It was at the height of the fighting in Iraq, both in Fallujah and the Shiite south, in April of 2004, and the Pentagon and Bush were probably afraid of losing Iraq altogether. Aljazeera was getting out the word of high civilian casualties in Fallujah, creating an outcry and prompting threats to resign among the US-appointed Interim Governing Council politicians. The plot is, of course, odious, if the evidence for it stands up, and I would argue that it was criminal. The FBI has busted mafiosi for plotting out murders over spaghetti in restaurants in Queens. How is this different?

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV has charged that UK PM Tony Blair was duped by the war party in Washington. They promised him a push to disarm Iraq via the United Nations, he argues, but all along intended to have a war into which they would drag the UK, UNSC resolution or no. Wilson is a Washington insider, and his account undoubtedly reflects conversations with officials or former officials in the know.

With kidnappings and killings of foreign workers in Afghanistan on the rise, some observers are worried about it going the way of Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

White Phosphorus Round-up

George Monbiot of the Guardian weighs in on the current state of the debate on the US military's use of white phosphorus at Fallujah.

I think he is too categorical about many ambiguous issues. Long-time readers know that I am from a military family, and I want to be very careful about charges made against US troops, especially of behaving in ways they knew to have been illegal. Monbiot argues for the latter. I don't think he has proved his case.

By the way, Scott Peterson of CSM went back to Fallujah fairly recently and concluded that "the battle of Fallujah has yet to be won," and that the security situation there is still very chancy.

My own discussion of the white phosphorus issue when it first broke is here. I generally stand by it, though as usual, the US military shot itself in the foot by the way in which it initially denied and then had to acknowledge the story. I should be clear that I think the US ought to sign the protocol banning the use of incendiary bombs, and I oppose their use. The charge that is being made, however, is that WP use is already forbidden in US law and US military regulations by virtue of the chemical weapons ban, and that the US military knew this and employed it anyway.

I said last Friday:

"The US military is puzzled about the outcry over the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. After all, a 500-pound bomb is also destructive. My guess? You can't go to war against Saddam on the grounds that he has stockpiles of chemical weapons, and then turn around and use incendiary bombs of a sort that much of the world regards as a form of chemical weapon. It is the hypocrisy factor. Not to mention that the international community is trying to get such weapons banned."

This analysis is borne out by the condemnation on Thursday of WP use in Iraq by the Russian Parliament. The parliamentarians said that they “consider the use, under cover of the noble aims of the fight against terrorism, of any type of weapon banned by international conventions, particularly phosphorus bombs, as absolutely unacceptable.”

This is a public relations issue, not an issue of war crimes, as Monbiot and many others apparently want to have it.

On to the article:

*Monbiot maintains that the the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, says that use of white phosphorus "against personnel targets" is against the law of war. [Cole: We'd need to see the text, and know more about military procedures, here. Use of incendiary weapons against *civilian* personnel is forbidden. I do not know if the Battle Book really widened it from there, or why, or what its legal standing is to do so.]

*Monbiot argues that although white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon is covered by a protocol that the US has not signed, it does have toxic lung effects that very possibly justify its categorization as a chemical weapon. [Cole: I'm not qualified to pronounce on this subject, but I do not believe any international forum has actually held that white phosphorus is forbidden on grounds of being a chemical weapon. See my posting above for the precise protocols involved. Note that the British have also used WP in Iraq, and Col. Tim Collins defended it on Friday.]

*Monbiot says that there may have been tens of thousands of civilians left in Fallujah when the US launched its assault, which damaged 2/3s of the buildings in the city. Use of thermobaric weapons in such a context is certainly questionable and very possibly illegal. [Cole: I don't think there were as many as 60,000 civilians left in the city at the time the US launched its assault. Most observers thought it was closer to 5,000. Given the immense fire power deployed, civilian casualties would have been much higher if there had been so many civilians left. Moreover, as long as US forces did not actively target civilians with white phosphorus in the assault, they were not acting criminally in the light of US law or military regulations. White phosphorus cannot burn through concrete and wouldn't have been very useful as an assault weapon against guerrillas holed up in such places. It seems to have been used in part to spook them and get them on the run.]

*The evidence given by Italian television channel RAI as to the effects of white phosphorus in Fallujah, of photographs of decomposing bodies, is not dispositive. The bodies pictured are simply what dead bodies look like after a while. [I agree with Monbiot about this.]

*Monbiot accepts journalist and film maker Gabriele Zamparini's characterization of a US Defense Department document he discovered recording a conversation between Kurdish fighters that spoke of Saddam's own use of white phosphorus as "a chemical weapon." [Cole: As many web commentators have pointed out, this document is not a Pentagon-generated report, but simply a Pentagon record of a third-party conversation. No known Pentagon-generated document issuing from the US military characterizes white phosphorus as a chemical weapon.

A big irony: Kurdish troops took part in the Fallujah assault. If the Kurds do want to continue to charge that Saddam was deploying WP as a chemical weapon, then they made themselves open to the same charge from Sunni Arabs in 2004. This irony is also an argument against too much self-righteousness when it comes to Iraq.]

*Monbiot: All this occurs in a context of illegal warfare in general, since the US and Britain had no casus belli for their war on Iraq and it was not authorized by the UN Security Council.

[Cole: I agree that the invasion in 2003 was illegal. However, the assault on the guerrillas in Fallujah was not illegal. It had a UN Security Council resolution behind it authorizing Coalition troops to carry out such operations, and recognizing the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, which also backed the operation. What was done to Fallujah was so horrible that it is now often forgotten that there was every reason to think that the city was a base for the worst kinds of terrorism against innocent civilians in Baghdad and Karbala; there were very bad characters there. Black and white depictions of the Marines as villains and the guerrillas as good guys are silly and morally poisonous. If I had known the full extent of the damage that would be done to the city, I would have been against the Fallujah campaign; it is just terrible counter-insurgency tactics for one thing, and was a humanitarian disaster. But to say that the US military wilfully contravened its own regulations and knowingly broke US and international law on chemical weapons by deploying white phosphorus there would have to be proven from better evidence than has been presented.]

Since exactly what I am arguing seems to be hard for some readers to understand, I just have to repeat that I am challenging the narrative that the US government recognizes white phosphorus as a chemical weapon; that it is so categorized in the convention banning chemical weapons; or that US military commanders deployed it in contravention of US law despite knowing or believing that it was illegal. That is, if you actually put the officers in charge of the operation in the docket, I am saying that no conviction could be obtained. It is worth saying, because allegations to the contrary are being seriously made by serious persons.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dulaim Chief's Murder Splits Iraqis

Guerrillas detonated another bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 2 and wounding another 2.

The murder of Khadim Sarhid al-Hamaiyim, leader of a branch of the Dulaim tribe, on the outskirts of Baghdad, has been interpreted in different ways by Iraq's ethnic groups. The hard line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars pointed out that the attackers had been wearing Iraqi army uniforms, and said that the attack was the work of fanatical Shiites who had infiltrated the Iraqi military. A police major named Falah al-Muhammadawi replied that uniforms are easily bought in today's Iraq, and even official army vehicles are often stolen. Al-Muhammadawi was trying to convince us that the Iraqi army was not behind the killing, but I fear he has only convinced us that the security situation in Baghdad is truly awful.

You could easily construct a narrative wherein al-Hamaiyim was killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas to punish his brother for being willing to run for parliament. The guerrillas have forbidden Sunni Arabs from participating in politics under the shadow of foreign occupation. But it is also possible that Shiite militiamen who had joined the army were extracting revenge for the alliance with Saddam in which some tribal leaders had acquiesced.

Al-Sharq al-Awasat/ AFP is reporting that young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr has given blanket permission to his own followers to participate in the elections. He said he hoped that they would hasten the departure of the "Occupying forces."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush as Press Assassin?
Baathist in a Mirror

The Mirror broke the story on Tuesday that a secret British memo demonstrates that George W. Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera's offices in Doha, Qatar, in spring of 2004. The subject came up with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK, and Blair is said to have argued Bush out of it.

Despite attempts of British officials to muddy the waters by suggesting that Bush was joking, another official who had seen the memo insisted, "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

The US military bombed the Kabul offices of Aljazeera in mid-November, 2001.

The US military hit the Aljazeerah offices in Baghdad on the 9th of April, 2003, a year Bush's conversation with Blair.* That attack killed journalist Tarek Ayoub, who had a 3 year old daughter. He had said earlier, "We've told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.''' Given what we now know about Bush's intentions, that may have been a mistake.

When the US and the UN shoe-horned old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi into power as transitional prime minister, he promptly banned Aljazeera in Iraq. The channel still did fair reporting on Iraq, finding ways of buying video film and doing enlightening telephone interviews.

There have long been rumors that the Bush administration has pressured the government of Qatar to close the channel down.

One of the misdeeds attributed to Syria or pro-Syrian forces is the attempt to assassinate the Lebanese journalist and fixture on LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, May Shidyaq (Chidiac). If the British report is true, Bush really is just a Baathist in the mirror.

Aljazeera is a widely misunderstood Arabic television channel that is mainly characterized by a quaint 1950s-style pan-Arab nationalism. It is not a fundamentalist religious channel, though it does host one old-time Muslim Brother, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Its main peculiarity in local terms is that it will air all sides of a political issue and allow frank criticism of Middle Eastern politicians as well as of Western ones. It is the only place in the Arab media where one routinely hears Israeli spokesmen (speaking very good Arabic, typically) addressing their concerns and point of view to Arab audiences.

Most of Aljazeera's programming is presented by natty men in business suits or good-looking, chic Arab women in fashionable Western clothes. (I see the anchors every day and am stricken at the idea of them being blown to smithereens by an American "accidental" bombing!) A lot of the programming is Discovery Channel-style documentaries.

The news is often criticial of the United States, though the journalists like controversy and are perfectly capable of asking fundamentalists and nationalists from the region very hard questions. The channel is one of the few places where you can sometimes see frank debate among Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis (the Lord knows we don't see it on US news!) Some Aljazeera journalists may have been sympathetic to radical Muslim groups, but mainly on nationalist and anti-imperialist grounds. These people don't look like adherents of political Islam for the most part.

Ironically, after one of the early-morning Aljazeera news broadcasts EST on Wednesday that discussed the Bush plot against the channel, the next show was about recently released American movies, including "Jarhead" (about a Marine during the Gulf War), which showcased the films enthusiastically and may as well have been an infomercial. It was jarring, the effusiveness about American soft power after the admission of the dark side of US military power.

Plotting to assassinate civilian journalists in a friendly country is certainly against the law, and if Bush is ever impeached, this charge will certainly figure in the trial. Who knows, maybe the murder of Tarek Ayoub will be added to the charges. His daughter must be 5, now.

There is a detailed and very valuable timeline of Bush administration- Aljazeera relations at Booman Tribune.

---

*oops, I had misread the date as 2004 in an earlier version
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Massacre in Kirkuk
Bush Suppressed CIA Report exonerating Saddam of al-Qaeda Ties

On Wednesday morning, a shaikh of the Dulaim tribe and 3 sons and a son-in-law were shot dead in West Baghdad. The Dulaim are mostly strong Sunnis and many Dulaim in Anbar province are part of the guerrilla movement.

AP reports that in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, guerrillas lured police to their deaths on Tuesday. One assassinated a police officer on a busy commercial thoroughfare. When other police rushed to the site, a suicide bomber detonated his payload, killing 21 persons and wounding 24. Half of the dead were police.

Deaths of three more GIs were announced, with two killed by small arms fire in Mosul while on patrol, and another killed on Monday in Habaniyah.

The ceremony held in Tikrit by American officials to turn a palace of Saddam back over to the Iraqi government was ruined by incoming rocket fire. The shells were duds, otherwise the lives of US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. Casey might have been placed in danger. As it was, they briefly had to take cover in the palace. When the enemy can strike at will this way at the highest representatives of the United States in Iraq, it is just further proof of how out of control the situation is.

Guerrilla violence also broke out in Karbala and Ramadi.

President Jalal Talabani is trying to reach out to Sunni Arab guerrilla forces and may have gotten one leader to come in from the cold. Al-Hayat reports that the other big Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani, is not happy with this outreach. Hard line Kurds and Shiites see the guerrillas as war criminals and Baathists or radical Salafis who should be fought to the death. Al-Hayat also says that its sources in Baghdad maintain that the United States officials in Iraq are not wild about Talabani's overtures, either.

Big Oil is attempting to lock in highly favorable contracts on the development of new Iraqi fields that would have the effect of robbing the Iraqi public of billions.


Remember how National Security Council adviser Stephen Hadley lamented the inadequacy of US intelligence on Iraq before the war? Well it turns out that the CIA briefed Bush on September 21, 2001, that there was no operational cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Then Bush refused to give the brief to the Senate Intelligence Committee! And then Hadley blames the CIA for bad intelligence on Iraq before the war? This information was revealed by the National Journal. If I were the National Journal, I'd look into whether the CIA official who told Bush that is still in government employ. The Bush administration has been extremely vindictive toward any government official who bucked its pet projects.

Dr. Amal Kashif al-Ghita, a parliamentarian from Iraq, argues that the big problem facing the country is not sectarian splits but the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor. Although the American tradition of social analysis is often allergic to class analysis, it seems obvious that social class is driving some of the country's conflicts. The battles in Najaf in spring of 2004 were between the urban poor ("the Mahdi Army") and the shopkeeper and entrepreneur class of the pilgrimage city. The Najaf bourgeoisie was happy to have the Marines fight for its interests. They won the struggle for control of the pilgrimage trade, and are now engineering closer relations to Iran, among their primary clients (i.e. pilgrims). This struggle, however, is unlikely actually to be over, which is why you don't see the Najaf wealthy clamoring for a US withdrawal. If Iraq falls further into poverty, social conflicts could well grow.

Iran will export power to Iraq.

Here is a profile of Kristina Borjesson's "Feet to the Fire,", a profile of journalists and bloggers on the failures of the corporate media in the run-up to the Iraq War.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqis ask for Withdrawal Timetable

AP reports on the results of the Cairo national reconciliation conference, attended by the major Iraqi political factions, including Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hayat gives the orginal Arabic wording of some articles of the agreement. One provision says, "We demand the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with a timetable, and the establishment of a national and immediate program for rebuilding the armed forces through drills, preparation and being armed, on a sound basis that will allow it to guard Iraq's borders and to get control of the security situation . . ."

Sources at the conference told al-Hayat that they envisaged the withdrawal of foreign military forces from the cities within 6 months (i.e. mid-May?). They said that the withdrawal would be completed over a period of two years (i.e. November 2007). This timetable, al-Hayat says, appears actually to have been put forward by the Americans themselves. If that is true, we finally know exactly what George W. Bush means by "staying the course." It is a course that takes us to withdrawal.

The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance list had originally called for an American troop withdrawal as part of its party platform, but that plank was opposed by Ibrahim Jaafari, and was dropped even before the January 30 elections, presumably because of American pressure.

The other surprise of the Cairo conference is that the negotiators accepted the right for Iraqi groups to mount an armed resistance against the foreign troops. The participants were careful to condemn universally the killing of innocent non-combatants. They decried "takfir" or declaring a Muslim to be an unbeliever.

The Sunni Arabs appear to have gotten some of the things that they wanted.

At the end of the conference, Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said that he would go forward with creating a provincial confederation in the south. (Such a body would have special claims on the petroleum resources of the South.) Sunni leader Harith al-Dhari dissociated himself in the end from that scenario.

Reuters continues to report on the horrific security incidents in Iraq.

The Daou Report covers ten pro-war fallacies.

My only dissent is that I do believe that if the Americans aren't very careful about how they do it, when they withdraw there will be a civil war and possibly a regional war. What Lebanon should have taught us is that when sectarian conflicts develop into guerrilla war, and when the central government and its army are for any reason paralyzed, a conventional war can easily ensue. As for a statute of limitations on "you broke it, you own it," whatever it is it is surely longer than 2 years.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sharon's Critique of the Authoritarian Likud Party

Ariel Sharon's resignation from the Likud Party is a more forceful critique of that party than any I have offered.

Likudniks are notoriously unable to deal with being criticized, so my simple and accurate characterization of the party as having colonialist and fascistic tendencies has driven its acolytes on this side of the Atlantic into a piranha-like frenzy. Being cultists of a sort, they play all sorts of dishonest political games, such as equating criticism of their party with racism (?), or equating their party with Israel itself and then saying that I called Israel a fascist state because I had so characterized the Likud. (I did not, of course, but then the surrogate American Likud has millions of dollars with which to smear me and an easy in with the major media, whereas I just have this little web site; so their megaphone is rather louder than mine.)

It would be rather as though American Latinos should take vehement exception to any criticism of Argentina's colonels and their authoritarian and murderous state in the 1980s. No one ever complains about people "maligning" Argentina, but the Likudniks have an obsession that their party be completely above criticism (or as they would call it, "slander.")

So how delicious it is that Sharon has left the Likud because it is too fascistic even for him! The party's highly authoritarian politburo was an albatross around Sharon's neck. Its strident insistence on continuing to steal Palestinian land and never trading land for peace would have accelerated the engorgement of the West Bank by Israel and the consequent transformation of Israel into a binational state. You can't annex the West Bank without getting a couple of million Palestinians into the bargain. The very hard line Likudniks would deal with that prospect by just ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, but Sharon is enough a man of the world to know that the US (and especially Condi), the European Union, and the Muslim world would never put up with that Milosevic-like war crime.

If Israelis really care about their future, they will swing behind the new Labor leader, Amir Peretz. In fact, a new coalition of those seeking a negotiated settlement with security hawks like Sharon could allow Labor and Sharon's new party to marginalize the "Greater Israel" (i.e. expansionist, colonizing and fascistic) tendency in Israeli politics, which is mainly sited in the Likud.

The lack of a strong Palestinian leader, and Sharon's refusal to deal with the Palestinian leadership that now exists, make it unlikely that there will be real progress on Arab-Israeli peace any time soon. You can't declare peace unilaterally, the way you can war. But if the Likud can be gotten out of office, at least the ruling party in Israel won't be actively attempting to destroy any peace process.
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Guest Editorial on Murtha: Achcar & Shalom

"On John Murtha's Position"

by Gilbert Achcar and Stephen R. Shalom

There is much of which to approve in the recent speech of Rep. John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Iraq. The hawkish Murtha had been critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war for some time, but until now his solution had been to call for more troops. On November 17, however, he recognized courageously that U.S. troops "can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME."

Murtha pointed out, as the anti-war movement has been pointing out all along, that the U.S. troops in Iraq, rather than adding to stability, "have become a catalyst for violence." He referred to the acknowledgement made by General George W. Casey, commander of the "multinational force" in Iraq, during a hearing before the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. Senate in September 2005, that the presence of "the coalition forces as an occupying force" is "one of the elements that fuels the insurgency."

Murtha pointed out that a recent poll indicated that 80% of Iraqis want the U.S. out. This poll, a secret British defense ministry survey conducted in August 2005, is consistent with earlier polls and several facts: the fact that most slates in the January 2005 election -- including the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which won the election -- had in their platform the demand for a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq; a U.S. military poll in February that found only 23% of urban residents supported the presence of coalition troops, compared to 71% opposed; the statement of 126 members of the Iraqi National Assembly, including a majority of the 140 MPs of the majority UIA, demanding "the departure of the occupation force"; and the request made repeatedly by the National Sovereignty Committee of the Iraq National Assembly for a withdrawal timetable for "occupation troops."

There is no guarantee of what would happen in the event of a U.S. withdrawal, but Murtha noted -- as the anti-war movement has argued since the beginning of the occupation -- that the U.S. presence makes an agreement between contending Iraqi forces and the peaceful unfolding of the political process more difficult. For example, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most prominent Sunni organization with ties to the armed resistance, has repeatedly declared that it would call for a cessation of all armed action if the U.S. and its allies set a timetable for their withdrawal.

Murtha has submitted a resolution to the House calling for the redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq. That Murtha, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and one of the most prominent boosters of the military in the Congress, has had it with the war is a telling sign of how badly things are going for the warmongers, and the more representatives who join the 13 co-sponsors of his resolution, the better. Furthermore, one has to sympathize with Murtha, of course, for the abuse that has been heaped upon him by the Bush administration and rightwing ideologues in Congress and the media.

Nevertheless, the anti-war movement needs to be careful not to confuse Murtha's position with its own.

When Murtha says "redeploy" -- instead of withdraw -- the troops from Iraq, he makes clear that -- despite his rhetoric -- he doesn't want to really bring them home, but to station them in the Middle East. As he told Anderson Cooper of CNN:

"We ... have united the Iraqis against us. And so I'm convinced, once we redeploy to Kuwait or to the surrounding area, that it will be much safer. They won't be able to unify against the United States. And then, if we have to go back in, we can go back in."

Moreover, Murtha's resolution calls for the U.S. to create "a quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines" to be "deployed to the region."

We strongly disagree. The anti-war movement cannot endorse U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, whether over or under the horizon. We don't want U.S. troops remaining in the region and poised to go back into Iraq. They don't belong there, period. Some -- though not Murtha -- suggest keeping U.S. bases within Iraq, close to the oil fields or in Kurdistan, in order to intervene more or less on the pattern of what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan. But this is a recipe for disaster, since the Iraqi view that the United States intends a permanent occupation is one of the main causes inciting the insurgency.

Moreover, stationing U.S. forces in Kurdistan could only deepen the already dangerous ethnic animosities among Iraqis. In any event, if U.S. troops continue to be used in Iraq -- whether deployed from bases inside the country or from outside -- they will inevitably continue to cause civilian casualties, further provoking violence. Having a U.S. interventionary force stationed in Kuwait or in a similar location will continue to inflame the opposition of Iraqis who will know their sovereignty is still subject to U.S. control. As for the impact of keeping U.S. forces anywhere else in the larger region, it should be recalled that their presence was the decisive factor leading to 9-11 and fuels "global terrorism" in the same way that the U.S. military presence in Iraq "fuels the insurgency" there.

Murtha, we need to keep in mind, is not opposed to U.S. imperial designs or U.S. militarism. He criticizes the Bush administration because its Iraq policies have led to cuts in the (non-Iraq) defense budget, threatening the U.S. ability to maintain "military dominance."

Murtha's resolution calls for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date" -- which is reasonable only if it means that the withdrawal should be started immediately and completed shortly after the December elections, with the exact details to be worked out with the elected Iraqi government. In his press conference, however, Murtha estimated it would take six months to carry out the "redeployment," which seems far longer than the "earliest practicable date." (Recall that U.S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 90 days from the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty.) To set such a long time period for the evacuation of Iraq is all the more worrying given that the decision to withdraw the troops is not even being considered yet by the Bush administration or the bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress.

Congressional Republicans, in a transparent ploy, offered a one-sentence resolution stating that the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq be terminated immediately. Murtha called this "a ridiculous resolution" that no Democrat would support (Hardball with Chris Matthews, Nov. 18). In point of fact, the resolution was opposed by all of the pro-war Democrats and most of the anti-war Democrats, who (as the Republicans hoped) didn't want to be accused of "cutting and running." But actually the resolution wasn't ridiculous at all understood in the sense we have just explained.

The anti-war movement should and no doubt will relentlessly continue its fight for the immediate, total, and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops and their allies from Iraq and the whole region. Its central slogan "Troops Out Now" is more warranted each day and will keep gaining in urgency until victory over the warmongers is achieved.

Gilbert Achcar is the author of The Clash of Barbarisms and Eastern Cauldron, both published by Monthly Review Press. Stephen R. Shalom is the author of Imperial Alibis (South End Press) and Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman).
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