Breaking News: Lebanese Government Resigns in Face of VideoClip Revolution

Futur television satellite news is reporting that the Lebanese government has resigned. For the last few days, I was watching the crowds assembled at Martyrs' Square in Beirut (a place significant in the anticolonial struggle against the French), and noted the ineffectual attempt of [now former] Interior Minister Suleiman Frangieh to forbid the protests.

I just saw a speaker at the protests shout that the people are more powerful than the government, with everyone joyous at the fall of the government.

Futur was showing the protests with an overlay of Lebanese music, so that the effect was to mimic the wildly popular Video Clips (a belated Arab version of "I want my MTV").

Futur was partially owned by slain Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, whose assassination kicked off the crisis.

Update: Al-Jazeerah is reporting that the Lebanese Opposition is now calling for the big demonstrations at Martyrs' Square to continue until all Syrian troops leave Lebanese soil.

You wonder what would happen if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tried the same thing re: Ariel Sharon's military occupation that they face. They'd be crushed by the jackboot (with convenient allegations that they were a front for terrorism).
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Breaking News: Bloodbath in Hilla with 120 Dead, 200 Wounded

Guerrillas drove a carbomb into the midst of young Shiite men standing in line to get physicals for service in the police or national guards, in the southern city of Hilla, and detonated it. CNN is reporting at least 120 dead and over 200 wounded. This attack is the worst single atrocity in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.

Gen. Richard Myers suggested recently that the guerrilla war would go on for at least 10 years.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

8 Dead in Mosul
UIA visits Sistani
Threat of a Deadlock

Guerrillas detonated a bomb in Mosul on Sunday that killed 8 persons and injured at least two more.

The Syrians found Saddam Hussein's half-brother in Beirut and handed him over to the US. (If there is an Arab city where US intelligence ought to have been able to find a high Iraqi official by itself without help from Syria, it should have been Beirut).

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP A delegation from the United Iraqi Alliance, the victorious coalition of religious Shiites parties in the Iraqi parliament, visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani at his home in Najaf on Sunday. A member of the 20-person delegation, Hussein Shahristani, said afterwards, "The basic advice that Sayyid Sistani gave was that action should be taken to include all Iraqis in the political process."

Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said, "We emphasized to his excellency that we are clinging to the unity of the Alliance, and to a strengthening of this unity, and action to ensure a quick meeting of the parliament." Chalabi called for a speedy formation of an Iraqi government so that "we can treat the existing serious issues in Iraq, the most important of them being sovereignty, security, administrative corruption, and the provision of services."

For Chalabi, who was convicted in Jordan of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, to complain about "administrative corruption", is rich.

Reuters reports that Ghalib al-Jazairy, the police chief of Najaf, is refusing to step down even though the Ministry of the Interior has ordered him to be replaced by A. Abdul Razzak. Some fear that Najaf will again fall into instability if police fight police:

' Police chief Ghalib al-Jazairy insists he is still boss even after Baghdad's Interior Ministry appointed Brigadier Abdel Shaheed Abdel Razzak to take over the post. To add to the confusion, Jazairy's rage is vented not at Razzak, but at Abdel Aal al-Koufi, who he believes has been put in charge of overall security in Najaf by his rival, Najaf Governor Adnan al-Zurfi. '

The Christian Science Monitor points out that the American idea of making Iraqis in parliament come up with a 2/3s majority to form a government may create permanent gridlock. The religious Shiites, who have 54 % of the seats in parliament, must now find a way to compromise with the Kurds.

In the other Shiite holy city, of Karbala, some 2,000 students demonstrated Sunday against the decision of the Iraqi government to make Saturday a national day of weekly rest, along with Friday. The students were responding to a call by Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, and they began at a Sadr political office and marched on the governor's office in the center of the city. When they got there they read out statements demanding the rescinding of this decree, calling on the religious authorities to speak out against it, and denouncing it as an attempt to please "the Zionists." (Saturday is the Jewish sabbath, whereas for Muslims the holiest day of the week is Friday.) They wanted the days of rest to be Thursday and Friday, not Friday and Saturday.

Protests had been held on Saturday elsewhere in the country. Having Thursday and Friday off is common in the Muslim world, especially the Gulf, and this is the way things are done in Iran, as well.

The major drawback of the Thursday-Friday weekend is that in most of the world, banks close on Saturdays and Sundays. So for both Thursday and Friday to be days off reduces the country's interface with international banking to only 3 days a week, which is undesirable. The religious fundamentalists in Iraq, such as the Shiite Sadrists and the Sunni Salafis, have focused on Saturday being the Jewish sabbath, and so are trying to rally against a Saturday day of rest as a Zionist plot. It has nothing to do with Zionism, of course, but it is true that a Saturday-Sunday weekend in most Western countries does reflect what is convenient for Christians and Jews. Traditional Islam, by the way, had no day of rest; people worked on Fridays, and just closed up shop to go to noon prayers and then came back and worked afterwards. So there is no tradition that should favor Thursday as a day off rather than Saturday, though the Sadrists seem to be trying to claim that there is.

In a positive development, the Turkish government has accepted the principle of federalism for Iraq. Ankara had earlier been skittish about the principle because they saw a federal Iraq with a Kurdistan state as unstable.
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Mubarak and elections,

Egyptian President Husni Mubarak is going to allow multiparty competition for the presidency. But note that only offically recognized parties can field candidates. This step excludes the Muslim Brotherhood, probably the only serious competitor with Mubarak's party. Will blog more on this later . . . I'm really sleepy and it is late. But just to say that while it is a step in the right direction, there is less to it than meets the eye and it is too early to get very excited. In a sense, Egypt's step now makes its presidential elections somewhat analogous to those in Iran, where candidates are vetted beforehand.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

s
Book Review on Islam and Iraq

Paul William Roberts reviews a number of books about Islam and/or Iraq, and has some kind words about my Sacred Space and Holy War.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pipeline Sabotage, Baghdad Bombing

Ten people were killed and 11 kidnapped in Iraq on Saturday. The current Marine offensive against guerrillas in Ramadi killed 3 and wounded 15. Al-Hayat reports this as a major US campaign in Anbar province.

Guerrillas blew up a northern pipeline on Saturday. Other guerrillas exploded a bomb in Baghdad, while in Mosul the body of a kidnapped female television presenter showed up.

James Glanz of the NYT discusses separatist or autonomist inclinations in the southern Basra province of Iraq.

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports on the quiet disappearance of most neighborhood "governing councils" in Iraq, the establishment of which had been touted as a Bush administration achievement in Iraq early on. The members no longe meet and many are in hiding, for fear of assassination.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat conducted an interview with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list. It seems to me really odd that no major Western media has conducted an interview with him. He doesn't probably speak English, but surely there are translators. Putin doesn't speak English at news conferences either.

Al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, emphasized that he will stand vigorously against any state that attempts to interfere in internal Iraqi affairs. Sensitive to accusations that he might be a cat's paw of Iran, he pointed out that the al-Hakims opposed the Baath party for 10 years before the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

He said no Iraqi wanted to see US troops in Iraq, and that when he consulted with the UN Security Council about a withdrawal of US troops, the UNSC told him that was a bilateral issue between the US and Iraq.

Colin Powell was pushed out as secretary of state because he sought to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to the Daily Telegraph. In another part of the interview, Powell criticized Rumsfeld for sending so few troops into Iraq:

' What went wrong for Iraq was not the military campaign, which was "brilliantly fought", but the transition to "nation-building" that followed. In Powell's view, there were "enough troops for war but not for peace, for establishing order. My own preference would have been for more forces after the conflict."

Why did you make the mistake, I ask, of putting so much weight on weapons of mass destruction? Originally, the United States had happily advocated regime change. When it began to contemplate war, was it forced to abandon this line on legal and diplomatic advice, and use WMD as the casus belli?

Not really, says Powell, because the two were linked. President Clinton and Congress had a policy of regime change, but when Clinton's Operation Desert Fox bombed Iraq for four days in December 1998, it was because of WMD. "It was intelligence over those years, including your own secret intelligence service [MI6], which said Saddam had WMD."

So, in Resolution 1441 at the United Nations, "we gave Saddam an entry-level test: give us a declaration that answers all the outstanding questions. He failed the test of the resolution. It became a question that he was hiding something, that he was going to drag this out until the international community lost interest. "There's no doubt in our mind that it would have lost interest. After his false declaration in response to 1441, it seemed likely he could return to his old ways. That was a gamble that the President and Tony Blair were not prepared to take." Hence the attempt at the second resolution and Powell's famous presentation of the WMD evidence to the Security Council.

And now Colin Powell becomes more direct: "I'm very sore. I'm the one who made the television moment. I was mightily disappointed when the sourcing of it all became very suspect and everything started to fall apart. "The problem was stockpiles. None have been found. I don't think any will be found. There may not have been any at the time. It was the best judgment of the intelligence community, not something I made up. Clinton had been told the same thing."

Matter-of-factly, he adds: "I will forever be known as the one who made the case."

With five days' notice from the President, Powell worked it up: "Every single word in that presentation was screened and approved by the intelligence community." He cites the case of the aluminium tubes, which he presented to the world as being, probably, for centrifuges intended for nuclear weapons: "We sat down with a roomful, of analysts. The Director of Central Intelligence [George Tenet] -- he's essentially the referee on these occasions -- sits down and says: 'We have concluded that they're not rocket bodies: it's our judgment that these are for centrifuges'. "So that's what I said, though I mentioned signs of differences of opinion. To this day, the CIA has not said that they aren't for centrifuges."

Another example was the mobile laboratories, supposedly intended for biological weapons. "I did not qualify that because they were very sure of their four sources, but the sources fell like straw men in seven months, including the famous German source [codenamed Curveball]. I don't think the CIA has disposed definitively of that either."

How on earth did it come about that intelligence could be so wrong? Were they guilty of telling President Bush what he wanted to hear? "I can't say that. What I can say is that there was a little too much inferential judgment. Too much resting on assumptions and worst-case scenarios. "With intelligence, sometimes you are talking to people who are perhaps selling you lies."

It seems that Colin Powell, the victim of weak intelligence, was also the victim of other people's politics. He is conscious that the whole business of the aborted second UN resolution, intended to authorise attack, invites derision. "What I'm going to say will sound like spin, but think it through. We didn't think there was a need for a second resolution, and we were quite sure of very serious problems with the French, but the UK needed and very badly wanted a second resolution. "It became clear that we were not going to get it, so we did not take it to a vote. However, a week or two later, Tony Blair was able to get the support he needed in Parliament. So my spin is that the second resolution served its purpose. The UK could say: we've tried but now we have to go forward." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

5 US Troops Die
Sistani Blesses Jaafari

Ibrahim Jaafari, the candidate for prime minister of the religious Shiite coalition, met Friday with Grand Ayatollah Sistani,who "blessed" (i.e. endorsed) his candidacy. This blessing will help Jaafari with the some 30 members of his United Iraqi Alliance coalition who are said to be wavering in their support of him. It may even boost him in the eyes of some of the Shiites in the rival Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi (some of whom have spoken of leaving that list and joining the UIA), and helps make it more likely that he will emerge as prime minister.

Sistani stressed the need for Jaafari to bring the Sunni Arabs into the new government, given that they largely stayed home on election day and are poorly represented in parliament (6 of 275 seats, even though they are 20 percent of the population).

Jaafari does, however, need the Kurds to form a government. His strategy for dealing with them was telegraphed in his remarks on Friday. He said the issue of the disposition of the city of Kirkuk, which is ethnically mixed, should be postponed until after the approval of a new constitution and the election of a regular parliament (the current body is transitional). The Kurds have said that they will not accept less than redistricting to ensure their states' rights and possession of Kirkuk, so they may reject Jaafari's gambit out of hand.

Meanwhile, the US military had announced that guerrillas have killed 4 US troops and wounded 9. Another US soldier died of non-combat related injuries.

Al-Hayat says that 9 Iraqis were killed in various incidents.

It also reported that the clerics of Ramadi issued a fatwa forbidding the killing of Muslims. This is a reference to the guerrilla attacks on Iraqi policemen.

The clerics in Lebanon used to try to forbid violence during the civil war there, too. I remember that one admitted that it was ineffective, because it wasn't the clerics who were killing people.

Amnesty International reports that the women of Iraq have suffered substantial setbacks in their rights since the US invasion, and live in a condition of dire insecurity.

The suggestion by some that the guarantee of 1/3 of seats in the Iraqi parliament to women might make up for the situation described by Amnesty is of course absurd. Iraq is not the first country to have such a quota. It was put into effect in Pakistan by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The move was meant to weaken Muslim fundamentalists, on the theory that women members of parliament would object to extreme patriarchy on the Khomeini or Taliban model. In fact, the Jama'at-i Islami, the main fundamentalist party in Pakistan, was perfectly capable of finding women to represent it in parliament. (US readers should remember Phyllis Schlafly!) Moreover, the 1/3 of MPs who are women can fairly easily be outvoted by the men.

If the Republican Party in the US is so proud of putting in such a quota for Iraq, they should think seriously about applying it in the United States Congress.

' . . . there are larger disparities between the Congress and the general citizenry in term of sex and race. In the House, there are currently 372 men and 63 women. In the Senate, there are 14 women and 86 men. '

Might not the US be a better country if there were 33 women senators and more like 120 congresswomen? If your answer is that it wouldn't matter, then you cannot very well insist that it does matter in Iraq. If you think it would be important, then if you support it in Iraq you should support it in the United States.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

30 Dead in Iraq Violence

AP reports that the one-day total for war-related violence in Iraq, including the police station bombing in Tikrit reported here yesterday morning, came to 30. That is about 11,000 persons a year if the rate were constant and extrapolated out. In fact, the wire services manage to report only a fraction of daily deaths from war-related violence. And, of course there is a sense in which a lot of the murders are an indirect result of the poor security produced by the guerrilla war.

AP also reports that the United Iraqi Alliance has managed to bring into its coalition formally the 3 members of parliament from the Turkman National Front, the 3 from the Cadres and Chosen list, and 1 from the Islamic Action Party, giving the UIA 148 or about 54 percent of seats.

The 30 or so more secular-leaning members of the UIA who were the core of Ahmad Chalabi's challenge to Ibrahim Jaafari are still agitating and threatening to leave the UIA because of the dominance of the Muslim fundamentalists in it. Since, however, the UIA would still have 43 percent of seats, it could block the formation of a government by any other group. So I don't see any advantage for the more secular group in leaving the UIA. If, on the other hand, they stick with it, and Jaafari can form an alliance with the Kurds, everyone in the UIA would suddenly have $17 billion to play with every year, more if the Iraqis get their act together.

Reuters reports on the extensive demands the Kurds are making as a price of joining the UIA governing, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, the creation of a Kurdistan province, semi-autonomy, and so forth. Reuters notes that these maximalist demands, most of them unwelcome to the Shiites, are slowing the formation of a new government in Iraq.

Well, now that Fallujah is liberated (i.e. wrecked and empty), residents of Ramadi are now beginning to flee in fear that they might get equally liberated. It is not clear how much liberation Iraqi cities (or ex-cities) can stand.

My op-ed, "The Downside of Democracy, appeared Thursday in the LA Times. An exercept:

' Pakistan and Iraq are not the only countries where elections have had mixed results. Although the Palestinian elections in January were widely viewed as a success — producing a pragmatic prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas — remember that the radical fundamentalist party, Hamas, boycotted those elections. Then, less than three weeks later, local elections were held — and Hamas won decisively in the Gaza Strip, leaving it more influential than before and poised for even bigger wins in next July's legislative elections.

And in recent years, democratization has also put Hezbollah in the Lebanese parliament. Serbian nationalists have won seats in Belgrade.

Are such outcomes acceptable to the Bush administration? If not, how will it respond? Given the war on terror, it is unlikely to simply take these electoral setbacks lying down.

But if Washington falls back on its traditional responses — covert operations, attempts to interfere in parliamentary votes with threats or bribes, or dependence on strong men like Musharraf — the people of the Middle East might well explode, because the only thing worse than living under a dictatorship is being promised a democracy and then not really getting it. '

AP reports on a network smuggling Saudi youth into Iraq to fight jihad. Oh, great. The last time young Saudis went off to fight a superpower, with the encouragement of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, it turned into al-Qaeda and blew back on New York and Washington. No wonder the CIA is afraid that Iraq is a new breeding ground for future anti-US terrorism.

Bob Harris's posting "Uncle Bucky and the Rocket-Fueled Breasts" is worth reading just for the title.

Arabic Link: Yusuf Hazim argues in al-Sharq al-Awsat that the relative calm and stability in Basra province is underpinned by a tacit alliance of tribal leaders, political parties, and militias.
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Koufax Complete List

I've gotten around to stealing code for the complete list of Koufax Award Winners at Wampum.

Best Blog (Non-Sponsored): Daily Kos

Best Blog (Pro): Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Best Writing: Hullaballoo by Digby

Best Post: "If America Were Iraq..." at Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Best Series (tie): The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism by David Neiwert at Orcinus;

and

Cheers And Jeers by Bill in Portland Maine at Daily Kos

Best Group Blog: MyDD

Most Humorous Blog: Jesus' General by J.C. Christian

Most Humorous Post: Poker With Dick Cheney by The Poorman

Best Expert Blog: Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Best Single Issue Blog (tie): TalkLeft by Jeralyn Merritt;

and

Grits For Breakfast by Scott Henson

Best New Blog: Mouse Words by Amanda Marcotte

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition: Suburban Guerrilla

Best Commenter: Meteor Blades at Daily Kos

and

Liberal Street Fighter
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bomb Blasts in Tikrit, Haglaniyah, Mosul Produce Dozens of Casualties

AP reports on violence in Iraq Tuesday:

' A car bomb exploded near police headquarters in the Iraqi city of Tikrit on Thursday, killing at least 10 people, witnesses said. More than a dozen cars were set ablaze after the massive blast . . . Meanwhile, clashes between U.S. troops and insurgents in the so-called Sunni triangle of death killed six Iraqis and left dozens injured in Heet, according to Dr. Mohammed al-Hadithi . . . In Haqlaniyah, 135 miles northwest of the capital, U.S. forces and Iraqi troops fought insurgents throughout the day, the military said. American aircraft fired cannon rounds and dropped bombs to help a Marine patrol that came under small arms and heavy machine-gun fire . . . Elsewhere, a U.S. soldier was killed when assailants set off a bomb near Tuz, 105 miles north of Baghdad. In Baghdad, gunmen assassinated the director of the Iraqi Trade Ministry, Saad Abbas Hassan, as he drove down a road . . . And in the northern city of Mosul, insurgents set off a car bomb, killing two people and wounding 14, the U.S. military said. Also in Mosul, U.S. soldiers shot and killed a civilian in a pickup truck who came too close to their convoy, policeman Ahmed Rashid said . . . '

In addition, guerrillas assassinated Khalil Ali Shukri, a Dawa Party official in Baquba, according to al-Zaman. Prospective prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari is from the Dawa Party. A military officer was assassinated in Baghdad on Haifa Street, and a contractor in Salman Pak.
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Were the Shiites Cheated? And What does Allawi Want?

Al-Hayat has a long interview with an "informed Iraqi source" who is close to US officials in Iraq. He maintains that the US officials there were astounded that the United Iraqi Alliance did so well, and that they felt helpless and resigned as the process unfolded. He says that they are now asking privately if the US shed so much blood and treasure in Iraq to help fundamentalist Shiite allies of Iran take over Baghdad.

Al-Hayat also today repeats the allegation that the US or the electoral commission somehow cheated the United Iraqi Alliance of an absolute majority in parliament. (Note that this argument completely contradicts the interview they did, which speaks of US helplessness before the results.) The argument that the Iraqi elections were fixed is, however, implausible. It is sometimes alleged that the Shiites should have done better than they did, given the Sunni Arab absence. But when the smoke cleared, the UIA did have a majority in parliament, so the allegation makes no sense.

The below figures are from this wire service article and from this piece from the New York Times.

The NYT claimed that "the turnout in the three mainly Kurdish provinces in the north averaged 85 percent; in nine mainly Shiite southern provinces, the average was 71 percent."

This is the breakdown for turnout as best I could determine it, with only a couple of missing figures.

Al-Anbar (2%)
Al-Basrah (?)
Al-Muthanna (61%)
Al-Qadisiyah (69%)
An-Najaf (73%)
Arbil (?)
As-Sulaymaniyah (80%)
At-Ta'mim (?)
Babil (71%)
Baghdad (48%)
Dohuk (89%)
Dhi Qar (67%)
Diyala (34%)
Karbala' (73%)
Maysan (59%)
Ninevah (17%)
Salah ad-Din (29%)
Wasit (66%)

Now, the United Iraqi Alliance has 51 percent of the seats, having attacted the religious Shiite vote. The Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi got the middle class, secular-leaning Shiites, with 14.5 percent. That is 64.5 percent for the two major Shiite lists. Then the small Shiite parties and the Communists (whose supporters are disproportionately Shiites) are another 3.4 percent, for a total of 68%.

If Shiites are, say, 62 percent of the population, and 71 percent turned out to vote, if 100 percent of the other groups had come out, the Shiites should have gotten 46 percent of the seats. But since the 4.5 million Sunni Arabs hardly turned out at all, and since 15 percent of Kurds did not, in the proportional system those percentages were added to the Shiite column, so they got 68% of seats in parliament. That is, it is as if 110 percent of the Shiites voted, because the absence of the Sunni Arabs magnified the Shiite vote. In fact, if the religious and secular Shiites could cooperate (fat chance), they could from a government all by themselves without reference to the Kurds or Sunni Arabs.

Precisely because the United Iraqi Alliance has ended up with 51 percent of the seats, which is enough to confirm the new government once a cabinet is selected, and since with the small Shiite parties it has 54 percent, either the US did not intervene in the ballot counting or it was completely incompetent in doing so. Personally, I don't think the US was in a position to intervene. Grand Ayatollah Sistani would not have put up with it, and the Americans knew it.

The results seem to me entirely plausible. Friends of mine with contacts among middle class Shiites in Baghdad reported that many of them were going to vote for Allawi, so the 14.5 percent showing for the Iraqiya list is not out of line (and is much smaller than most reporters with mainly middle class Baghdad contacts had expected).

If the Daily Telegraph is right that Iyad Allawi hopes to form a government without either the Kurdish Alliance or the United Iraqi Alliance, then this whole bid of his for the prime minister post is a stalking horse for some other purpose. The UIA and the Kurds between them have 78 percent of the seats in parliament! And Allawi would need 66 percent to form a government. He says he will work with small parties, but aside from the Sunni Iraqiyun with 5 seats and the Communists with 2, most of the rest are Shiite and have already formed a coalition with the UIA. Allawi's only hope is to detach delegates from the United Iraqi Alliance in such numbers as to put into question that list's ability to dominate parliament. Even then he has no chance of becoming prime minister. He almost certainly is simply angling for a cabinet position, and using the threat of creating disunity in the UIA ranks by seducing some of its members as leverage.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Show Trials and Phony Confessions Target Syria

AP reports on a televised confession of someone who said he was a Syrian agent in Iraq in charge of terrorist operations. The confession was broadcast on US-backed al-Iraqiyah television, and was produced presumably by the former Baath domestic intelligence officers appointed by Iyad Allawi.

These confessions are phony as a three-dollar bill (or a three-Euro coin). AP reports with a straight face that al-Essa "claimed he infiltrated Iraq in 2001, about two years before the U.S. invasion, because Syrian intelligence was convinced that American military action loomed." That allegation doesn't pass the smell test with me. If this guy was sent in 2001, it was to make trouble for Saddam, not with reference to America. The Syrian Baath mostly did not get on well with the Iraqi Baath. Another confessed terrorist said he was sent to Pakistan for training and then Syria. Oh, now we have a Baath-Islamist axis again. Sure. Shiite secular Arab nationalists are just dying to get up a collaboration with non-Arab Pakistani hyper-Sunnis who paint "Kill the Shiites" on their mini-buses in Lahore.

It is embarrassing that Allawi thought he could peddle this horse manure to the Iraqi and American publics.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Association of Muslim Scholars Denies Negotiations with US

Gilbert Achcar kindly supplied the following translation:

The following interesting excerpt from today's (Feb 23) Al-Hayat (my translation from Arabic):


' A member of the Association of Muslim Scholars [believed to be the most popular group among Arab Sunnis in Iraq] has denied that the contacts held by the American delegation wiith armed groups involved the Association.

He declared to Al-Hayat that the practice of equating the "armed resistance" with the Sunnis is "a big mistake, and the contacts do not take place with Sunni groups but with high leaders of the dissolved Baath Party."

He added that the Association is not concerned by these contacts, because it is "a Sunni religious authority opposed to the occupation through peaceful means, and even though it considers the resistance to be a legitimate right of every Iraqi, it rejects terrorism and the killing of innocents."

He revealed that the contacts engaged with the Association in order to integrate it in the new government centered only around the procedure of writing the constitution, and were held with Iraqi political forces and with Ashraf Qadi, the representative of the UN General Secretary, and not with the Bush administration.

He added that "these meetings will remain useless if the Americans keep betraying their promises, like carrying on the military operations and arrests."
"The US administration, which is the occupying force, should have controlled the borders with the neighbouring countries that allow the infiltration of terrorist groups, and made a distinction [in their contacts] between the legitimate resistance and terrorism, unless they are the first beneficiaries of the instability of security conditions to guarantee that they will stay as long as possible." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq-Blogging

Nick Turse at tomdispatch.com skewers Donald Rumsfeld's various rhetorical strategies of evasion whenever he has been asked hard questions about Abu Ghraib, the situation in Iraq, etc.:

' I was truly curious: Was it a budgetary problem -- the lack of CD burners, or floppy disks, or available computers at the Pentagon? Or was no one technically capable of making copies for Rumsfeld? Or was there some kind of institutional/personal issue at stake? Were Rumsfeld's underlings, for unknown reasons, engaging in a game of diskette keep-away "for days and days and days" (and right before his big Senate grilling too)?

Since then, I've paid closer attention to Rumsfeld's problems and continued to speculate. Just take a look at a few of the numerous incidents thus far in 2005…

On January 8, 2005, Newsweek broke a story about a high-level debate within the Pentagon on implementing the "Salvador Option" -- that is, the use of "death-squads" like those the U.S. funded in El Salvador during the 1980s -- in Iraq . . . Rumsfeld went on to complain that he couldn't find a copy of the story anywhere and could only read articles about the story. Members of the press corps promised to get him a copy and informed him that it was available in the on-line edition of the magazine. In his defense, Rumsfeld claimed that he only buys the hard-copy of Newsweek.

That Rumsfeld is such a cut-up.

Suburban Guerrilla (journalist Susan Madrak) takes an extended look at the way Pentagon reporting procedures on casualties are skewing the public's idea of the cost of the war in US lives and injuries. She wonders what the public reaction would be if it could be proved that the true count of dead and wounded, counting all the troops and contractors and all even tangentially combat-related casualties, was 2 or 3 times what we are being told.

The Middle East Information Center discussion board highlights the excellent article by Nir Rosen on Kirkuk that appeared in the NYT magazine Sunday. Rosen's portrait of a city that is little more than a massive urban roadside bomb ready to go off at any moment is a chilling harbinger for the future.

In the hyperlinked way of the blogging world, Andrew Arato's guest editorial on Monday about the likely struggle between the elected parliament in Iraq and the dead hand of the American-imposed interim constitution provoked y provoked Josh Buermann of Flagrancy to Reason to some acute observations about the severe constraints on Iraqi democracy imposed by the US. He cites Kevin Carson as saying,

' Once again, as has been the case with assorted other velvet and orange revolutions, along with sundry exercises in "people power," what's left after the smoke clears is a neoconservative counterfeit democracy. What the neocons call "democracy" is a Hamiltonian system in which the people exercise formal power to elect the government, but the key directions of policy are determined by a small and relatively stable Power Elite that is insulated from any real public pressure. the "Hamiltonian" nature of the Iraqi government and the continued purchase US policy has on its bureaucracy. '

Carson in turn quotes Milan Rai from Electronic Iraq pointing out that:

' Another device for maintaining control was Paul Bremer's appointment of key officials for five year terms just before leaving office. In June 2004, the US governor ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the US-imposed interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government. Bremer also installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry, and formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. '

Rai also points out that the big fight now looming between Ibrahim Jaafari of the United Iraqi Alliance and Iyad Allawi of the Iraqiyah List is over the extent of debaathification. Jaafari wants to continue to exclude midlevel and high Baath officials from government posts, whereas Allawi had begun bringing them in, even putting one in charge of the secret police:

' Allawi restored former servants of the Saddam regime to important posts, and has filled the security forces with former Ba'athists. Saddam's Special Forces soldiers and former intelligence officials are even being rehired as a police commando strike force. Last summer Allawi's government appointed Rasheed Flayeh to the post of director-general of the secret police force, despite objections from the Supreme Commission for De-Ba'athification that as head of security in the city of Nasiriyah, Flayeh had taken part in the brutal suppression of the 1991 Shia uprising.

Last October, Allawi tried and failed to disband the De-Ba'athification Commission (headed by his old rival Ahmed Chalabi). Allawi wanted to be able to openly readmit former senior Ba'athists to power unless they have been found guilty of serious crimes in court, a policy supported by Washington. The Shia coalition that has 'won' the elections has vowed to reverse re-Ba'athification, and it is likely that Allawi's enthusiasm for this policy will bar him from being a compromise prime minister in the new government. '

Buermann, Carson and Rai have put their fingers on a key set of issues in understanding the contemporary situation in Iraq. How much control can the US keep, and with what tools? What is the future of the ex-Baathists? Can a stable new regime emerge that can claim popular legitimacy under the shadow of Western military occupation? Thank God someone is at least broaching the questions.
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Germans Trust Putin More than Bush

Frank Domoney kindly sends his translation of a Die Welt article that reports that over-all, the German public trusts Vladimir Putin more than it trusts George W. Bush. I was struck that it doesn't trust either one very much, and that even in West Germany they are in a virtual tie. It is a sad commentary on the trans-Atlantic relationship, and is almost completely the fault of George W. Bush.

' Die Welt: US President calls Europeans to take part in joint working in spite of the differences over Iraq. The Germans trust Russian President Vladimir Putin more than the American President George W. Bush.

Tasked by the Die Welt the renowned Opinion Polling Institute Dimap asked the opinion of Germans about the USA. The Russian president gets a greater degree of trust particularly in the East of the Republic, according to the results of a representative poll. While the average result across the Federal republic is 29% for Putin and 24% for Bush, in East Germany Putin reaches 37% (Bush 16%) In contrast in West Germany the value for Bush reaches 27%, for Putin 26%.

It is clear from the results of the poll that both presidents are greeted with scepticism in Germany. A majority of 37% trusts neither. Infratest Dimap polled 1000 citizens between 15 and 16 February 2005

In the meantime US President George W Bush yesterday again called the Europeans, during his visit to NATO and EU headquarters, to end the old conflict about the Iraq war, and walk a common path in the future. He understood “that the Iraq war had upset many Europeans” in unusual clarity. “The decision has however been taken, we must get over it, now it is time to work together in peace”. This is in the interest of the European lands as well as the US.

Bush praised the engagement of the alliance partners in the training mission in Iraq. “Every little helps” said the US President.

Although the Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schroeder’s suggestions on the reform of the Atlantic Alliance were not explicitly discussed at the meeting of the 26 heads of state and government, the theme could occupy them further in the coming months. NATO general secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced that he would put on the table suggestions for a political reform of the alliance. Bush said that everyone had heard “loud and clear what the Bundeskanzler had said”. He alluded to the fact that NATO is the reason why Europe is today “United and Free”. It is vital for the transatlantic relationship; the only grouping that is able to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Schroeder himself said that it had “in fact given a great measure of agreement to strengthen the political dialogue”. The form would require further talks.

After the meeting with NATO seniors, Bush travelled to the centre of Brussels where he was guest in the afternoon of the 25 heads of state and government of the EU. Subsequently a visit to the EU commission lay on the agenda. At the EU the remaining unresolved subjects of conflict of the Transatlantic Relationship were to be discussed: The EU negotiations with Iran about their Atomic program, and the removal of the weapons embargo on China, which is supported by many EU states. '

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Koufax Awards

The Koufax Awards have been announced.

Many, many thanks to readers who voted mine the best "Expert Blog" and made my piece, "If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? the best post of 2004. These are humbling awards to win.

A warm congratulations to Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos for winning Best Blog. It was close between Kos and Atrios's Eschaton, which had won twice before. Also congrats to Josh Marshall for winning Best Blog Pro Division.

Well, I had better stop there or just quote the post, to which I've already linked-- but congrats to all fellow winners in all categories.

And a big vote of thanks from me to Dwight, MB, and Eric for running the contest. They are a central element of civil society in the left weblogging world. Please send them money by paypal.
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Free Mojtaba and Arash

If Blogdex is any indication the campaign to free Mojtaba and Arash is going well.

The Iranian government is not immune to public opinion, and I hope people will keep trying to get them out.

In fact, assuming someone could plan it out and get a permit, wouldn't a flashmob protest in front of Iran's permanent mission to the UN be an appropriate blogger tool for this campaign?

Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
622 Third Avenue, 34th Floor, New York, NY 10017
Telephone: (212) 687-2020, Telefax: (212) 867-7086
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Jaafari slams Hilary

Stephen Farrell reports for the London Times that a minor tiff occurred last week between Senator Hilary Clinton and prime ministerial candidate Ibrahim Jaafari:

' Last week Hillary Clinton, the New York senator, visiting Baghdad, said that there were “grounds both for concern and for . . . vigilance” about Dr al-Jaafari’s Iranian connections. Clearly irritated, the candidate — at present Iraq’s Vice-President — brushed aside the remark yesterday. “We are not at an American traffic light to be given a red or green signal. I am speaking on behalf of a collective decision. I will stop when the Iraqi people say to stop,” he said. “Hillary Clinton, as far as I know, does not represent any political decision or the American Administration and I don’t know why she said this. She knows nothing about the Iraqi situation.” '

I take it that Hilary is laying out a Democratic Party strategy for the 2008 elections, which may well argue that Bush lost Iraq to Iran through his incompetence. The argument probably implies that Jaafari as a Muslim fundamentalist is not only close to Iran but will pursue policies and legislation that hurt women.

These points are not without some validity. But maybe Baghdad just after the elections wasn't the best time and place for her to criticize positive feelings toward Iran on the part of Shiite politicians (which, I have pointed out, is sort of like criticizing the Irish for feeling positively about the Vatican). Jaafari is an Iraqi patriot and he has a right to be offended at the idea that he might be a puppet for Tehran. Still, it does seem inevitable that some canny Democrat will figure out that the US public has severe doubts about the Iraq adventure, and find a way to parlay that into political advantage.

Jaafari for his part was ill-advised to lash out at Hilary. If he becomes prime minister, he will need a good working relationship with the US Congress on both sides of the aisle.

Current Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told the NYT on Tuesday that he had heard that Iran had lobbied its Iraqi allies against allowing him to continue as prime minister. Allawi professes puzzlement at this stance. Uh, Iyad, it might be because you let your defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, say that Iran is Iraq's number one enemy! You could see how a thing like that might annoy Tehran a little bit. Not that Iran really has a veto-- pretending that it does may be an attempt to smear the United Iraqi Alliance as themselves puppets of Iran. Allawi also admits to the strategy I suggested Tuesday morning, of attempting to become prime minister by allying with the Kurds and then trying to detach 60 or so members of the UIA.

Al-Hayat, however, suggests that two can play that game. It says that of the 40 deputies in Allawi's Iraqiyah list, 9 are thinking of bolting and joining the UIA. They include two persons who tilt toward the Sadr Movement, and 7 other members led by Husain Ali Shaalan.

It should be remembered that Allawi would need two thirds of the parliament, or about 182 MPs, to form a government. The UIA can prevent him from succeeding even if only 94 of its 140 deputies stand firm (and this conclusion assumes that Allawi could attact the allegiance not only of 46 UIA deputies but of all of the small parties such as the Sadrist Cadres and Chosen, the Turkmen National Front, the Islamic Action Council, and the Kurdish Islamic Bloc). I'd say Allawi's task is simply impossible.

Allawi does not count on the moral authority of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, which is what enabled the UIA to be cobbled together. Sistani probably could send envoys to most UIA deputies and argue them out of supporting Allawi. And I suspect that he would do so if he felt it necessary.

Al-Hayat quotes a member of the UIA who says that the delegates who supported Chalabi would not support Allawi, and that the UIA rejects even a cabinet post for him; and that he should just get used to leading a small opposition faction in the parliament.

Persons close to Allawi, in contrast, told the newspaper that the current prime minister remained confident that he could seduce enought UIA members away from their party to form a government.

Gilbert Achcar informs me that the distribution of some of the seats for the religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance was given in al-Hayat, and kindly provides the figures mentioned:

Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq: 18 seats
Islamic Da'wa Party: 15 seats
Islamic Da'wa Party-Iraq organisation: 9 seats
Islamic Virtue Party: 9 seats
Shia Islamic Council: 13 seats
Faili Kurds: 4 seats
Al-Sadr's Current: 21 seats

This list accounts for only 81 of the 140 seats, though. It demonstrates that the religious parties were seriously shortchanged in the formation of the United Iraqi Alliance list.

What's next? If Jaafari can put together a 2/3s majority in parliament, he can have the president and two vice-presidents elected. They in turn will forma presidency council that will appoint a prime minister. He and they will then jointly appoint the cabinet ministers. The final government will need a 51 percent vote of confidence in parliament. (Some commentators are saying that it needs 2/3s approval the way the initial government did, but this is not true. A simple majority can confirm the government in power). Andrew Arato reminds us of the following passages of the interim constitution.

' Article 36.

(A) The National Assembly shall elect a President of the State and two Deputies. They shall form the Presidency Council, the function of which will be to represent the sovereignty of Iraq and oversee the higher affairs of the country. The election of the Presidency Council shall take place on the basis of a single list and by a two-thirds majority of the members’ votes.

Article 38.

(A) The Presidency Council shall name a Prime Minister unanimously, as well as the members of the Council of Ministers upon the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister and Council of Ministers shall then seek to obtain a vote of confidence by simple majority from the National Assembly prior to commencing their work as a government. The Presidency Council must agree on a candidate for the post of Prime Minister within two weeks. In the event that it fails to do so, the responsibility of naming the Prime Minister reverts to the National Assembly. In that event, the National Assembly must confirm the nomination by a two-thirds majority. '

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Chalabi is Prevailed upon to Withdraw

It turns out that the other members of the United Iraqi Alliance prevailed on Ahmad Chalabi to drop his bid to become candidate for prime minister. It is not clear if Jaafari, the winner, promised him anything in return for stepping down. AP suggests he might be a deputy prime minister for security and economic affairs. I'd say, keep that man away from money and security!

Personally, I think all the talk of withdrawing for the sake of unity is bunkum, and that Chalabi toted up his votes and did not have anywhere near 71, so he withdrew in time to save face and also in time to be offered some sort of consolation prize.

Charles Clover of the Financial Times, who has done some excellent reporting from Iraq, points to a cloud on the horizon. He says that Jaafari is committed to a vigorous de-baathification program, despite his commitment to reaching out to Sunni Arabs, and that the prospective prime minister may not understand the contradiction in his stances. I had assumed that Jaafari's opposition to the Fallujah campaign indicated he was less of a wild man on the issue than Chalabi, but maybe not. The Dawa Party certainly has reason for a grudge against Baathists, given all those mass graves the latter filled with Dawa Party members.

The press keeps saying that the crackdown on Dawa came in 1982. It was 1980, with the execution of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and I believe it is 1980 when Jaafari escaped to Tehran, where he stayed until 1989.
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Breaking News: Jaafari PM Candidate for UIA

Well, the United Iraqi Alliance just announced that Ibrahim Jaafari has won out against Ahmad Chalabi. Jaafari's victory is not a surprise, since he was backed by the two core parties in the UIA, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. [I had assumed that an internal vote went forward but apparently it was handled by consensus in the end.]

Nic Robertson at CNN is saying that Jaafari was seen as a more unifying figure. You could interpret that statement in a lot of ways, but it is certainly true that Jaafari has a rhetoric of inclusion that stretches even to the people of Fallujah, whereas Chalabi wanted to punish all the Sunni Arabs who had had anything to do with the Baath Party (a lot of them).

The Dawa Party was founded in 1958 or so, with the aim of establishing an Islamic state in Iraq (and as an alternative to Communism, with its atheist workers' paradise). That it is now supplying the prime minister of the country under American auspices is among the more startling developments of our time.
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3 US Troops Dead, 8 Wounded
18 Iraqis Killed

Wire services reported that ' Twenty-two people including four US soldiers have died in a series of attacks in Iraq since Sunday evening, while a journalist, her son, and three men working for the US military have been kidnapped, according separate security sources and a statement from a militant group. ' The guerrillas struck all over the center-north of the country, from Baghdad to Mosul.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb in Baghdad Monday near a US medical helicopter, killing 3 US troops and wounding 8.

Iraq, in short, continues to be a godawful mess, with no real security on the major roads. As I suggested in January, the anonymous elections have not had a significant impact on the guerrilla war.
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UIA Will Hold Secret Ballot
Chalabi, Allawi Still in Running for PM

The Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, will hold a secret ballot within the list to decide on a prime ministerial candidate, according to AP. This move is a sign that neither Ibrahim Jaafari nor Chalabi could win by consensus. Jaafari should have had enough votes to prevail by consensus, given that he heads up the Dawa Party, one of the two major forces in the UIA, so this development is unexpected.

Then it was announced that Iyad Allawi, the ex-Baathist interim prime minister, will also enter a bid to become prime minister, even though his Iraqiya list only got 14.5 percent of the seats in parliament.

The strength of Chalabi's challenge, and Allawi's sudden hopes, need to be explained, and if readers will bear with me, I'm going to engage in a heuristic exercise (i.e. a thought experiment). I can't get exact enough data to simply say what the situation is, but I think I can lay out a scenario that is at least broadly plausible.

The UIA is a coalition of 11 parties, along with many independents chosen by a committee appointed by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The two major parties in it are the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, both fundamentalist in orientation. I have still not seen a breakdown of the party allegiance of the 140 UIA members that have been seated.

But it is possible that Dawa and SCIRI were shortchanged by the process that Sistani instituted. That is, Dawa and Islamic Dawa were said to have each been given 10 percent of the seats in the UIA, and SCIRI and its offshoot, the Badr Organization, were given 12 percent and 10 percent respectively. That proportion would suggest that the two parties only control about 59 of the 140 seats, or 42 percent.

The other 81 seats are controlled by other small parties or by independents. I suspect at least some of the independents tilt toward Dawa or SCIRI, however. The Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi had ten seats according to some press reports, though it is hard to know for sure. Other relatively traditionalist or secular-leaning small parties also have some seats. The Faili Kurds, who are Shiites, have a few, as do the Turkmen (I don't believe we've been told how many). According to some reports, about 30 Sadrists ran on the UIA ticket, though we cannot know how many were seated. These are persons who are devoted to the memory of Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999) and may or may not be close to his son, Muqtada al-Sadr. If Sadrists were seated in the same proportion as the rest of the list (60 percent of UIA candidates were seated), that would be 18 Sadrists. Chalabi, it should be noted, has some sort of weird alliance with Muqtada al-Sadr.

Quite apart from party, every third seat went to a woman or about 46 of the UIA seats. Middle class women in Iraq are generally terrified of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, including many Shiite women, since they saw how the Khomeini regime (to which SCIRI was historically close) took away civil rights from women and imposed on them medieval patriarchy in the law. Still, if my estimates above are correct, about 19 of the women's seats belong to female members of SCIRI and Dawa, who presumably will support their own parties. So 25 of the women might be free to support Chalabi against Jaafari.

A lot of the women appear to have supported Chalabi, according to AP. Let's say he picked up even 20 of them. Then the Faili Kurds supported him (2-3?). So, too, did the Sadrists (15-18?). Then he had his 10 INC members (who were probably fairly high up the list and so probably got seated) and a few other secular-leaning or traditionalist independents who preferred him to Dawa and SCIRI. You could see how he could have 60 votes. His people claim he has 80, but that is not plausible because if it were true, he would have won by consensus (a candidate would need 71 votes to win).

If SCIRI and Dawa vote together, Jaafari, who is the candidate of the more fundamentalist parties, would need 29 votes from elsewhere in the list, assuming the women and other members of their contingents held firm. Apparently it is not clear to the UIA members whether he has those 29 or not (otherwise, they would just acquiesce in his bid).

This outcome is in part a result of the compromise suggested by Sistani to Dawa and SCIRI, which certainly shortchanged them. SCIRI won 8 of the 18 provincial council elections for itself, and would therefore almost certainly have dominated the UIA if seats within it had been apportioned according to true electoral strength. Sistani has long been concerned that local politicians who stayed in Iraq have a voice in government, and not just the expatriate parties such as Dawa and SCIRI. But these local forces and independents are often less fundamentalist than the expatriates, which had taken refuge in Iran.

The other wild card here is the women. The interim constitution had specified that at least 25 percent of seats be apportioned to women. Somehow the United Nations committee for assisting the Iraqi elections managed to put that up to 33 percent. If Muqtada al-Sadr (who wants women all covered up and put in their places) and middle class Shiite women joined forces to put into power Ahmad Chalabi (a corrupt financier charged with spying for Iran), that would be about the most bizarre set of bedfellows in the history of parliaments.

So this is where Allawi enters the picture. If Chalabi were to cobble together 71 votes within the 140-strong UIA contingent, he might in the process so anger Dawa and SCIRI that they will refuse to support him when the government is voted on in the full parliament.

To form a government, a prime minister will need 182 seats. If Chalabi only had 71 from the UIA, and could get the support of the Kurds, with 75, he would still need 36 votes from somewhere else. He would need to get them from the Iraqiya list of Allawi.

At that point, Allawi becomes plausible. He thinks he can turn the tables on Chalabi. He has 40 from his list, and the 6 Sunni Arabs will support him. If he can ally with the Kurds and get their 75, he would need 61. He would have to steal those from the UIA. It is not impossible that the same sort of UIA delegate (minus the Sadrists) who would vote for Chalabi would vote for him. Moreover, if it became a choice between Chalabi and Allawi, a lot of MPs might defect to Allawi on non-ideological grounds, just because Chalabi is such a sleazebag and will prolong the Sunni Arab insurgency with his punitive campaign against ex-Baathists.

Personally, I think it is unlikely that Allawi can put together 182, starting from only 40, even if the Kurds swing around to back him, just because so many Shiites in the UIA will have a grudge against him and his ex-Baathists.

There are two other wild cards in all this. Al-Hayat reported over the weekend that even the UIA would want a green light from the US embassy, to which it obviously has a back channel. Whereas Chalabi has allies in the Department of Defense among the Neoconservatives, he is widely disliked by the State Department, and Negroponte might be enough of a State Department man to block Chalabi.

The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani also has a veto because of his moral authority with the Shiites. He, however, is said to have adopted a stance of neutrality as between Jaafari, Chalabi and Adil Abdul Mahdi (who earlier withdrew but shouldn't be counted out). Sistani said he would be happy with the UIA choice.

In the same way that the US could block Chalabi by simply intimating that he is unacceptable, so Sistani might be able to block Allawi if he so chose.

Several readers have asked for final tallies for the parliamentary elections, which were announced after reapportionment last Thursday.

Some of the implications of the final tallies were analyzed in this article in the Turkish newspaper, Zaman, though from an odd point of view. The author seemed to think there was a chance of the United Iraqi Alliance (140 seats of 275) cooperating with the secular, largely ex-Baathist Shiites of Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya list (40 seats) to form a Shiite 2/3s majority. This outcome strikes me as highly unlikely. I could not find any similar detailed discussion (as opposed to simple reportage) of the final parliamentary outcome in the Western press by keyword search, though I could easily have missed something. If the absence I note is real, it is a sad commentary on our press.

Al-Hayat reported several of the final results last week. I've seen other results in the wire services. This is what I think the final tallies look like:

United Iraqi Alliance 140 seats 51 percent
Kurdish Alliance 75 seats 27 percent
Iraqiya (Allawi) 40 seats 14.5 percent
Iraqiyyun (Ghazi al-Yawir) 5 seats 1.8 percent
Cadres and Chosen (Sadr) 3 seats 1 percent
Turkmen National Front 3 seats 1 percent
Islamic Action Council (Shiite) 2 seats 0.7 percent
Communists 2 seats 0.7 percent
Kurdish Islamic Bloc 2 seats 0.7 percent
National Democratic Alliance 1 seat 0.3 percent
Mesopotamian National (Christian) 1 seat 0.3 percent
Welfare and Liberation (Juburi) 1 seat 0.3 percent

(does not equal 100 because of rounding)

As for the forces that rejected the elections, BBC world monitoring on Feb. 17 says, ' Al-Hawzah carries on page 1 of the Supplement a 2,000-word article by Abd-al-Samad al-Suwaylim, discussing the "legitimacy" of the Islamic political parties in Iraq, saying that these parties are "religiously illegitimate" because they do not believe in Wilayat al-Faqih rule of the legal scholar, according to the Shiite doctrine. ' Al-Hawzah is the newspaper of Muqtada al-Sadr. There has been some controversy about whether the Sadr Movement accepts Khomeini's doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent (Wilayat al-Faqih). I'd say the answer is yes, and the Muqtada faction of the Sadrists is even using the doctrine as a litmus test for whether other parties are truly Islamic.
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Basra Council Dominated by Fundamenatlists

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The results have been announced for Basra province. The city of Basra alone has 1.2 million inhabitants, so this is a major province, and is largely Shiite. Fundamentalist Shiite parties gained 85 percent of the seats. The United Iraqi Alliance won 20 seats, or 49 percent.

The Islamic Fadila Party won 12 seats, or 29 percent. (Fadilah is an offshoot of the Sadr II movement led by Muhammad Yaqubi). Since the UIA is a coalition, this result makes Fadilah the biggest single party on the council.

The Islamic Dawa Party, which ran apart from the UIA in Basra, received 3 seats or 7 percent. The remaining 5 seats were distributed among the Iraqi National Accord (Iyad Allawi), which received 4 seats or 10 percent and the Caucus for Iraq's Future, which received 2 seats.

Women received 29 percent of the seats.
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Back Channels

The US military has established back-channel negotiations with some of the leaders of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war, according to Time magazine. Earlier on, the US had refused such negotiations.

Ahmad Chalabi was clearly angered by these talks, and said on US television on Sunday that the new Iraqi government would not be bound by such negotiations conducted by the US. Chalabi, who is running for prime minister, has a history of advocating punitive measures against former members of the Baath Party.

Mark Hosenball of Newsweek reports that Iran is attempting to place its assets in key ministry posts in Iraq. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Al-Da'wa Party, both old-time revolutionary Shiite organizations, were in exile in Tehran in the 1980s and after, and it is not impossible that some members were recruited by Iranian intelligence.

Sunni Arab leaders met on Sunday to discuss strategies for going forward.

The Association of Muslim Scholars appears determined to stick to a rejectionist stance.

Speaking of which, I saw Muqtada al-Sadr being interviewed on al-Jazeerah Sunday. Muqtada said that the most pressing task was the expulsion of the foreign troops. He denied having participated in the election in any way. He recognized that some Sadrists had gotten elected, either on the Sistani list or as part of the Cadres and Chosen Party (which won 3 seats). Muqtada seemed to say that he would only cooperate with the new government if it set an immediate timetable for the withdrawal of US troops.

Am back in town and will post more regularly from Monday afternoon
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Abu Ghraib in Brooklyn

Larry Cohler-Esses of the New York Daily News reveals that Abu Ghraib has been going on in the United States itself. Five Israeli suspects and dozens of Muslim ones apprehended after September 11 were subjected to humiliation, stripped, left in the cold, and generally treated with cruelty. None of the arrestees was ever convicted of any wrongdoing, save visa violations that caused them to be deported, save for one.

The Israeli detainees do not appear to have been treated any better than the Muslim ones:

' Oded Ellner - one of five Israeli Jewish terrorist suspects - said he sought medical help after MDC's allegedly meager, often spoiled meals left him with severe dysentery symptoms. The doctor came with five guards and a camera, he said. She then ordered him to strip and shift his backside into a small space in the cell door so she could conduct a rectal exam from outside the cell. "I'm a human being, not an animal!" Ellner said he shouted. "I have a right to an exam." The guards, he said, "just laughed," and all walked away. '

The man who wrote the advice to President Bush on the permissibility of the use of torture after September 11, Albert Gonzales, is now in charge of the very penitentiary where his sort of thinking went wild.
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How Many Methods Are There to Enact a New Constitution in Iraq?

Guest Editorial

by Andrew Arato


Many commentators keep repeating a fundamentally erroneous statement, namely that Sunni part of the population unrepresented in the National Assembly is to an important extent protected in the Iraqi political process because a new constitution can be adopted only if it is not rejected by 2/3 of the voters of three, in this case Sunni provinces. The assumption is based on the provisions of the Transitional Administrative Law, the Interim Constitution currently in effect, that had been imposed by the American Coalition Provisional Authority in the Spring of 2004. Unfortunately or not, this official constitution-making method of the TAL, a document that has been repeatedly denounced by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani (who blocked its approval by the UN Security Council), is not the only one currently available to the new National Assembly where his forces will dominate.

Members of parliament might decide that they are not bound by the interim constitution. Although the TAL contains no provision for democratic decision-making, on these issues the elected government would be within its rights to engage in it. Of course, the members of parliament could simply keep the interim constitution in place. But they could also legally amend it. Or they could replace it through a series of amendments. This diversity of methods is important, because the new National Assembly in Iraq may pursue several of them simultaneously thereby reducing to insignificance broad participation conceded on only one, the official level.

The official method does involve drafting an entirely new constitution in the current National Assembly, and offering it for ratification to the electorate as a whole as well as province by province, where a majority of Iraqi voters must approve and 2/3 of the voters of 3 provinces can subvert ratification. (TAL: Art 61 B and C). It is however quite erroneous to claim as many now do that 2/3 of the National Assembly must according to the TAL approve a draft, although the assembly could (and should) still decide to set up such a rule. There is no veto provided for the Presidency Council either, as in the case of ordinary laws.

While there are no provisions for setting up a constitution drafting committee, the only reason why such a body would be difficult to established according to ethnic and political parity or proportionality different than the distribution of the assembly itself is that relevant Sunni representation in the National Assembly will be zero. Something like a creative use of the extra-parliamentary round table method, pioneered in Central Europe and South Africa may be needed to secure a preliminary constitutional agreement with significant Sunni groupings like the Association of Islamic Scholars, and groups that did well in the elections for local government.

At the other extreme there is the extra-legal but certainly democratic if majoritarian method of repudiating the TAL and its constitution-making rules, and producing new ones. The justification for this would be that the Interim Constitution is a document imposed by a foreign occupying power, never involving Iraqi consent, and thus cannot bind and constrain a freely and democratically elected constituent assembly. More or less, this used to be the position of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and was confirmed as a possibility by no less than Lakhdar Brahimi, the representative of the UN Secretary General. Sistani has now achieved his freely elected assembly.

Nevertheless, the elections, with the Sunni boycott, were not themselves fully democratic. The bare majority of seats achieved by the Shi'a list in the National Assembly would now make the classical revolutionary democratic road a very hazardous one to follow, since it would incite Kurdish defection as well as Sunni resistance and probably international condemnation. Because of careless talk of some members of the United Iraqi Alliance, in spite of Sistani’s own protestations, the whole majoritarian democratic path very much at home elsewhere in the world, e.g. the UK, is now indissolubly tainted with the prospect of theocracy, or the tyranny of the majority. Nevertheless, the taint of American imposition of the TAL, and the resentment of the three province veto keep even this option alive as one option of the UIA list.

In between the extremes of the official method and extra-legal democracy lie however methods of perpetuating a constitution that would be still the TAL, formally speaking. Taken far enough this approach could lead to a substantially new constitution, and this is what almost all commentators miss. According to the TAL itself, if the assembly simply fails to agree on a constitution, or if its work is rejected by the electorate of three provinces, and this could happen an indefinite number of times, new elections would be necessary in 12 or 18 months. For an indefinite period the TAL even as it now stands could remain the constitution of Iraq, de facto.

In the meantime however it could be also amended, in part or as a whole. Its amendment rule requires ¾ of the votes of the National Assembly, plus the agreement of all three members of the Presidency Council (who were picked by 2/3 of the assembly). (Art. 3A) A UIA led coalition with the Kurdish Alliance (with obvious allies) would have about 215-220 votes, well over the required ¾, and all they would have to make sure is to elect in advance by 2/3 a friendly three member Presidency Council amenable to such purpose. Such an amendment process may simply improve upon the TAL, currently much too sketchy and even contradictory to be of use for the longer run.

But the approach could go so far as to replace the TAL altogether by an entirely new constitution, along with a new amendment rule, and a new constitution making procedure or no new constitution making procedure at all if the ruling coalition so wishes. This is so in spite of the fact that the TAL has some supposedly unamendable provisions. The careless framers forgot to make Art 3A, the amendment rule itself unamendable, and after it were suitably amended, everything else could be changed as well.

These issues sound technical, but in fact they are of deep political significance. The new coalition accordingly does not really have to fear Sunni rejection of its constitutional product. It is in the position to offer only token representation to the Sunni, or none at all, and amend the TAL while it produces a new constitution. In case of rejection by three provinces, the TAL would stay as the new constitution. Or, alternately, serious participation could be offered to groups like the Association of Islamic Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party in the National Assembly committee writing the new constitution, as I once suggested here. Even in that case, amending the TAL could be held as a club over the new committee, its co-opted Sunni members, as well as the voters of Sunni provinces. In principle two constitutional projects could proceed together with the authentic justification that the TAL needs revision
and relegitimation at the very least.

There are answers to the dilemma however, technical and political. A short time period should be set up for the necessary partial revision and relegitimation of the TAL, probably a period of six or eight weeks. One thing that should be changed is the ratification rule, since neither a three province veto nor the possibility of indefinite self-perpetuation of an interim constitution are desirable. Then, a moratorium should be declared on all further amendments to the TAL, while a genuinely pluralistic constitutional committee does its work on the new constitution and is allowed to reach consensus.

Of course the key issue remains setting up a constitution drafting committee where the Sunnis will be adequately represented. The only reason why such a body would be now difficult to establish according to ethnic and political parity or proportionality different than the distribution of the assembly itself is that relevant Sunni representation in the National Assembly may now be actually zero. Something like a creative use of the extra-parliamentary round table negotiations, pioneered in Central Europe and South Africa may be needed to secure a preliminary constitutional agreement with significant Sunni groupings like the Association of Islamic Scholars, and parties like the Iraqi Islamic Party that did well in the elections for local government.

Of course the National Assembly would have to retain the right to to debate and alter any such prior informal agreement. Hopefully, however, the majority forces would adhere to promises and commitments made to the minority. It may be that this is the only way that participation by all major political forces in Iraq could lead to the desirable conclusion: the achievement of a new and legitimate constitution free of either American or Iraqi majoritarian imposition.

The author is Professor at the New School in New York

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Chalabi Interviewed by Stephanopoulos

George Stephanopoulos interviewed Ahmad Chalabi on ABC's This Week Sunday morning. Here are some excerpts from the press release issued with the transcript afterwards:

' · When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked why Prime Minister Allawi’s government failed to stop the insurgency and how the new government will deal with the same issues, Dr. Chalabi responded: “…The Iraqi government failed to stop those killers because the security plan that the United States and the coalition put together for Iraq for the period after sovereignty did not work. The government did not take the issue of the sovereignty of Iraq seriously. Iraqis must take control of the Iraqi armed forces from the recruitment, to the training, to the deployment.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked about a “Time” magazine report on US military officials negotiating with former Saddam regime elements leading the insurgency, Dr. Chalabi responded: “I know nothing about such negotiations. Those negotiations will in no way bind the elected government of Iraq because it's not part of them. And I don't know whether the report is accurate or not. But the issue here is not negotiating with the killers who are killing the Iraqi people and who are murdering tens of Iraqis on their most religious occasions like this, like what happened yesterday and the day before. I believe that the Iraqi government will defend the Iraqi people and will stop the killers and stop the terrorists.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if the US military should stop negotiating with these regime elements, Dr. Chalabi replied: “The U.S. military is free to do what they want. But what is binding on the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government is regulated by agreement that exists now and by the fact that Iraqis are a sovereign state and will have an elected government very soon.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked how the status of US forces will changes under the new government, Dr. Chalabi responded: “I believe that the agreement will deal with the issues of how the Iraqi armed forces work, how the command structure of the forces in Iraq to be organized, where the U.S. forces will be deployed, how they will deal with emergencies in Iraq, and where will they be. All these issues need to be clarified.”

· Dr. Chalabi on the withdrawal of US forces: “As for the time when U.S. forces can begin to withdraw, I would say to you that this is contingent upon the training and the making Iraqis' armed forces effective in fighting the insurgents and identifying the enemy and fighting them, and not negotiating and giving them (inaudible) fighting them. We need to do it politically and militarily. And also, the United States forces can begin to withdraw when the Iraqi security forces are able to assume more and more of the burden in doing this. Iraqis are perfectly willing to fight the killers and the terrorists. And I think that they have not been -- no structures were in place to make them effective so far. So we need to improve on that.”

· Dr. Chalabi on the issue of detainees: “The agreement will deal with the right or how those U.S. forces detainees Iraqis. There are thousands of Iraqis now detained by U.S. forces. We don't know why. We don't know how. And we don't know under what legal structure they are being detained. I believe that this process should be an Iraqi process.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if he was in the good graces of the US again, Dr. Chalabi responded: “I hope to be a friend. I'm a friend of the United States, and I continue to be a friend of the United States. And I am grateful, as are most Iraqis, to the American people for helping liberate Iraq and also, young and old men and women of the United States Armed Forces in Iraq who have done a great job in helping us have elections, and also for the leadership of President Bush.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if he thought he would be the next Prime Minster of Iraq, Dr. Chalabi responded: “That's up to the United Iraqi Alliance parliamentary bloc, and they will decide on that through a democratic process… I believe I have a majority of the votes on my side right now.”

· Dr. Chalabi on the newly formed government: “We want to change the way Iraq is governed. It's no longer -- it will no longer be the government of a leader with everybody else not counting very much. We want to have a cabinet form of executive authority in Iraq, and I am perfectly willing to cooperate, as indeed are my other friends and colleagues who are competing the job of prime minister.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked about Iran’s relationship with Iraq, Dr. Chalabi responded: “The Iraqi people will assert themselves as an independent people. They have elected an assembly which ran on this platform, independence, sovereignty. And I believe that the Iraqi people will not accept to be part of Iran. And the Shia of Iraq will not accept to be under the influence of Iran. But that does not mean we have to be enemies of Iran. Iran has a long border with Iraq, and we intend to have the best possible relations with Iran based on non-interference in each other's affairs, and also good neighborly relations, and no terrorism from either side against the other.”

· Dr. Chalabi on Israeli-Palestinian relations: “…I believe myself that the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute will be solved by negotiations. And I'm glad to see the negotiations are progressing between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government under the new leadership in the Palestinian Authority. And we look forward to the day when there is an independent Palestinian state at peace with all its neighbors so that we can resume -- we can put this problem behind us.” '

What all this tells me is that Ahmad Chalabi still has a highly vindictive, almost violent attitude toward the Sunni Arab community, many of whom were Baath Party members even though most were not guilty of actual crimes. I personally can't imagine a process through which Chalabi emerges as prime minister from the United Iraqi Alliance, or at least not a process that did not involve a lot of bribery. But if such a disaster occurred, it is obvious that he would throw the country into further chaos immediately.

It is absolutely outrageous that Chalabi blames US policies for the guerrilla war. He was the one who pushed for punitive policies toward the ex-Baathists and for dissolving the Iraqi military, and he and his Neoconservative cronies in the Pentagon bear a great deal of the responsibility for the mess in Iraq today.

By the way, it seems pretty obvious that aside from Stephanopoulos, a lot of television news leaders are trying to dump the Iraq story. Despite massive bombings and loss of life on Ashura in Iraq on Saturday, there is so far relatively little about it on the Sunday afternoon talking heads shows.
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At Least 55 Dead, Over 100 Wounded In Ashura Bombings

Eight suicide bombers struck at various sites in Iraq on Saturday, killing and wounding dozens during the commemboration of Ashura. This holy day is sort of like Easter Friday for Shiites, when they remember the martyrdom of Husain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The guerrillas, who are from a Sunni Arab background, are hoping to provoke the Shiites into attacking Sunnis, so as to throw the country into (even greater) chaos. They hope massive sectarian warfare will force the US out and will allow them to make a coup and come back to power.

Contrary to what Hilary Clinton said in Baghdad on Saturday, this series of huge explosions does not demonstrate that the guerrilla insurgency has failed or is weakening. Rather, the attacks demonstrate that the guerrilla war is still being waged fiercely.

Al-Hayat reports that a decision on the new prime minister will not be announced until at least Wednesday. The decision was postponed in part because of Ashura, and in part because of the difficulty in getting a "green light" from Washington in the wake of Ambassador John Negroponte's appointment as intelligence czar. (US news sources have not spoken as openly of the need for a green light from Washington, but al-Hayat's sources are frank about it. This frankness agrees with the comment made by one embassy official that Iraq cannot select a prime minister who is unacceptable to Washington.

I'll be a guest on Jack Cafferty's "In the Money" on CNN on Sunday at 3 pm EST, 12 pm PST
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Present Conflicts, Looming Conflicts

Reuters reports, ' Five U.S. soldiers were killed in separate guerrilla attacks in Iraq, the U.S. military said Friday, three in or near the northern city of Mosul, one north of Baghdad and the fifth south of the capital. '

The Financial Times points out that a conflict is brewing between the Shiite majority in the new parliament and the Kurds over the veto power given any three provinces over the new constitution. The Shiites have never accepted the veto and Grand Ayatollah Sistani threatened Kofi Annan over any attempt to have it endorsed by the UN security council.

Abbas Kadhim analyzes the significance of the Sunni Arab absence in the new parliament, and makes some suggestions as to how to begin repairing this disastrous situation.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim accused Iraqi police of torturing and killing three members of the Shiite paramilitary, the Badr Corps, under mysterious circumstances, according to Ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Hakim, the leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance, said that the deed was done by ex-Baathists who had been re-recruited into the police corps. The rehabilitation of Baathists under the interim Allawi administration is likely to produce many such conflicts now that the religious Shiites are in power.

The same newspaper reports that the bodies of the two sons of Najaf police chief Ghalib al-Jazairi were found Friday in the holy city of Karbala. Guerrillas appear to have used the ritual mourning processions of Muharram among Shiites as a cover to kidnap them.

Al-Hayat reports that Samirah Rajab published an op-ed in the Khalij Times after the recent Iraqi elections in which she refered to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as "General Sistani" and complained that the Shiite cleric had legitimated the foreign military occupation of Iraq by supporting the elections and by helping pacify the country for the Americans. The article produced vehement protests among the Bahraini Shiite community (the majority of the population), and demands that Bahrain newspapers be censored so as to prevent such comments from appearing in the future.

Shaikh Husain al-Najati, Sistani's representative in Bahrain, complained of the negative and derisive tone toward the grand ayatollah. Rajab had defended Saddam Hussein, and represents a Sunni Arab nationalist point of view that views the rise of Shiite dominance in Iraq as extremely unfortunate. This conflict demonstrates the kinds of tensions between Sunnis and Shiites provoked by the new situation in the Gulf.
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Bomb Blasts kill at Least 40

Suicide bombers targeted three Shiite mosques in Baghdad and one near Kirkuk, and other blasts went off elsewhere in the country, wreaking devastation. The guerrillas continue to attempt to provoke Sunni-Shiite civil war, but so far Shiites are continuing to refuse to fall for this gambit. Having come to power, they know that stability will help their cause.
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Shiite Iraq

Al-Hayat: Muhammad Husain Adili, the Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, said Thursday that his government had leant substantial help to the United States in fostering a "calm atmosphere" for the holding of elections on Jan. 30 in Iraq. He revealed that Iran had contacted Sunni Arab groups with which it had influence and attempted to convince them that the elections were in Iraq's best interest. He offered Iran's help in future, as well, in helping establish security in the Middle East, where Iranian and US interests coincide.

As I predicted, the United Iraqi Alliance not only has 51 percent of seats on its own, but has already made a coalition [Arabic link] with some smaller parties. The three representatives of the Cadres and Chosen Party that is close to Muqtada al-Sadr will join the large coalition, as will the 3 deputies of the Turkmen National Front and a few independents. Only twelve lists were seated in parliament in the end, and most of them have joined the Shiite fundamentalist coalition. If the UIA can come to an agreement with the Kurds, it can easily form a government and then rule parliament.

In a startling development to which the Western press is paying little attention, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has won the provincial governments in 8 of the 18 provinces in the country, including Baghdad. Over-all Shiite lists won 11 of the 18. Sadrists won Wasit and Maysam, and perhaps one other. Dawa doesn't appear to have run well at the provincial level. The Kurds won several of the northern provinces, including Ta'mim (where Kirkuk is) and Ninevah. The Iraqi Islamic Party won Anbar province, even though it withdrew from the elections. (It couldn't properly withdraw because the ballots had already been printed.) But only 2 percent of the residents of Anbar voted, so the IIP victory doesn't mean much.

The UIA is looking to given Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, former national security adviser, an important post. It will definitely sack interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, who is vehmently anti-Iranian.

Tony Karon of Time profiles Ibrahim Jaafari, who will most likely be the new prime minister of Iraq. He says

' . . . Jaafari is a “Shiite modernist,” according to an AFP profile carried in the Tehran Times. He has signaled a moderate Islamist position on questions of religion and the state, advocating that Islam be constitutionally recognized as Iraq's official religion and a source (but not the sole source) of legislation, and that no laws will be passed that contradict Islamic values. At the same time, he favors protection of minority religious and ethnic groups, and insists that the first priority of a new government is not only to be as inclusive as possible of those who participated in the election, but also to draw in those who stayed away — almost half the eligible population (42 percent), including the vast majority of Sunnis . . . The U.S. is now faced with negotiating a relationship with a new government that reflects limited U.S. influence, and whose leaders enjoy historic ties with Iran.

The AFP profile notes,

' When talks were under way last February over the drafting the fundamental law which serves as Iraq's interim constitution, Jaafari was among those champions who favored Islam as the only source of legislation. But he has distanced himself from a hard line. "Secularism originally meant opposing God and religion. Now it is not the same. Islam has changed too. It is different from country to country," he said earlier this month. "It is true that some countries stop women from attending schools and others do not let women drive. For me that would be a problem . . ." Despite having been one of the first to organize demonstrations opposing the presence of U.S.-led troops on Iraqi soil, earlier this month he admitted their necessity -- for the time being. "Despite their presence here in Iraq, terrorism exists," Jaafari said. "Can you imagine what will happen if we ask them to leave? This could mean the beginning of a civil war." '

Phillip Kennicott of the Washington Post does one of the best Western press profiles of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani yet. It is a judicious exploration of Sistani's thought on matters of religious law and social mores.

' While American leaders emphasize that Sistani isn't like the clerics of Iran, others point out that the Shiite tradition leaves Sistani little wiggle room on fundamental topics, including women's rights. "It is important to keep in mind that there are certain issues in the Shiite community about which no ayatollah, however progressive, can afford to deviate in his deliberations and final ruling," Abdulaziz A. Sachedina writes in an e-mail from Iran. A professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia, Sachedina met with Sistani several times in the 1990s, and on one occasion Sistani criticized his writings and issued a ruling against Sachedina's public comments on matters of faith. Sachedina was undaunted and says he carries "no grudge" against Sistani. Nonetheless, Sachedina's inside view of Sistani and Sistani's organization lead him to consider the ayatollah more conservative than do other observers. Sistani's views on women "are restrictive and in his personal communication to me in 1998 he made it very clear that he abides by the age-old opinions regarding women's inequality with men, and that he regards their testimony, as extrapolated from the Qu'ran, half of a man's testimony in value," the scholar writes. '

The only thing I would add is that this profile of Sistani seems to me insufficiently appreciative of the ways in which he has incorporated notions of popular sovereignty and parliamentary elections as a means for the people to express their will into Shiite law.
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