Al-Hakim Sees Baghdad as Federated Province
Sadrists Urge Alliance with Sunni Arabs


Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.]: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the victorious (fundamentalist Shiite) United Iraqi Alliance suggested Friday that Baghdad province join Kurdistan, the Middle Euphrates, and the deep south as a confederacy with special privileges, overseen by a federal government. He said that the constitution had given the Iraqi people this right, adding, "The choice of federalism is the right one, because it has strengthened the unity of Iraq on the one hand, and on the other has ensured justice. It has saved the country forever from the troika of dictatorship, racism and sectarianism."

Al-Hakim said it was unlikely that the establishment of provincial confederacies in the south would lead to a break-up of Iraq: "The notion of the partition of Iraq is just not plausible, since we have made our choice, and have chosen to remain united in Iraq." He affirmed, "The Iraqi that everyone wants to realize is an Iraq of rights, participation, equal opportunity, love, peace and liberty."

He said in defense of the Shiite-Kurdish political alliance, "Our trial and tragedy are one, for the tyranny and persecution we experienced has pushed us to achieve the a partnership among all the elements of the Iraqi people." He said that his brother, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (d. Aug. 29, 2003 in a huge carbombing), who had led the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq for two decades, had always stood by the Kurdish people, and had emphasized the need for a strategic alliance of Iraqi Shiites and Iraqi Kurds. He called on the Kurds to work jointly with him in order to "safeguard the constitution from any attempt to alter it that might erase the gains that have been achieved by the Iraqi people."

(Cole: The Sunni Arabs had been promised that the new parliament would reopen negotiations on some articles of the constitution that they rejected. Al-Hakim is here correctly pointing out to the Kurds that if they ally with the Shiites, the Sunni Arabs can just be voted down in any attempt to change the constitution. The window for doing so will in any case close four months after the new parliament comes into session.)

Al-Hayat [Ar.] says that its sources tell it that al-Hakim and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani reached a broad agreement on the outlines of a Shiite-Kurdish alliance in the new parliament. Talabani was keen to see the prerogatives of the president expanded, to which al-Hakim is said to have assented. He also wanted written guarantees as to the referendum to be held in 2007 about whether Kirkuk will acceded to the Kurdistan confederacy. Both agreed to seek a government of national unity, bringing in Sunni Arabs and secularists. They put off dealing the American demands that the secular forces be given a prominent role in the security forces. (The security forces are at the moment dominated by hardline Shiite fundamentalists close to Iran, and the US embassy is pressing hard to dilute them with a ministerial appointment to Interior from the Allawi faction. Allawi, however, is widely considered a Baathist light, and the elected government is a little unlikely to turn security over to him, especially since his list ran poorly in the elections.)

The two did not take up the issue of who the prime minister will be. Talabani deeply dislikes the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari, whom he accused of overstepping his constitutional authority on numerous occasions. The Dawa Party asserted on Friday that Jaafari was its candidate for PM again. His rival is Adel Abdul Mahdi, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (al-Hakim's party). Al-Hakim and Talabani agreed that the majority party should discuss the issue internally first.

Representatives of the Sadr movement said that they had withdrawn from the discussions between the UIA and the Kurds at Sulaimaniyah in protest that the Iraqi Accord Front [Sunni Arab religious] and the National Dialogue Council [Sunni Arab secularist] had not been invited to participate. The Washington Post quotes a Sadr aide as favoring an alliance with the Sunni Arabs rather than with the Kurds.

(Cole: As I noted earlier, many Turkmen in the contested northern oil city of Kirkuk are followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. An alliance with the Kurds would require that the Turkmen Shiites be sacrificed and Kirkuk turned over to the Kurds. This outcome seems to suit the al-Hakim and his Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but is not palatable to the Sadrists. A national unity government, including both Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, would help resolve this dispute, but that would weaken the Kurds' hand in Kirkuk.)

Incidentally, the small Sadrist "Risaliyyun" or Upholders of the Mission list, which ran separately from the United Iraqi Alliance, has announced that it will vote with the UIA. It probably only got one or at most a handful of seats, but the UIA only needs to top off its probable 130 seats to about 138 to have a simple majority.
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Iraq Petroleum Crisis
Bahr al-Ulum Forced Out

Drivers in Baghdad are waiting in lines a quarter of a mile long, according to the NYT, as the country faces a fuel crisis. They feared further price increases, and were also stocking gasoline to run their generators, since electricity provision in the capital has been erratic.

Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.] report that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the minister of petroleum was removed on Friday from his position by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari after Bahr al-Ulum had protested the tripling of fuel prices. Jaafari handed the running of the ministry over to his deputy premier, Ahmad Chalabi, given that he was already chairman of the Energy Council in Iraq. Chalabi is only expected to serve in this capacity for a month or so.

[That's what the Arabic article says, folks. All this time, Chalabi has been chairman of something called the "Energy Council." Or maybed that should be translated "Energy Taskforce"? :-) Chalabi was convicted in Jordan for complicity in the failure of his Petra Bank, in which some $300 million disappeared. In a country with poor auditing, the last thing you would want was Chalabi in charge of the petroleum ministry. And, if he has done a good job as chair of the Energy Council, why is the energy sector in Iraq in such a huge mess?

Bahr al-Ulum said, according to the BBC, "I object to the decision of putting me on leave and the mechanism by which it was done after I objected to the government's decision to raise fuel prices." He had gone on vacation, and when he got back he was told to go back on vacation for another month while Chalabi took over his job.

Al-Zaman says that its sources in Najaf maintained that Bahr al-Ulum's firing reflected escalating conflicts among the great Shiite religious authorities and their sons. They point out that Jaafari need not have announced the firing, since Bahr al-Ulum had stopped going to his office, and negotiations are under way on who should head the ministry in the next government. Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum belongs to a distinguished clerical family in the holy city, but has a technical Ph.D. from the US. He had left the United Iraqi Alliance and ran for parliament in December at the head of his own, small, independent list. He did not gain a seat in the legislature, so he was unlikely to continue in the cabinet in any case. Ibrahim's father, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, is considered a leading moderate cleric, and had served in the American-appointed Interim Governing Council.

Al-Zaman's sources seem to be implying that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum had fallen afoul of the Sistanis. Although Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani declined to endorse the UIA, he and his clerical colleagues did urge Shiites not to split their vote by supporting tiny local parties. It stands to reason that they were therefore annoyed with the Bahr al-Ulums for breaking ranks, leaving the UIA, and starting a small independent party that might waste Shiite votes. It is probably being implied that since Bahr al-Ulum is from a prominent clerical family, Jaafari consulted with the Sistanis before publicly firing and humiliating him.

[Cole: I doubt that clerical politics is the main dynamic here, though it may have been involved at the margins. Chalabi after all also left the UIA and ran at the head of his Iraqi National Congress, but there doesn't seem to be any strong objection in Najaf to his serving as interim petroleum minister. Of course, he is not from a clerical family and so perhaps not considered under the same discipline.]

A government source said that Bahr al-Ulum protested the tripling of fuel prices because no provision had been made to cushion the poor from it, because it was implemented before it should have been, and because the decision directly contradicted an agreement reached by the cabinet on 6 October before the elections.

The Jaafari government's decision was forced by demands of the International Monetary Fund, which made a loan of $140 mn. dependent on it, as well as future debt relief. Although Iraq has extremely inexpensive petroleum, and gasoline is now 40 cents a gallon, it also have a very poor population, with vast unemployment and many families that were already barely making it, so that any big increase in the price of any staple hurt. Many Iraqis feel that the subsidized fuel is a way for them to share in the country's oil wealth. Unlike in Alaska, the general population does not receive a check from the Iraqi government with their share of petroleum income.

Al-Zaman says that the decision to triple prices was met with numerous popular protests, and a number of Shiite provinces in the south have been unable to implement it.

Iraq imports $500 mn. a month in gasoline from neighboring countries, and the amount will probably increase now that terrorist threats have closed the Beiji refinery. (Scroll down).

Al-Zaman/ AFP/Reuters [Ar.]: The stoppage of petroleum exports from the southern port of Umm Qasr continued on Friday owing to poor weather. Only half the normal amount is being exported from Kirkuk through the Turkish port of Ceyhan via pipeline. Pipeline sabotage, the shutting down of the refinery at Beiji, and terrorist acts against electricity plants have contributed to the crisis.

The Iraqi ministry of petroleum on Friday laid the foundation for two new petroleum refineries in the province of Sulaimaniyah in the Kurdistan confederacy, with a capacity of 10,000 barrels a day. The ministry is spending $25 mn. on them. A spokesman from the Kurdistan Patriotic Union said that such projects had been forbidden by the Saddam regime. Two more refineries will be situated in the Kurdish province of Irbil.
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Iraq Petroleum Production "Suffocating": Bahr al-Ulum

An informed observer writes:

' Reuters reports that “average exports in November fell to 1.21 million barrels a day – the lowest level since at least November 2003 – and down from 1.24 million barrels per day last month,” indicating that something may be seriously wrong.

The figures for November were below earlier projections and lower than earlier export levels, indicating that something was seriously wrong. Apparently, in the south, tankers are lined up in the Gulf and waiting for 14 days to be loaded.

The following is being quoted in the early reports of Chalabi taking over from Bar Uloum:

“A ministry spokesman allied to Uloum said the country was facing what he called an impending oil supply crisis. 'Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,' he said.”

There have been no exports to Ceyhan for a long time. If the south were to shut down, the oil export revenue contribution to the budget would be zero. The quote indicates that something is clearly going on.

With respect to the Beiji refinery, as New Orleans demonstrated, once a refinery is shut down, there is more to restarting operations than clicking a switch. So long as it is out of operation, there are only two possibilities: people must drive less or imports from Kuwait and elsewhere must increase, further exacerbating the budget situation.

Note that the 20-30,000 employees of South Oil felt impelled to start a web site and write letters opposing privatization. Three southern Provinces have opposed and apparently have refused to implement the Gasoline Price Program forced on Jaafari by the IMF. As in the case of privatization, the doctrinaire position of the IMF, without regard to the facts and circumstances, could have grave political repercussions. Do they not realize that there is a dirty war going on and also a political revolution? Time enough for all that in a year or two, if then. What is the hurry? There will be no substantial foreign investment until the security conditions improve. There will be no privatization of the oil industry for years in any event. I suspect that there is turmoil and disarray throughout the oil industry bureaucracy and employee rank and file. Chalabi probably will not have the credibility to restore order. He is a fixer, not an administrator. He will be associated with the US/IMF privatization effort. He has no Iraq constituency. Recall that months ago it was reported that he had assumed the leading role in the oil infrastructure security forces. What happened to that? We do not know, but the infrastructure remains insecure.

There is also the following quote:

“An official of the Oil Ministry in Baghdad told ISN Security Watch, on condition of anonymity: “We do not know the exact quantity of oil we are exporting, we do not exactly know the prices we are selling it for, and we do not know where the oil revenue is going to.””

“'Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,' he said.” [repeated for emphasis] '

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The Middle East and America in 2005: How the Region Has Changed

The Bush administration has several major policy goals in the Middle East, which are often self-contradictory. They include:

1. Fighting terrorism emanating from the region, which might menace the US or its major allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

2. Ensuring the security of petroleum production in the Oil Gulf, which contains 2/3s of the world's proven reserves.

3. Reestablishing order in Afghanistan and ensuring that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot again use it as a base for Muslim radicalism.

4. Reestablishing order in Iraq and ensuring a government and system there favorable to US interests.

5. Weakening or overthrowing the governments of Syria and Iran, primarily because they are viewed as threats to Israel. As part of weakening Syria, the US applied enormous pressure to get its remaining troops out of Lebanon.

6. Pushing for democratization in the "Greater Middle East," even at the risk of alienating long-time US friends such as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Some parts of the Bush administration are more committed to some of these goals than to others, and huge foodfights seem to be taking place behind the scenes over what priority to give them each or how useful some of them are to US interests. The Neoconservatives, for instance, are very interested in shaping Iraq, but seem much less interested in Afghanistan. The State Department seems generally very nervous about the Iraq misadventure and not very enthusiastic about democratization.

The major developments in the region of 2005 have been momentous, but what is striking is how little the over-all dynamics have changed.

Afghanistan conducted parliamentary elections, but old-time warlords from the 1990s such as Abdul Rasul Abu Sayyaf (once close to Bin Laden) seem likely to dominate it.

Pakistan's parliament is virtually hung, too paralyzed by disputes between the opposition, often led by the fundamentalist United Action Council, and supporters of military dictator Pervez Musharraf, to accomplish anything of note. The Muslim fundamentalists had seldom done well in Pakistani elections before 2002, but the electorate was angry about the US attack on neighboring Afghanistan and gave them about a fifth of seats in parliament, control of a major northern province, and partial control of another province. The Pakistani military and security forces continue to hunt down al-Qaeda, but few really big fish have been caught recently. Osamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who conspired to have 3,000 Americans murdered, remain free men.

Iran held presidential elections, won by the fundamentalist Shiite hardliner (and horse's ass) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad used many of the same tactics to get into power as Bush supporters did, including smearing his opponents, attracting the common people with false promises, posing as an outsider to the government despite being a consummate insider, benefitting from his party's dominance of the judiciary, and drawing on support from the religious right and the military.

The reformists in Iran under President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) had reached out the to US, seeking forms of "ping pong diplomacy" and expressing profound sympathy for America after the 9/11 attacks. The US government studiously ignored these overtures and kept sanctions on Iran, treating even the reformists as pariahs. The reformers were stymied at home by clerical hardliners' control of the judiciary and Khomeinist institutions that could strike down liberalizing laws, close newspapers, and exclude liberals from running in subsequent elections.

Ahmadinejad's victory is the triumph of the hard Iranian right. He has alienated virtually all Western diplomats hoping to work with Iran, pushing his country into renewed isolation in the space of only a few months. He has been particularly stupid in his pronouncements on Israel. He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that the "Occupation Regime" (i.e. Israel) "must vanish." He views the Holocaust as a "legendary epic," and clearly doubts it. He suggested that if it did occur, then the Jews should have been given part of Europe on which to make a state, rather than displacing the Palestinian people. (This is not a new talking point. King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia said the same thing in the late 1940s.) His statements were morally outrageous and historically ignorant, but he did not actually call for mass murder (Ariel Sharon made the "occupation regime" in Gaza "vanish" last summer) or for the expulsion of the Israeli Jews to Europe. Nor is he, as has been alleged, the head of the Iranian state. The Iranian president is something akin to the pre-Cheney US vice presidents. But Ahmadinejad seems to think that the world is about to end, and is fixated on the Mahdi or Muslim messiah, and is generally a demagogue. He has also banned rock music.

It seems most likely that Bush administration pressure on Iran, naming it as an axis of evil, making clear a desire to overthrow its government, and militarily surrounding it in Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed the Iranian electorate to the right. It is not known if Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon, but it is certainly trying to get nuclear energy. Likely by committing the US so heavily to Iraq, which did not have a nuclear program, the Bush administration has lost the opportunity to do anything serious about Iran's program, whatever its ultimate aims.

Ironically, the Iranian hardliners have been strengthened by the overthrow of the Taliban and the Baath Party. In Afghanistan, the warlords who are so prominent in the parliament and the executive often had strong ties to Iran, and Afghan Shiites did disproportionately well in the elections; they are often tied through the Vahdat Party to the ayatollahs in Iran. Afghanistan is friendlier to Iran now than at any time since the 1960s, when both were monarchies.

In Iraq, both the Jan. 30 election and that of Dec. 15 cemented Shiite fundamentalist political control of the country. The United Iraqi Alliance, now a coalition of all three major religious and political currents among Iraqi Shiites, had 140 seats (a simple majority) in the Jan. 30 elections, and will likely have 130 seats in the new parliament, such that it can easily form a government that can survive votes of confidence requiring 51 percent support for the prime minister. The fundamentalist Shiites got the constitution they wanted on October 15, enshrining strong elements of Islamic law and ensuring that the southern Shiite provinces will control all future petroleum finds in the oil-rich south.

An Iraq dominated by religious Shiites will certainly be on very friendly terms with iran, as I argued in Salon last summer. Far from causing the pillars of Khomeinist power to tremble in Iran, the Bush administration has larded the region with new and powerful allies of Tehran.

Shiite fundamentalist power in Iraq and Iran will translate into new monetary and diplomatic resources for the Shiites of the region, a prospect that terrifies the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Likewise, the Shiites of southern Lebanon, supporters of the Hizbullah and Amal parties, will benefit from Iraqi patronage. The Lebanese Hizbullah has historical ties to the Iraqi Dawa Party, which the prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim Jaafari, leads.

The year 2005 was one of both tragedy and triumph for the Lebanese. Lebanon, a multi-ethnic country of only 3 million persons, is the Rhode Island of the Middle East. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lebanon fell into civil war and prolonged instability. The United States greenlighted a plan to pacify the country with Syrian troops in 1976. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982, also destroying a good deal of what was left of Beirut with indiscriminate artillery fire and bombing. From 1989, the Saudis intervened to help restore stability, brokering a new political bargain amongst the Christians and the Muslims and their allies. In the south, the Shiites became radicalized, in part by the Israeli occupation and the civil war, and in part through Iranian influence, and Hizbullah came to dominate that region of the country. In 2000, they finally succeeded in forcing the Israelis back out of their country. The post-1989 reconstruction of Lebanon depended heavily on Sunni politician Rafiq al-Hariri, a billionaire protege of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, on the disarming of the militias everywhere but the Shiite south, and on continued Syrian peacekeeping.

The new stability came at a price, of heavy-handed Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs. Electoral districts were gerrymandered in 1999 to favor pro-Syrian parties and candidates. The anti-Syrian rightwing Phalangist Party popular among some Maronite Catholics, had collapsed in the 1990s. Bashar al-Asad, Syria's young president, especially promoted president Emile Lahoud, a pro-Syrian Maronite general, both to repress anti-Syrian forces and to marginalize even pro-Syrian politicians close to the old guard in Damascus against whom Bashar was trying to assert himself. Lahoud seemed indispensable to Bashar, but the Lebanese president serves only a 6-year term according to the constitution. Bashar intervened to have the constitution amended to give Lahoud three extra years. Most Lebanese were appalled and outraged. Even the pro-Syrian prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, resigned in protest.

In February of 2005, a truck bomber pulled up beside al-Hariri's motorcade and detonated his payload. Although he was himself a Muslim radical with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq (he had lived in Saudi Arabia and had fought the Americans in Iraq), the bomber appears to have been put up to the assassination by Syria or some of its Lebanese allies. [I initially wondered if Hariri was hit by al-Qaeda, and it was plausible at the time, but subsequent events have established, let us say, a pattern.] The assassination of the widely admired Hariri provoked mass popular mobilization. Lebanese Christians, a large section of the Sunnis, and the Druze minority formed an alliance to force Syrian troops out of the country. Demonstrations hundreds of thousands strong were mounted in downtown Beirut. The sentiment was not universal. Demonstrations by Hizbullah and the Shiites, implicitly pro-Syrian, were almost as large. The Saudis, afraid of instability, intervened with the Syrians, and in the end Syria withdrew its troops that spring. The parliamentary elections in Lebanon (not a new thing; Lebanon has been having parliamentary elections for many decades) held in May produced a win for the reformist, anti-Syrian coalition, though the Shiite Hizbullah and Amal parties also did very well. Once the issue of Syrian presence was settled, the various parties proved perfectly willing to ally with one another despite their duelling demonstrations and counter-demonstrations of the spring. Still, the reformists secured from the international community an investigation of Hariri's killing, which finally elicited a damning report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, implicating not only the Syrian regime but even Bashar al-Asad's own brother.

In the aftermath, there has been an uneasy relationship between President Lahoud and the cabinet, full of seething reformists convinced that Lahoud might have had a hand in Hariri's assassination. Anti-Syrian figures went on being blown up for the rest of 2005. Old-time communist thinker Georges Hawi was killed. Then popular current affairs interviewer May Shidyaq (Chidiac) was nearly killed by a bomb last fall. In mid-December, Jibran Tueni, the editor in chief of the respected al-Nahar newspaper, was killed by a huge bomb blast. Tueni had been severely critical of Damascus. Tueni's killing seems likely to inspire the reformists in parliament and on the cabinet to redouble their efforts to force the resignation of President Lahoud. It appears that elements of the Syrian Baath or its Lebanese allies are afraid that the new government in Beirut is attempting to drive them from power altogether, pursuing them to Damascus through the United Nations and the United States. The bombings carried out against media figures are a Mafia-like warning: Lay off, or else.

The rhetoric of Lebanese politicians toward Syria has become blunt and acerbic. The Hizbullah, Shiite fundamentalists who benefit from the Syrian-Iranian alliance, rejected the idea of blaming or punishing Syria for Tueni's death, and pulled out of the government, creating a national crisis that remains unresolved. Lebanon is polarized and tense in a menacing way that bodes ill for stability or national unity. The withdrawal of Syrian troops was a great national achievement, but so far this story is a fraught one. One worries about the stability of the country. Lebanon needs stability. Tourism was down 11 percent this year. Per capita income is still below that of 1975, by a third. Economic growth has slowed from the 6 percent achieved in the mid-1990s to 2 or 3 percent.

Then there were big demonstrations by the Shiites of Bahrain, demanding that the king give them a truly democratic constitution (he appoints the prime minister and the upper house, which can over-rule the lower house.) Bahrain has a Shiite majority but a Sunni king and political establishment.

And, in Egypt, which deserves more space, the Muslim Brotherhood went from having 17 representatives in parliament to over 70 and became the de facto opposition party in the country. In the old days, the government of Hosni Mubarak would not have allowed so many from the MB to be seated. Is this development a good thing? Having a slightly more representative government is always to the good, but the Muslim Brotherhood is not exactly a force for progressivism in the region.

Ariel Sharon went through with his poorly conceived unilateral withdrawal of colonists and Israeli troops from Gaza. He rejected the idea of having a negotiating partner, having no real consultation with Gazans. Predictably, in the aftermath there has been continued fighting between the Gazans and the Israelis. If this goes on, Israeli troops will be drawn right back in. In the meantime, Israelis continue aggressively to colonize the West Bank and the area around Jerusalem, in ways guaranteed to generate violence for years to come.

Washington's interventions in the Middle East have created a failed state in Iraq that has no military power to speak of, has threatened the Oil Gulf with destabilization, and has in various ways contributed to the ascension of political Islam. Shiite fundamentalist parties rule Iraq. The Islamist warlords are back in the Afghan parliament. Hardliners have been strengthened in Iran, and are creating a Tehran-Baghdad alliance. Sunni Arab Iraqis are turning to fundamentalist Islam in large numbers, forsaking secular Arab nationalism. Some are growing close to al-Qaeda-type organizations. The Lebanese Hizbullah has rich and powerful new allies. Lebanon is free of foreign military forces, but is threatened with renewed sectarian conflict. And the Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as a possible successor to the long-lived secular military regime in Egypt.

Are Americans safer because of the political developments in the Middle East of 2005? The widespread instability introduced into the region by aggressive US policies seems more portent of menace than harbinger of peace. The one development that might have made us safer was the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, but it was done in a hamfisted way that likely guarantees continued conflict and continued bad press for the US, the coddler of the Israeli hardliners. Otherwise, the US may have started some political tsunamis in the region, but the waves have not yet come ashore.

As for Bush's goals:

1. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are still at large, so the war on terror is not won.

2. Security in the Gulf is endangered by the Iraqi guerrilla war, and oil prices are very high, benefitting Iran and Saudi Arabia. Oil security is in doubt.

3. Resources to do Afghanistan right were diverted to Iraq. Afghanistan has a very weak government that might well not survive on its own. Suicide bombings are on the uptick. Oldtime warlords are back, as members of parliament.

4. Order has not been reestablished in Iraq.

5. The Syrian and Iranian governments have not been noticeably weakened. Iran is flush with extra petroleum income this year. The US may yet decide that it needs Damascus and Tehran, if it is to have a soft landing in Iraq.

6. Lebanon is more democratic at the end of 2005 than at its beginning, but also much less stable. These changes had little to do with the US. Egypt's elections were not free enough to accomplish much, and there is a question as to whether the US really wants a Muslim Brotherhood take-over of Cairo. The MB hates the Camp David accords and would immediately abrogate them. The Bush administration has said nothing publicly about the demand of Bahraini Shiites that a more democratic constitution be enacted in that country. Iraq has had two elections, but they have been deeply flawed, such that basic security could not be guaranteed candidates or voters, most candidates could not campaign, the electorate did not know the personalities for whom it was voting (but rather voted for ethnic lists), and some candidates were killed. The elections have exacerbated sectarian tensions of a sort that could pull the country apart, and they brought fundamentalist Shiites to power. Whatever is going on in Iraq, it is not a model that most Middle Eastern states would want to emulate.

I'd give the Bush administration a "D" (60 out of 100) on the Middle East this year. Support for the end of two military occupations, in Gaza and Lebanon, pull up the averages. But much of the policy is self-contradictory, in disarray, or likely to cause some wars. None of that makes us safer.
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International Team to Assess Elections
Al-Hakim meets Talabani

In Baghdad, , AP reports that the International Mission for Iraqi Elections will send a team of assessors to look into charges by Sunni Arabs and secularists that there was significant ballot stuffing in the Dec. 15 elections. UN observer Craig Jenness had earlier defended the over-all fairness of the election.

The Iraqi Accord Front, a fundamentalist coalition, expressed pleasure that the team would be sent. It has rejected the election results as fatally flawed.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that the basic outcome of the elections will be altered by any of these procedural steps, and the Sunni Arab conviction that they are a majority of Iraqis, which drives much of their ire over the outcome, is simply incorrect.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who heads the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list in parliament, met Thursday with Kurdish leader (and current Iraqi president) Jalal Talabani. Al-Hakim repeated his willingness to join in the formation of a government of national unity.

AP also says that a GI was killed Thursday in East Baghdad by a roadside bomb. It was one of dozens of deaths in guerrilla violence in Iraq.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.]: Unknown gunmen killed 14 Shiites in a minibus near Latifiyah south of Baghdad. They belonged to a single extended family had set out early on Thursday from their home in Mahmudiyah.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, a suicide bomber dressed as a policeman detonated his payload, and killed 4 policemen and wounded 5 others.

The US military announced that it had launched an air attack on the town of Hawija, north of Baghdad, to which planters of roadside bombs had fled. Ten persons were killed in the air attack, which used 500-pound bombs. The US military found caches of weapons in a subsequent search.

Al-Quds al-Arabi : argues that the Kurds are conducting a campaign of subtle ethnic cleansing against the Arabs of Kirkuk and its surroundings, creating facts on the ground with settlements and forcing Arab farmers off their land. It says that tensions in the city between Kurds and Turkmen are running high and that it has been the site of 30 assassinations, making it one of Iraq's bloodiest cities. It says that they will use their leverage as a swing vote in parliament to ensure that Kurds continue to be able to move into the province. Baghdad-based Kurdish officials of the federal government also exercise their influence to deliver important provincial and police positions in Kirkuk into Kurdish hands. They wish to alter its demographic character decisively before the 2007 referendum, when Kirkuk (Ta'mim) province will decide whether to join the existing 3-province Kurdistan confederacy. The Kirkuk fields hold a 10-20% of Iraq's proven petroleum reserves and would be essential to the formation of any independent or semi-independent Kurdistan state. (If the Kurds lacked Kirkuk, and Baghdad continued to get the petroleum income, it could bribe the Kurds into remaining in Iraq. Kurdistan without petroleum would be rather like eastern Anatolia in neighboring Turkey: poor.

Borzou Daragahi and Louise Roug of the LA Times explore the fading of Iraqi national identity and the building danger of a partition of the country. I am quoted, arguing that Iraq is no more artificial than most nations, and Iraqi nationalism should not be completely discounted.

The NYT reports that hundreds of US military advisers will be assigned to Iraqi special police commando units that had been set up by the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry is controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary wing, the Badr Organization, both of them close to Tehran and the latter trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Dexter Filkins reports that a US officer criticized the special police resort to secret prisons and torture:

' American commanders here say that such practices, while abhorrent in their own right, tend to provoke consequences almost precisely the opposite of what is desired. Rounding up young Sunni Arab men and killing them will only spur the growth of the insurgency, they say. "You are making new enemies here," the American commander said. "You've got to be more moderate. You must follow the rule of law." '

Ironic, ain't it?
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10-20 Dead in Failed Terrorist Prison Break
Sunni Arabs Demonstrate Against Election Results in Samarra

Prison guards killed between 4 and 16 inmates when some of them attempted a jail break from a special facility for terrorists in Kadhimiyah, northeast Baghdad, on Wednesday, according to AFP. An inmate got hold of a weapon and began shooting indiscriminately, then attracted fire from the guards. Four guards are also said dead, along with a translator. The reports of the number of dead inmates varied, with the US military estimating 4 prisoners dead. High police official Abdul Aziz Muhammad gave the number of dead inmates as 11, while anonymous Iraqi sources in the Ministry of the Interior alleged that 20 prisoners were killed. Al-Zaman/AFP accepted that the number of dead inmates was 16.

Al-Zaman/ AFP/ DPA report other violence. In Baghdad, a former officer in the Iraqi army was assassinated in Baladiyyat, east Baghdad. A roadside bomb set by guerrillas wounded three policemen near Mustansiriyah Mosque. Iraqi police discovered 5 corpses in Baghdad on Wednesday.

US troops killed one civilian and wounded two others at a checkpoint in Khalidiyah. Guerrillas killed two policemen in Tikrit, while guerrilla missiles fell on in a civilian neighborhood in Dhuluiyyah on Tuesday night, killing 3 civilians and wounding 9 others. In Baqubah to the northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas attempted to assassinate the mayor; they failed, but wounded two of his bodyguards. Guerrillas in Samarra killed 3 policemen with a car bomb, according to some reports. Others say that 4 special police died, along with 4 civilians.

The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the Iraqi police for invading the home in Najaf of Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi, a Shiite cleric who opposes the US military presence.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Hundreds of Sunni Arabs demonstrated in Samarra against what they viewed as electoral fraud in the December 15 elections. The demonstrations follow much bigger ones in Baghdad and some other Sunni cities on Tuesday and the previous Friday.

The Iraqi prison population held by US forces is rising toward 15,500. In the absence of a Status of Forces Agreement, and with the passage of the new constitution (which requires warrants for arrests), these prisoners are probably being held illegally.

al-Zaman/ AFP say that the US embassy in Baghdad has advised the incoming government to privatize the hundreds of companies and factories owned by the state (the Baath Party was actually the Baath Socialist Party), selling them to investors. The US administration of Iraq attempted to move toward privatization under Paul Bremer, but the issue was rendered moot by the poor security in the country, which makes investing in it at the moment unattractive.

One of the least attractive aspects of the US government is its fanaticism about privatization. I mean, is this really the time? The good Lord knows how many of those companies or factories are actually operating. And who is going to buy them? Wouldn't it be better at this juncture for the government to use them in a way analogous to FDR public works projects, to put people to work? Al-Zaman estimates that 1/4 of Iraqis live in dire proverty, and the real unemployment rate is still probably 50 percent. Corporations are far less efficient than Washington believes (see: Enron), and some state-owned enterprises have prospered (ask Californians if privatized electricity worked out well for them; and see: Enron). It is no doubt better in the long run to move away from bloated state-owned industries in Iraq, but I just wouldn't have made that a priority.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the lawyers' guild is protesting the decision of the ministry of justice to dissolve it and place a counsellor over it. Guild spokesman complained that the move contravened a 1965 (pre-Baath) law and damaged the independence of the organization from the government. (It is hard to tell what is going on here, but guilds and unions in Iraq were arms of the Baath Party, now dissolved and despised.
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Kurds Plan to Seize Kirkuk Militarily: Knight Ridder

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports that the Kurds have seeded 10,000 peshmerga militiamen into the Iraqi army units in the north of Iraq, and plan to use them to seize control of oil-rich Kirkuk. (Actually, the Kurds already control Kirkuk militarily, since their forces conquered it from Saddam with US air support, and they dominate the city's police force).

Lasseter says that the Kurdish paramilitary leaders believe Iraq is on the verge of disintegration into three states, and are preparing to take and hold Kirkuk when the civil war breaks out. (Kurdish leaders speaking this way will no doubt hurry along the process). The Sunni Arabs have no developed petroleum fields in their region, and most rich undeveloped fields appear to lie in the Shiite south. If a tripartite partition did take place, and if Kirkuk went to the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs would be reduced to dire poverty. For this reason, they are unlikely to go quietly.

The fix may well be in, on Kirkuk. Al-Zaman/ AFP[Ar.] report that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is also said to have shown a new flexibility toward the Kurds on the issue of control of oil-rich Kirkuk. When he spoke before the Kurdistan regional parliament, he promised to redraw the boundaries of Kurdistan. Kurds insist that Ta'mim or Kirkuk province had originally been Kurdish but was artificially detached from Kurdistan by Saddam. The Turkmen population of the province maintain that Kirkuk was traditionally Turkmen. The Arabs that Saddam settled up there (or who came as labor immigrants) are often being expelled. Thousands of Kurds are flooding into Kirkuk and clearly are attempting to make it overwhelmingly Kurdish. Kurdish representatives won 6 of the province's 9 parliamentary seats on Dec. 15.

Al-Hakim said the issue of redrawing regional boundaries did not only concern the Kurds, suggesting that he has in mind some gerrymandering in the largely Shiite South, as well. Since a large proportion of Turkmen in Kirkuk are Shiites, if al-Hakim goes forward on this basis, he is showing a willingness to sacrifice their interests to those of the southern, Arab Shiites that are his power base. Many Shiite Turkmen, however, follow Muqtada al-Sadr, currently al-Hakim's coalition partner, and it remains to see if al-Hakim can hold his coalition together if he pleases the Kurds as a quid pro quo for Shiite autonomy in the south, while allowing the Shiite Turkmen to be walked all over in the north.

The CSM suggests that tiny parties in Iraq could end up being important because they may be swing votes for the large Shiite fundamentalist coalition.

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that Jalal Talabani (a Kurdish leader) and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (leader of the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance), were supposed to meet at Sulaimaniyah with US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Wednesday concerning the formation of a new government, but the meeting ended up being postponed, according to al-Hayat. Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist, had been invited to the talks but refused to take part, since he is calling for an investigation into irregularities in the Dec. 15 election and regards it as flawed.

Kurdish member of parliament Mahmoud Osman said that there was coordination between the Americans and the Kurds to resolve the crisis.

Massoud Barzani is said to have proposed to Al-Hakim trading Shiite control of the Ministry of the Interior to the Kurds, with the Shiites taking the Ministry of Defense. Al-Hakim is said to have refused. The ministry of the interior, controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq that al-Hakim heads, has been plagued by charges of running Shiite paramilitary death squads and secret prisons where Sunni Arabs have been tortured and starved. The Americans are said to be determined to get Interior (sort of like the US Department of Homeland Security plus FBI) out of the hands of the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council. At the moment, a Sunni Arab holds the post of minister of defense, but he is without any strong party backing. Sunni Arabs and secularists had been demanding both Defense and Interior, but they lost the election, and may not get either.
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Over 10,000 Sunnis, Secularists March in Baghdad against Election Results;
Al-Hakim meets Kurdish Leaders

AP reports that in Iraq, over 10,000 mainly Sunni Arab demonstrators rallied in downtown Baghdad on Tuesday, calling for a rerun of the elections on the grounds of massive fraud, and demanding a government of national unity (which would include many Sunni Arab ministers). The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the fundamentalist Shiite coalition that won the Dec. 15 election, has indicated a willingness to form such a government of national unity.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports the number of demonstrators as rather larger, at tens of thousands strong, but the size of demonstrations is notoriously hard to estimate and the guesses tend to be larger than the reality. The marchers set out from al-Mansur, shouting their rejection of the outcome of the elections, according to Reuters. They demanded the resignation of members of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. One poster read, "No to sectarian relections that seek to partition Iraq!" Others warned Irran to leave Baghdad free. Others chanted, "No Sunni, no Shiite, all Islam-- Unite!" They wanted the election results annulled, and an investigation, as well as new elections.

Hundreds of Sunnis in Tikrit to the north held a similar demonstration.

Last Friday, even larger crowds had thronged the streets of Baghdad protesting that the recent parliamentary elections had been stolen by the Shiite fundamentalists.

In Kirkuk, Sunni Arab and Turkmen politicians rejected the results of the election. AFP says that 75 leaders of these two groups were sending letters to the UN, the Arab League and others affirming that they share the consensus of the "national" parties in rejecting these election results. They pledged to hold demonstrations on Wednesday in Kirkuk. This oil city is a tinderbox full of ethnic rivalries and hatreds, and it is coveted by the Kurds, who now may make up half of the city of Kirkuk.

Al-Hayat[Ar.] : US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad visited Riyadh on Tuesday for an audience with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia.

Khalilzad had earlier met in Abu Dhabi with the UAE minister of foreign affairs, Shaikh Hamdan bin Zayid. Shaikh Hamdan has apparently been acting behind the scenes as a mediator in an attempt to resolve the political crisis. Abu Dhabi will host a meeting to be attended by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, Adnan Pachachi of the secular Iraqiya list, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a Shiite cleric, and a Kurdish leader.

Al-Hayat: Political leaders continued their negotiations and meetings in an attempt to exit from the political crisis provoked by the rejection by Sunni Arabs and secularists of the fairness of the Dec. 15 elections. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who heads up the fundamentalist UIA, met in Irbil with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani early on Tuesday. Barzani has publicly expressed frustrations with his Shiite coalition partners. Al-Hakim then went to Sulaimaniyah to meet with Jalal Talabani, to explore a renewal of the Shiite-Kurdish political marriage of convenience, which had allowed the formation of the previous interim government.

Al-Hakim absolutely rejected the notion that the parliamentary elections would be re-staged, and he also rejected the idea of allowing international observers to conduct an investigation into the elecitons. At a news conference with Massoud Barzani, al- Hakim said, "It is impossible to annul the elections. The elections cannot be held over again, and it there is no possibility of any international or regional intervention in them."

As for the next government, al-Hakim evinced a willingness to negotiate "with those who have a clear position on essential national principles." Among the more prominent of these principles is "the struggle against terrorism, uprooting the Baath party, and seriousness about prosecuting Saddam Hussein." (Al-Hakim is probably signalling that he will not entertain an alliance with the National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak, which has secular, neo-Baath tendencies, or with the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi, which includes many ex-Baathists.)

For his part, Barzani said he would support the establishment of a government with "a broad popular base." Asked if the two leaders had agreed on including Sunni Arabs in the new government, Barzani said, "We are agreed on the principle of including other parties. We have not discussed the details at this time. We shall, later on, hold discussions with all concerned parties."

A member of the National Iraqiya list of Allawi, old-time Sunni Arab nationalist politician Adnan Pachachi, affirmed that his list would seek to participate in the formation of a government "so as to cut down on the possibility of the rise of a sectarian state." In another article, al-Hayat reports that the victory of Muslim fundamentalists in the Dec. 15 elections in Iraq has pushed the secularists to angle for control of the ministries of the interior and of defense. (In the present government, Interior is dominated by the (Shiite) Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, both of them long resident in Iran. Defense is held by Saadoun Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab who has thrown in with the new order. The likelihood that the secularists, who might have only 20 or so seats in the 275-member parliament, will get control of either ministry strikes me as low. It is said that the Americans want to get rid of Bayan Jabr Sulagh, the Turkmen Shiite who now heads Interior, viewing him as complicit in the setting up of secret torture cells. (Some observers snicker and say that the Americans should talk.)

At least 11 Iraqis died in political violence, and 4 US GIs were killed, two of them in a helicopter crash.

The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the arrest of 50 iraqis in West Baghdad, most of them members of Arab clans, especially the Dulaim. The government also arrest 12 other suspicious characters, one of them of Syrian nationality.

Al-Hayat further reports that the city of Najaf has become a city of gated communities cut off from one another by heavy private security measures aimed at protecting high Shiite clerics and politicians. Checkpoints dot the streets leading to their homes, causing traffic gridlock.

Jalal al-Din Kalidar, from the family that traditionally controlled the shrine of Ali in the city, criticized clerics for inconveniencing their fellow residents with such intense security measures. He complained that many of the clerics had only recently come back from Iran, loaded down with cash, and that they were more politicians than clergymen. Shaikh Abdul Mun'im al-Musalli complained that if these clerics had been real clergymen, they wouldn't have needed to surround themselves with so much security. He said, "Shaik Abdul Fattah al-Dhibhawi was killed the day before yesterday not because he was a man of the cloth but because of his political work with Sayyid Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq." He said sometimes rival Shiite political parties assassinate one another's activists.

Lt. Adil Fatlawi of the Najaf police said that the police remain impotent to address such problems: "The civil administration of the province and its officials take orders from the religious leaders, and some clergymen have organizations and movements behind them." He alleged, "Najaf is now ruled by militias and their leaders.

A mass grave was discovered in Karbala, probably from spring, 1991, when the Bush senior administration stood by and allowed Saddam to crush a popular Shiite uprising against the Baath Party. Bush senior had called for the Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam, but allowed them to be massacred when they took his advice. Many Shiites are still angry over that betrayal.
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Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005

Iraq has unfortunately become a football in the rough and ready, two-party American political arena, generating large numbers of sound bites and so much spin you could clothe all of China in the resulting threads.

Here are what I think are the top ten myths about Iraq, that one sees in print or on television in the United States.

1. The guerrilla war is being waged only in four provinces. This canard is trotted out by everyone from think tank flacks to US generals, and it is shameful. Iraq has 18 provinces, but some of them are lightly populated. The most populous province is Baghdad, which has some 6 million residents, or nearly one-fourth of the entire population of the country. It also contains the capital. It is one of the four being mentioned!. Another of the four, Ninevah province, has a population of some 1.8 million and contains Mosul, a city of over a million and the country's third largest! It is not clear what other two provinces are being referred to, but they are probably Salahuddin and Anbar provinces, other big centers of guerrilla activity, bringing the total for the "only four provinces" to something like 10 million of Iraq's 26 million people.

But the "four provinces" allegation is misleading on another level. It is simply false. Guerrilla attacks occur routinely beyond the confines of Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Baghdad. Diyala province is a big center of the guerrilla movement and has witnessed thousands of deaths in the ongoing unconventional war. Babil province just south of Baghdad is a major center of back alley warfare between Sunnis and Shiites and attacks on Coalition troops. Attacks, assassinations and bombings are routine in Kirkuk province in the north, a volatile mixture of Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs engaged in a subterranean battle for dominance of the area's oil fields. So that is 7 provinces, and certainly half the population of the country lives in these 7, which are daily affected by the ongoing violence. It is true that violence is rare in the 3 northern provinces of the Kurdistan confederacy. And the Shiite south is much less violent than the 7 provinces of the center-north, on a good day. But some of this calm in the south is an illusion deriving from poor on the ground reporting. It appears to be the case that British troops are engaged in an ongoing struggle with guerrilla forces of the Marsh Arabs in Maysan Province. Even calm is not always a good sign. The southern port city of Basra appears to come by its via a reign of terror by Shiite religious militias.

2. Iraqi Sunnis voting in the December 15 election is a sign that they are being drawn into the political process and might give up the armed insurgency So far Iraqi Sunni parties are rejecting the outcome of the election and threatening to boycott parliament. Some 20,000 of them demonstrated all over the center-north last Friday against what they saw as fraudulent elections. So, they haven't been drawn into the political process in any meaningful sense. And even if they were, it would not prevent them from pursuing a two-track policy of both political representation and guerrilla war. The two-track approach is common among insurgencies, from Northern Ireland's IRA to Palestine's Hamas.

3. The guerrillas are winning the war against US forces. The guerrillas are really no more than mosquitos to US forces. The casualties they have inflicted on the US military, of over 2000 dead and some 15,000 wounded, are deeply regrettable and no one should make light of them. But this level of insurgency could never defeat the US military in the field.

4. Iraqis are grateful for the US presence and want US forces there to help them build their country. Opinion polls show that between 66% and 80% of Iraqis want the US out of Iraq on a short timetable. Already in the last parliament, some 120 parliamentarians out of 275 supported a resolution demanding a timetable for US withdrawal, and that sentiment will be much stronger in the newly elected parliament.

5. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, born in Iran in 1930, is close to the Iranian regime in Tehran Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's majority Shiite community, is an almost lifetime expatriate. He came to Iraq late in 1951, and is far more Iraqi than Arnold Schwarzenegger is Californian. Sistani was a disciple of Grand Ayatollah Burujirdi in Iran, who argued against clerical involvement in day to day politics. Sistani rejects Khomeinism, and would be in jail if he were living in Iran, as a result. He has been implicitly critical of Iran's poor human rights record, and has himself spoken eloquently in favor of democracy and pluralism. Ma'd Fayyad reported in Al-Sharq al-Awsat in August of 2004 that when Sistani had heart problems, an Iranian representative in Najaf visited him. He offered Sistani the best health care Tehran hospitals could provide, and asked if he could do anything for the grand ayatollah. Sistani is said to have responded that what Iran could do for Iraq was to avoid intervening in its internal affairs. And then Sistani flew off to London for his operation, an obvious slap in the face to Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei.

6. There is a silent majority of middle class, secular-minded Iraqis who reject religious fundamentalism. Two major elections have been held. For all their flaws (lack of security, anonymity of most candidates, constraints on campaigning), they certainly are weather vanes of the political mood of most of the country. While the Kurdistan Alliance is largely secular, the Arab Iraqis have turned decisively toward religious fundamentalist parties. The United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite fundamentalists) and the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalists) are the big winners of the most recent election. Iyad Allawi's secular Iraqiya list got only 14.5 percent of the seats on Jan. 30, and will shrink to half that, most likely, in this most recent election. A clear majority of Iraqis, and the vast majority of the Arab Iraqis, are constructing new, fluid political identities that depend heavily on religious and ethnic sub-nationalisms.

7. The new Iraqi constitution is a victory for Western, liberal values in the Middle East. The constitution made Islam the religion of state. It stipulates that the civil parliament may pass no legislation that contradicts the established laws of Islam. It looks forward to clerics serving on court benches. It allows individuals to opt out of secular, civil personal status laws (for marriage, divorce, alimony, inheritance) and to choose relgious canon law instead. Islamic law gives girls, e.g., only half the amount of inheritance received by their brothers. Instead of a federal government, the constitution establishes a loose supervisory role for Baghdad and devolves most powers, including claims on future oil finds, on provinces and provincial confederacies, such that it is difficult to see how the country will be able to hold together.

8. Iraq is already in a civil war, so it does not matter if the US simply withdraws precipitately, since the situation is as bad as it can get. No, it isn't. During the course of the guerrilla war, the daily number of dead has fluctuated, between about 20 and about 60. But in a real civil war, it could easily be 10 times that. Some estimates of the number of Afghans killed during their long set of civil wars put the number at 2.5 million, along with 5 million displaced abroad and more millions displaced internally. Iraq is Malibu Beach compared to Afghanistan in its darkest hours. The US has a responsibility to get out of Iraq responsibly and to not allow it to fall into that kind of genocidal civil conflict.

9. The US can buy off the Iraqis now supporting guerrilla action against US troops. US military and civilian officials in Iraq have on numerous occasions alleged in the press or privately to me that a vast infusion of billions of dollars from the US would dampen down the guerrilla insurgency. In fact, it seems clear that far more Sunni Arabs support the guerrilla movement today than supported it in September of 2004, and more supported it in September of 2004 than had in September of 2003. AP reports that the US has spent $100 million on reconstruction projects in Diyala Province. These community development and infrastructural improvements, often carried out by US troops in conditions of danger, are most praiseworthy. But Diyala is a mess politically and a major center of guerrilla activity (see below), which simply could not be pursued on this scale without substantial local popular support. The Sunni Arab parties, which demand US withdrawal and reject the results of the Dec. 15 elections, carried the province, winning 6 seats.

The guerrillas are to some important extent driven by local nationalism and rejection of foreign occupation, as well as resentment at the marginalization of the Sunni Arab community in the new Iraq. They have a keen sense of national honor, and there is no evidence that they can be bribed into laying down their arms, or that the general populace can be bribed on any significant scale into turning the guerrillas in to the US. Attributing motives of honor to one's own side and crass economic interests to one's opponent is a common ploy of political propaganda, but we should be careful about believing our own spin.

Even a simple economic calculation would favor the guerrillas fighting on, however. If they could get back in control of Iraq through a coup, they'd have $50 billion a year in oil revenues to play with. The total US reconstruction aid promised to Iraq is only $18 billion, and much of that will be spent on security-- i.e. it won't benefit most Iraqis.

10. The Bush administration wanted free elections in Iraq. This allegation is simply not true, as I and others pointed out last January. I said then, and it is still true:

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

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

Iraq's situation is extremely complex. It is not a black and white poster for an American political party. Good things and bad things are happening there. The American public cannot help make good policy, however, unless the myths are first dispelled.
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Over 20 Dead, 46 Wounded in Guerrilla War;
Governor of Diyala Wounded in Assassination Attempt
Sunnis Threaten Boycott

A wave of guerrilla bombings and apparently coordinated small arms attacks around north-central Iraq left over 20 dead and over twice as many wounded on Monday. (Actually, it is worse; the average estimated dead in the guerrilla war ranges between 38 and 60 per day, but wire services seldom report more than a fraction of these deaths).

Guerrillas launched a series of 4 car bombings around Baghdad, killing 5 and wounding 15. Later they detonated a motorcycle bomb in a Shiite neighborhood of the capital near a funeral, killing 3 and wounding 23. According to al-Sharq al-Awsat, guerrillas assassinated Nawfal Ahmad, a professor at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts when he came out of his house in al-Tubji, in north Baghdad. (Hundreds of Iraqi professors have been assassinated; it is not clear that this death is included in the totals given by the wire services, since none that I saw mention it explicitly). Police in Baghdad also happened upon 3 corpses on Monday, one of them that of a police officer.

In Buhriz near Baqubah northeast of Baghdad, a guerrilla platoon of more than thirty men launched a well-planned attack on local police at a checkpoint, jumping out of a minivan and firing rocket propelled grenades. They then advanced, throwing grenades. Late reports say that they killed 10 of the policemen and wounded others. They claimed on the internet to have killed or wounded all 20 policemen at the checkpoint, which may be near enough the truth. Iraqi police claimed to have killed six of the guerrillas.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that guerrillas at the same time assassinated Su'ad Jaafar, a member of the Diyala governing council along with 3 of her bodyguards while she was returning home. A member of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, she was a candidate for parliament in the Dec. 15 elections. They also tried to kill Raad Rashid Jawad, the governor of Diyala province (in which Buhriz is located), with a bomb planted on the route of his motorcade; one of his bodyguards was killed and he and two other bodyguards were wounded. US officials and officers have frequently said that US troops would be withdrawn when Iraqi security forces can handle the guerrillas themselves.

In Dhahab, north of Buhriz, another guerrilla band shot dead 5 Iraqi soldiers, in what may have been a coordinated attack. In Fallujah to the west, a guerrilla wearing a suicide bomb belt killed himself as he waded into a crowd of persons trying to join the police, killing two of them, as well.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrillas set ablaze a gas pipeline carrying gas from Kirkuk to Samarra, via an improvised explosive device that they detonated in southwest Samarra, a city of some 200,000 an hour north of Baghdad. The Washington Post reports that the US military has imprisoned the rebellious Samarra population behind an earthen berm in an attempt to keep guerrilla fighters out, in which they have had some success. US forces have on several occasions declared that they have made substantial progress in Samarra, but violence usually breaks out there again after a time. One suspects that a lot of the violence is not actually coming from the outside.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat[Ar.] : The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq announced Monday early results of the special voting held for certain groups, such as expatriates, members of the armed forces and security forces, and for prisoners. Among these groups (which total just under 500,000 or less than 5 percent of the electorate), the Kurdistan Alliance received 36.5%, the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite) received 30.2%, and the National Iraqi list headed by Iyad Allawi received 11.1%. The National Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalist) received 4.8%. These results are incomplete and could change. The majority of these voters were expatriates, helping explain the disproportionately large Kurdish showing and the disproportionately small vote for Shiite fundamentalists. These numbers will not affect very much the overall shape of the election, which the Shiite religious parties appear to have dominated.

The NYT saw separate statistics for the voting patterns of the 200,000 military, police and prison voters, which gave the Sunni parties about 7 percent, and concludes that Sunni Arabs are under-represented in the new military. The Kurdistan Alliance got 45% of the votes from the security forces, while the UIA got 30%. I am not entirely sure that you can read off these totals as the ethnic make-up of the military and security forces, though, since it is possible that Sunni Arabs in the military did not vote as enthusiastically as Shiites and Kurds. But the NYT and its sources are correct that these proportions are suggestive and disturbing.

The National Accord Front denied earlier reports that it had asked the Shiites to give Sunni Arabs ten seats. (Actually, the report I saw said that the request came from some Sunni Arab cabinet ministers).

The Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front, along with the secular National Dialogue Council and the National Iraqiya list of Allawi, have planned a big demonstration in Baghdad for Tuesday. They, along with 39 other political parties and lists have formed an organization, the Conference for Rejection of the Fraudulent Elections, CRFE (Muram in Arabic). They charge that the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, stole the election through electoral fraud. They also accused the IECI of not actually being an independent electoral commission, implying that it was serving Shiite interests.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat has sources who attended meetings of the rejection front in Amman, which included Iyad Allawi, Adnan Dulaimi and Salih Mutlak, and who reported that these politicians will inform the Arab League Secretary General, Amr Moussa, of their demands that the election be held all over again in the provinces where widespread fraud occurred, especially in the northern cities and in Basra and Baghdad. They sources say that the three leaders have decided to boycott parliamentary sessions in an effort to paralyze it if it will not heed their demands. They are also planning to write a letter to Kofi Annan.

Cole: Parliament requires a 2/3s vote to elect a president, who must appoint a prime minister from the coalition with a simple majority. I figure 2/3s as about 184 votes. Allawi and the Sunni Arabs probably won't have more than 50 or 55 seats all told, leaving around 220. The Kurds will have about 50. If we subtract them, we come down to 170. Therefore, an Allawi/Sunni boycott would force the Shiites into another coalition with the Kurds if they are to form a government, and the Kurds can extract promises moderating Shiite fundamentalist policies before they agree. Since the Rejectionist Conference is alleging fraud in "northern cities," probably a euphemism for Kirkuk, it may in fact push the Kurds to ally with the Shiites again, since both have an interest in protecting their electoral victories in their provinces. On the other hand, if the Kurds and the Shiites can do business, then the Allawi/Sunni boycott would become meaningless and would simply deprive them of a vote in parliament.

Once a Shiite-dominated government is formed, the United Iraqi Alliance could simply vote down its rivals by simple majority, though it would risk a presidential veto if it failed to get a consensus. The president (who likely will be a Kurd and likely will be Jalal Talabani) and the two vice presidents (likely a Sunni Arab and a Shiite) each can exercise a separate veto over legislation for the next 4 years. If the Kurds and the Shiites can find a pliable and complaisant Sunni Arab to serve as vice president, though, they could just run roughshod over the Sunni Arab and secularist minority.

Generally speaking, in parliamentary systems boycotts usually backfire and a poor political strategy. If the Sunni Arabs and secularists were smart, they'd make themselves swing votes in parliament and use their economic power to lobby for policies they want, thus leveraging themselves into great influence. The Sunni Arabs and ex-Baathists were used, however, to ruling by the iron fist from above, and so are hardly canny parliamentarians, and don't know how to make themselves indispensable as a minority.
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Shiites, Sunnis, Demonstrate Against one Another over Elections;
Five Percent of Ballots Fraudulent: IECI

According to Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times, Sunni Arab cabinet ministers requested that the United Iraqi Alliance donate 10 of their seats to Sunni Arab candidates. Apparently they hoped such a gesture would mollify Sunni Arab activists who believe that the Shiites unfairly stole the election. The UIA declined, nor would such a gesture probably have been legal.

Sunnis rallied again on Sunday against the election outcome, crying fraud, at Baqubah in the northeast and Fallujah west of the capital. In Baqubah after the demonstrations, guerrilla groups engaged local Iraqi police, killing 4 of them and wounding 15.

In Fallujah, hundreds of protesters came out. Some rallied against the election results. Others demanded release of detainees held by the US and Iraqi governments, or wanted to be paid compensation for the property damage the city suffered during the November, 2004, assault on the city by US forces, which destroyed 2/3s of the buildings and left most inhabitants refugees. Still others wanted the government to repeal the tripling of fuel costs.

In Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of East Baghdad, about 1,000 Shiites held a demonstration in support of the electoral victory apparently gained by the United Iraqi Alliance. They supported the government of Ibrahim Jaafari, denounced former prime minister Iyad Allawi (a secular Shiite and oldtime CIA asset), and demanded the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder reports increasingly vehement anti-Iranian sentiment among Iraq's Sunni Arabs. They blame Iran for supporting the fundamentalist Shiite parties, and for a string of assassinations of Sunni figures.

Two US soldiers died in Iraq on Sunday, and some 16 Iraqis were killed in guerrilla violence in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Jabala and Baqubah. Guerrillas destroyed an Abrams tank with a roadside bomb, which would have taken a big explosive device, though no US casualties in the event appear yet to have been released. It is not good news that the guerrillas have evolved to the point where they can destroy an Abrams tank.

Iraq's minister of justice, Abdel Hussein Shandal, narrowly avoided being assassinated on Saturday when guerrillas sprayed his car with machine gun fire, killing two.

Al-Hayat [Ar.]: The London pan-Arab daily says that American pressure has increased on the Shiite funamentalist parties to form a government of national unity so as to exit from the current crisis, and that the US is using President Jalal Talabani (a prominent Kurd) as their go-between. US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is playing a key role in attempting to bring the parties together so that a government can be formed, according to another London daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat

Al-Sharq al-Awsat quotes an official of the Iraqi Accord Front, Zafir al-Ani, as saying that electoral fraud in the parliamentary elections of Dec. 15 was "the closest thing to a mercy killing of the entire political process in Iraq." He added that his Sunni fundamentalist coalition was keeping all options open, including that of completely boycotting that political process. He said that his list is getting enormous popular pressure from Sunni Arab voters who were promised that voting on Dec. 15 would restore ethnic and sectarian balance to parliament.

Al-Hayat: The United Iraqi Alliance, the victorious Shiite coalition, has rejected charges that its victory was engineered through voting fraud, and its prominent leaders have intimated that they might take measures against "instigators of violence" (i.e. Sunni Arabs protesting the election results). The massive Sunni demonstrations last Friday and the belligerant Shiite response have raised profound fears that the Iraq crisis could escalate to a new level of violence and instability.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq admitted on Sunday that voting fraud occurred in approximately 5 percent of the ballots cast, but said that this level of fraud would not affect the over-all outcome. Still, the IECI announcement will certainly fuel Sunni Arab anger and conviction that the election was stolen.

Shiite Iraqi politician Hussein Shahristani maintained that United Nations and European Union observers viewed the December 15 elections as among the more above-board and clean in the third world, and said that there is no doubt that its results reflected the will of the people.
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Iraqi Christians in Peril this Christmas

Because of the poor security, Iraqi Christians had to celebrate midnight mass at sundown instead. Many Christians have fled Iraq for Syria and elsewhere, while others are afraid to go to the churches, which have been targeted in the past by bombers. (Ironically, the secular Arab nationalist regimes like the Syrian Baath have typically been favorable to local Christians, since they downplay religious identity.

The year 2005 has not been kind to Iraqi Christians, who number around 700,000. Like all Iraqis, they face problems of insecurity, violence, and kidnapping. But they are sometimes unfairly targeted as pro-Western. About 80 percent of Iraqi Christians are Uniate Catholics or Chaldeans, who acknowledge the Pope but have their own liturgy. Pope John Paul II, it should be remembered, opposed the Iraq War. The other 20 percent are Assyrians, rooted in a historical legacy of the Nestorian, Aramaic-using church of the Near East, though most of these have moved away from classical Nestorian theology (which emphasized the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth and refused to recognize the Mother Mary as the "mother of God.") These are old, local churches.

The political events of 2005 often harmed the interests of the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians. The ballot boxes they should have received in their region of Ninevah in the north for the Jan. 30 elections often never arrived. They also alleged that they were slighted unfairly in the recent Dec. 15 polls. At some 3 percent of the population, they would ideally have 8 or so seats in the parliament, but do not.

The constitution forged in summer of 2005 and approved in a referendum on Oct. 15 makes Islam the religion of state in Iraq and says that the civil parliament may pass no legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Chaldeans and Assyrians vehemently protested these provisions, to no avail. They were especially concerned that the constitution likely makes it illegal for Muslims to convert to Christianity, and therefore puts Christians in legal peril if they are responsible for such conversions. It may also be that some Christian sentiments about Islam will be regarded as blasphemous, as has happened in nearby Pakistan.

Iraq's Christians have also often been disadvantaged by the movement of Kurds into northern Iraq and Kurdish hopes of annexing much of Kirkuk and Ninevah to Kurdistan. There is often tension between Iraqi Christians and the Kurds because of these territorial issues.

The Chaldeans are deeply worried about their future. They are concerned with the likely impact on their community of emigration (because of the bad security) and of the rise in Iraq of political Islam. They are also profoundly fearful and resentful of evangelical Protestant targeting of their members for conversion. (In modern Middle Eastern history, Presbyterians and Baptists have on a number of occasions launched a big push to convert Muslims, which invariably failed miserably, after which the missionaries turned their attention to local Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and other Middle Eastern Christians).

It seems clear that the new order that Bush has brought to Iraq holds substantial perils for the indigenous Iraqi Christian community.
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Sistani Calls for Government of National Unity

According to AFP, Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie met Saturday with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and then conveyed the latter's hope that a national unity government will be formed. Rubaie (al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP, Cole trans.:) quoted Sistani as saying, "I urge you to maintain the unity of the Iraqi people, and urge the parties that won to deal with those issues over which there is dispute, with wisdom and nonviolently." He further conveyed the ayatollah's words, "I also counsel the the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the elections, to work with other components of the people of Iraq to form a government of national unity that will represent all the chief currents in the country." Sistani is said to have stressed the need for calm, so that the country could be rebuilt.

Sistani is in essence supporting the plan of President Jalal Talabani (a Kurd). The grand ayatollah had pressed for much more Sunni representation in the cabinet last spring than the Shiite religious parties and the Kurds were willing to accept, and this sectarian selfishness on their part appears to be one of the things that soured him on the United Iraqi Alliance.

The call comes in the wake of huge demonstrations in Iraq by Sunni Arabs on Friday against what they called election fraud on Dec. 15, and after about 100 prominent Sunni candidates were excluded on the grounds that they had been high officials in the Baath Party-- reinforcing the Sunni Arab conviction that they were targeted for marginalization by the new regime.

The Debaathification Committee is de facto an arm of corrupt financier and current vice premier Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and it is widely rumored that Chalabi has deployed it to intimidate and blackmail possible opponents. Chalabi and the INC are close to the Pentagon and the Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute. The Committee had forwarded to the High Electoral Commission the 100 or so names of candidates who had been high in the Baath establishment. The High Electoral Commission concluded that the Debaathfication Committee had not presented sufficient proof, and so allowed these 100 candidates to run. This policy reflects the conviction of Iyad Allawi, the CIA and the State Department that incorporating the ex-Baathists into the government would both dampen the guerrilla war and offset the power of the Shiite fundamentalists with close ties to Iran, who had come to power in the Jan. 30 elections. The Chalabi group took the Electoral Commission to court, and the 3-judge Supreme Judicial Court sided with the Chalabi faction (i.e. Rumsfeld and the Neocons won this one, and the CIA and the State Department lost.) It would be interesting to know who appointed the Supreme Judicial Council.

The exclusion of these 90-odd prominent Sunni Arabs from the election, even after many had won seats in parliament, can only exacerbate ethnic tensions in Iraq.
I have repeatedly said that the standard for who is excluded from public life should be whether they could be proven to have committed crimes. Mere membership in a party should not be the criterion. As one canny reader wrote me, moreover, the threat of using former Baath Party membership to remove persons from civic life could easily be used to intimidate and coerce Sunni Arabs, most of whom had those connections.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.] reports that the Shiite fundamentalist list, the United Iraqi Alliance, has begun to explore political alliances that will allow it to form the next government. Jawad al-Maliki of the Dawa Party (a component of the UIA) said that a prime ministerial candidate will be chosen by the coalition as soon as the final results of the election are known. He also castigated protesters against the election results, saying that they must accept the will of the people. He added, "Many of them are led by gangs of the remnants for the former regime and by excommunicators (radical Salafi Muslims who declare Shiites and moderate Muslims to actually be "infidels.").

Iran's Interior Minister said that what is happening in Iraq today is an echo of the Khomeinist ideals of the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Meanwhile, Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said that Iraq wants to strengthen relations with Iran along a whole range of dimensions. Zebari is a Sunni Kurd, but many Kurds view Tehran fondly because it supported the Kurds against Saddam.

In Hilla, Kirkuk, Baghdad and Fallujah on Saturday, the guerrillas set off bombs, set afire pipelines, tried to assassinate the minister of justice, killed or wounded Iraqi soldiers and police, murdered civilians, and killed another GI. Fourteen persons were killed in Baghdad alone, and six corpses showed up in the streets of the capital. Hostage crises with regard to Jordanian and Sudanese continued.

A report in the Washington Post suggests that aggressive US use of air power in Anbar province to combat the Sunni Arab guerrillas may be killing twice as many innocent civilians as guerrillas. Air power as an element in aggressive counter-insurgency is an overly blunt instrument, and is certainly producing more enemies for the US than it kills. All along, the US has relentlessly bombed civilian neighborhoods in Iraq, helping to produce the horrible security situation than now obtains. Air power is especially useless insofar as it affords the political wing of the guerrillas no opportunity to negotiate. Successful counter-insurgency must have a political track.

Pepe Escobar has a canny run-down of the political situation in Iraq after the elections.
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Interlibrary Loan/ DHS Story a Hoax

The story of the interlibrary loan request for Mao's Little Red Book that produced an interview by the Department of Homeland Security turns out to be a hoax.

However, it is one of those hoaxes that bespeaks a reality, which is that the level of unwarranted (a pun!) surveillance of Americans and violation of their fourth amendment rights under the Bush administration has skyrocketed to new levels of criminality. And, as I said, I do know of people who have been interviewed when they tried to import Arabic books.
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Achcar Comments on IC 12/24/05

Gilbert Achcar kindly writes:

' Dear Juan

Two remarks:

1) re: to the "informed reader" of your "informed comment" who wonders about the independent Sadrist list, Risaliyun, which you translated as "Messengers" (I am sure they would reject such an English label which would put them on a par with the Prophet: al-Rasul, the Messenger, the plural of which is Rusul, as you know, not Risaliyun). This list whose name could better be translated as the Upholders of the Message is indeed the one that the IECI refers to under the odd translation of "Progressives."

[Cole note: The translation of Risaliyun as "Messengers" was that of a wire service report, not my own.]

This last-minute list of anti-UIA Sadrists was backed by one of al-Sadr's collaborators, sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji. Its results in Baghdad (Darraji operates in al-Sadr City) where it got 1.8% of the votes compared with 58.5% for the UIA, in Basrah, another stronghold of the Sadrists, 0.5% compared with 77.5%, and in Najaf, 4% compared with 82%, show clearly that the vast majority of al-Sadr followers voted for Shiite unity within the UIA, as recommended indirectly by Sistani, and not for a separate entity. However, since the Sadrists have becomed golden boys in the political equivalent of hedge funds, it is likely that the purpose of this slate was only to attract the votes of the residual number of Sadrists who are vehemently opposed to the alliance with SCIRI. That would explain the relatively good score in Najaf where enmity is highest between Sadrists and SCIRI.

2) re: the story about the tanker full of forged ballots to which you devoted a long comment. What you say is very sensible. What should be added is that this story was printed very prominently by the New York Times on Dec. 14, quoting "an official at the Interior ministry... who spoke on the condition of anonymity" without the newspaper bothering to verify it, a fact which could mean that it was "whispered" to them by a US or Allawi-inspied "informant" as part of the very intensive disinformation and propaganda campaign engaged since several weeks by US authorities and their close allies in Iraq against the UIA and Iran. It was immediately denied by Iraqi official sources -- the border police -- who said they were even astonished to hear of it as nothing at all approaching that story was reported to them at any point of the border. (If I am not wrong, the NYT did not bother either to report the denial.)

The story was so little credible that nobody among the UIA or Iran's opponents in Iraq made a fuss about it, though if it were real you can be sure that it would have become a major international and local news item and the object of strong statements from Khalilzad, the occupation authorities and Washington. The only other sources reporting it actually quoted... the NYT and the story is used in Arabic only by those among the fiercest Shiite haters who have no scruples about facts anyway.

The story about the arrest of a man in relation with the "forged ballots" which you refer to today is to be very much qualified. One should always describe the source that is quoted, especially when the odds that this source is biased are heavy indeed. In this case, this source is an anti-Iranian regime website, "Iran Focus," and the fact that no Iraqi source, including anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian sources reported its story makes it highly suspiscious, as long as it is not confirmed separately (not by quoting Iran Focus, otherwise the whole thing turns farcical!) by reliable sources. The Dec. 23 dated dispatch of "Iran Focus" did not credit any specific source for their "information" but just said "according to Baghdad dailies." You and me happen to read Baghdad dailies, and I haven't seen any trace of that yesterday or today (correct me if you have seen any).

The rest of the Iran Focus dispatch is revealing in the same vein:

"Independent analysts in the Iraqi capital said the incident was not isolated and that Tehran had sent a huge number of fake ballots to Iraq to boost the performance of its protégés in the elections.... Last week, the commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, General George Casey, said that there was intelligence indicating that Tehran had “invested heavily” in political parties supportive of Iran in southern Iraq." No further comment is needed.

All the best, Gilbert '

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20,000 Protest Election Fraud in Iraq
Leading Sunnis Scorned as Baathists

The question of whether the December 15 elections might contribute to social peace in Iraq (always a chancy proposition) began to clarify on Friday.

The guerrilla war raged with full fury, as two GIs were killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb. A suicide bomber on a bicycle killed 10 persons and wounded others at a Shiite mosque in Baladruz northeast of Baghdad. The death toll from an attack on an Iraqi army base in the north rose to 10. A bomber targeted a British convoy in Basra, but missed.

First, Nancy Youssef and Huda Ahmed broke the story that the Iraqi Supreme Court has ordered the high electoral commission to heed the warning that several leading Sunni Arab candidates were high-ranking Baathists and should be disqualified. The affected candidates are largely from the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi and the National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak, both of them hospitable to secular ex-Baathists. Mutlak predicted turbulence in the streets, with perfect accuracy (of course, he helped arrange for the turbulence).

Then, Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.] : and AP report that some 20,000 mainly Sunni protesters (along with some secular Shiites) came out in several cities to protest what they called election fraud. Demonstrations were held in Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit and Samarra, among other cities. The crowds demanded that new elections be held, given the extent of irregularities they maintained had occurred.

At one of the Baghdad rallies, Adnan Dulaimi of the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni Islamist) demanded that the results of the election be abrogated in every province where any electoral fraud could be demonstrated. He pledged to "follow all peaceful and legal means to vindicate the truth and defeat falsehood." His coalition partner, Tariq al-Hashimi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said, "our position of rejecting the results of the elections is reinforced daily, and before us lies the difficult mission of altering the results and achieving justice." He said, "The intention to commit fraud was present even before the ballot boxes were opened." He added, "If we do not receive an answere, we will rethink our participation in politics, for we reject a political process that some desire, based on fraud and lies." The Sunni Arabs, he said, "refuse to be second class citizens."

Shaikh Mahdi al-Sumaidaie, the preacher at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in West Baghdad said in his sermon that "The Iraqi people, which had anticipated the rise of national government that would include all groups, has been shocked by the process of election fraud, and it is something that the Iraqi people absolutely will not abide." Sumaidaie had been among the few hard line members of the Association of Muslim Scholars who had called for Sunnis to participate in the elections.

In Mosul, hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Khidr Mosque toward the governor's mansion at the center of the city, carrying Iraqi flags and placards with phrases like "The Electoral Commission is Subordinating Iraq to its Neighbors" (i.e. Iran), and shouting "No, no!" to the High Electoral Commission, which they called the "High Fraudulent Commission."

The demonstrations were called by the Iraqi Accord Front, the Iraq People's Congress, and the National Dialogue Council one day after 35 coalitions, parties and movements (including some consisting of secular Shiites) rejected the early results being announced concerning the outcome of the elections. In those results, the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, won most of the seats in 9 southern provinces and in Baghdad. The demonstrators shouted that Iran had intervened in the elections, and said that even a high American official had complained about Tehran's interference (a reference to Gen. George Casey.)

(The Bush administration's fear of Iran and of its reigning Iraqi allies in Baghdad may be destabilizing Iraq by giving ammunition to disgruntled Sunni Arabs. How many feet does the Bush administration have left to shoot itself in??)

There was a story floating around last week that a "tanker" full of "hundreds of thousands" of forged ballots coming from Iran was discovered and confiscated at the border, with the names but not the rest of the ballots filled in. This story, which has fed Sunni Arab discontent, makes no sense. First of all, you can't get hundreds of thousands of ballots on one truck, even a tanker. Paper is bulky. How would Iran have a list of plausible Iraqi voters? Iranians mostly print in nasta'liq script, not the naskh favored in the Arab world, and mostly use Persian, not Arabic. While Iranian printers could pull off such a thing, you have to ask, why? If you were going to print fake Arabic ballots for Iraq, why not just do it in Basra? It is not as if the United Iraqi Alliance, the presumed beneficiary of the alleged forgeries, does not control Iraqi printing presses in areas secure enough for it to commit fraud if it liked. I don't find the story plausible, but it appears that the US military has actually arrested Fazel "Abu Tayyib" Jasim, a provincial council member of Kut and a member of the Shiite Badr Organization (the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), implicating him in the affair. I'd like to see the truck and the ballots on television. One tanker, or even a fleet of them, couldn't affect centrally an election with millions of voters.

In any case, these actions and statements of the US military are unlikely to overturn the election results, which probably give the religious Shiites control of parliament. But they could further destabilize Iraq, if that is possible.

Informed sources told al-Zaman that the new government won't be formed until late February or early March.

SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani Friday in Najaf. Afterwards, he issued a statement that he would not allow the dissolution of the High Electoral Commission, as critics of the eleciton demanded. He said the criticisms of the election results were unwarranted, and he called the threats issued by some "a bad thing." He said, "We have to honor the will of the people." He said that criticisms of the High Electoral Commission were understandable, but that to target the people itself was bizarre and unprecedented. He insisted, "The United Iraqi Alliance too strong for any blocs to stand before it, since it represents the will of the majority of the Iraqi people."
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