Guerrillas Kill 5 US Troops
Shiite Reprisals in Haswa
Allawi Bid for New Coalition Founders
Iran is considering trying the 15 British sailors it captured at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, in what it claims were Iranian territorial waters. British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned Iran that it should not underestimate the seriousness of the capture. The sailors were taken captive at a time of increased US sabre-rattling toward Iran. This weekend, the UN Security Council voted to sanction Iran for its nuclear enrichment program, which Iran says is purely for civilian purposes.
Sunni Arab guerrillas deployed roadside bombs to kill five US GIs on Sunday. Clashes erupted between local guerrillas and Iraqi security forces in the working class Fadil District of Baghdad. Police found 22 bodies, most of them in Baghdad. Another ten persons died in other violence. Reuters gives details of other political violence, including a Shiite attack on Sunni mosques in Haswa in reprisal for Saturday's attack on a Shiite mosque.
McClatchy describes the violence in Haswa:
The Iraqi Islamic Party sits in parliament.
' In retaliation for yesterday['s] bombing in the mixed city of Haswa (50 Km south of Baghdad) gunmen burned 4 Sunni mosques and attacked the Iraqi Islamic party (IIP) headquarter in the city. Around 1 p.m. and during the funeral of yesterday bombing victims, Shiite gunmen attacked and burned two mosques, Abdullah Al Jubouri and Hiteen mosques. The gunmen set a bomb in Usama bin Zaid mosque and burn it. The fourth mosque, Al Anwar mosque, gunmen bombed the Minaret and burned the mosque after no resistance were noticed. Almost at the same time the gunmen attacked the IIP headquarter in the city and a clash started between the guards and the attackers till around 4:30 p.m. The three hours continues clashes and sectarian violence stopped after the arrival of the American and Iraqi troops. Police said 2 men were injured only but sources of the IIP said 15 of the attackers were killed. '
Marid Abd Hasun, a political conselor to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, held a reconciliation meeting in Basra in an attempt to resolve the disputes between the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadilah) and the Sadr Movement-- quarrels that led to open fighting last Thursday. The conference ended without achieving any real reconciliation.
90 Iraqi members of parliament called on prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to allot emergency funds to care for the intellectuals and artists inhabiting the famed al-Mutanabbi Street, favorite site of booksellers in Iraq, which was recently blown up by guerrillas.
The facilitator for the assassin in the attempt on the life of vice premier Salam al-Zawba'i was a distant relative of the official who had fought alongside Sunni Arab guerrillas but been pardoned at al-Zawba'i's request. Some reports are saying up to three of his bodyguards were involved in the plot. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi government is blaming the assassination attempt on the Baath Party. (Note that the Western press was almost unanimous in blaming "al-Qaeda;" but the Iraqi government is better placed to know who is trying to kill its officials). Al-Zawba` is a Sunni Arab clan, the leader of which has, like the vice premier, been willing to cooperate with the Americans. The incident shows the ways in which ideology is sometimes more powerful than kinship ties in today's Iraq. The hope sometimes expressed that tribes could step up and stop the guerrillas founders on such data.
Al-Hayat also says that the "Islamic State of Iraq," the fundamentalist guerrilla group active in western Iraq, has demanded that the city of Tikrit accept its rule, in return for which it would release Sheikh Naji Jabarah al-Juburi, the chieftain of the powerful, largely Sunni Arab Jubur tribe.
KarbalaNews.net, a Shiite web site, argues that the attempts of former appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi to form a new parliamentary bloc have foundered. Allawi, an ex-Baathist and old time CIA asset, was attempting to group political forces against the Shiite fundamentalist majority. The leader of the Iraqi National List (25 seats in parliament) billed himself as seeking a non-sectarian alliance, though in fact it would have been an anti-Shiite one. Among the coalitions he hoped would join is that Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front, and Adnan Dulaimi, a high official in that group, had seemed to signal its willingness. But now Iyad al-Samarra'i, the no. 2 man in the Iraqi Accord Front and a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party has denied that the fundamentalist Sunni MPs (44 out of 275 in Parliament) are interested in allying with Allawi. He said that Dulaimi had been too hasty in his pronouncment on the issue. Then Dilshad Miran, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government, denied that Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani had indicated any interest in joining the new bloc. Then Izzat al-Shabandar, a leader of Allawi's Iraqi National List, admitted that the effort had been unable to garner any American support. Finally, Nadim al-Jabiri, the leader of the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadilah), said that his group had no interest in bringing down the al-Maliki government. Virtue (15 seats in parliament) had recently withdrawn from the Shiite fundamentalist United Iraqi Alliance, and there was speculation that it might join up with Allawi. That seems unlikely in light of al-Jabiri's statement. So, in short, the whole effort appears to have fallen apart. Nor was there any real prospect that such a diverse coalition could have held together for very long even if it had been formed. And, any success Allawi would have had in marginalizing and sidelining the Shiite fundamentalist majority would have just thrown Iraq into greater turmoil. You can't mobilize people politically and then just tell them to sit down and shut up. That's how revolutions are created (e.g. Algeria 1991)
The prayer leader of the shrine of Ali in Najaf, Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Sunday. Sistani urged politicians to sacrifice sectorial, personal and sectarian goals for the sake of Iraq's national interests.
Barack Obama said Sunday, according to this site, that 'the Iraq war is diminishing America's standing in the world and diverting millions of dollars that should be spent on health care, education and alternative energy research in the United States . . . "We have to recognize that if we don't make some fundamental changes right now that we could be the first generation in a very long time that leaves an America behind that is a little poorer and a little meaner than the one we inherited from our parents, and that's unacceptable . . ." '
Labels: Iraq War
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/26/2007 12:22:00 AM
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7 Comments:
On Allawi's failure to form an anti-Shiite alliance:
Isn't part of the news here that Allawi's "effort had been unable to garner any American support"? Is this because none of the "realists" who pushed Allawi in '04 are willing to back him after his poor electoral showing?
Or does the failure to garner any American support suggest that even "realists" in the US reconciled themselves to the so-called Shiite Option?
www.profcutler.com
Good Shiite/Sunni article in Times.
I personally am always skeptical about things like the Americans not supporting Allawi, or in fact anything the Americans publically announce about their intentions in Iraq.
(Except when Gates said the US intends to use Iraq as a buffer against Iran for the indefinite future whether the Iraqi people/voters/elected officials want it or not)
Everyone presumed Khalilizad went to Kurdistan specifically to lobby for the Allawi ticket. If Allawi had gotten support from any respectable amount of Iraqis, the Americans would have been on board, but after seeing it fail the Americans are claiming they would never have supported such an anti-democratic endeavor.
Pure nonsense.
Iraq has come out in support of UK's assertion that the sailors were in Iraqi water.
Earlier though, and interesting to me,
the Iraqi military commander of the country's territorial waters said the British boats may not have been in Iraqi territory.
"We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control," Brig. Gen. Hakim Jassim told AP Television News in the southern city of Basra.
"We don't know why they were there," he said.
In any event the capture of these soldiers is a very interesting story. How did it happen now? Were the Brits routinely coming into vulnerable areas or was it a fluke?
Did the Iranians have standing orders to capture anyone they could? If so, starting when?
The Islamic State of Iraq has also claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt on the vice-premier.
Yesterday Professor Cole wrote that “as an ex-Trotskyite, (Kanaan Makiya) is a genuine Neoconservative.”
I am still learning what words like “Trotskyite” and “Neoconservative” mean. If you are too, George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics Vs. Literature” will help. Unless I have misunderstood, Orwell described part of the pathology of Neoconservatism decades before the term was coined.
Orwell says that Jonathan Swift is “one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.”
Swift’s “debunking of human grandeur… springs from the fact that he belonged to the unsuccessful party. He denounces injustice and oppression, but gives no evidence of liking democracy. In spite of his enormously greater powers, his implied position is very similar to that of the innumerable silly-clever Conservatives of our own day… people who specialize in cracking neat jokes at the expense of whatever is ‘modern’ and ‘progressive,’ and whose opinions are often all the more extreme because they know they cannot influence the actual drift of events.”
“However, the reactionary cast of Swift’s mind does not show itself chiefly in his political affiliations. The important thing is his attitude towards Science, and, more broadly, towards intellectual curiosity… there is no sign that ‘pure’ science would have struck him as a worth-while activity… he goes out of his way to proclaim the uselessness of all learning or speculation not directed towards some practical end.”
Though “the force of belief is behind it,” Swift’s is “a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity.”
Morally, mentally and physically, progressives may exert themselves at high levels for long periods. They need to be aware of their own moral and of their friends’, too. Such awareness might have saved Kanaan Makiya and those like him from catastrophic moral exhaustion and intellectual corruption, and the Iraqis and Americans killed or maimed in the Iraq War might today be alive and whole.
1) Last year a Johns Hopkins study estimated the Iraq War had resulted in 655 000 Iraqi deaths.
Today the BBC reports: “the (UK) Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were ‘close to best practice’ and the study design was ‘robust’.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6495753.stm
2) In my last e-mail I meant to say that progressives "need to be aware of their own MORALE," not "moral."
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