Holy Day attacks Kill at Least 56

Sunni Arab guerrillas seeking to provoke further fighting in Iraq's sectarian civil war targeted Shiites on the holy day of Ashura, Tuesday, killing 56 and wounding dozens. Many of the Shiites targeted were in smaller towns or cities, or were hit by mortar shells. The deployment of 11,000 men from the army and police in the holy city of Karbala forestalled attacks there.

Reuters reports this and other political violence. Note that Baladruz and Khaniqin, where Shiite mosques and worshippers were targeted, are east or northeast of Baghdad and are in mixed Sunni-Shiite regions.

McClatchy reports that a British base at Basra in the south received an intensive mortar shell bombardment on Ashura'. Some nationalistic Shiite militias in Basra deeply resent the foreign troop presence there.
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Bush Comment on Najaf Farcical;
Hawatimah Tribe of Diwaniyah involved in Mahdist Uprising?

Attempts are being made to knock down all kinds of stories about the Najaf uprising. Bush expressed happiness that the Iraqi Army (actually the Badr Corps fundamentalist Shiite militia) acquitted itself well against the rebels. But in fact, the Iraqi security forces were surrounded, cut off and nearly destroyed by heavily armed cultists--and had urgently to call in US troops, tanks and close air support.

Bush told National Public Radio on Monday, "My first reaction on this report from the battlefield is that the Iraqis are beginning to show me something."

So does the US military not tell Bush when their Iraqi allies get into deep trouble fighting a few hundred cultists and they have to go bail them out? Or was Bush briefed on the situation and he came out and told a bald faced lie to the public about what had happened?

Either thing at a time the country is at war is truly horrifying.

The radical Sunni Arab newspaper Mafkarat al-Islam and the moderate Arab nationalist newspaperal-Zaman weighed in with yet a fourth account of the fighting in Najaf on Sunday and Monday.

In this one, an innocent poor little tribal group from Diwaniyah, the Hawatimah, got up a night-time convoy to the holy city of Najaf on their way to Karbala for Ashura. They happened to have raised anti-Iranian slogans and placards. (At night or early dawn? How could they be seen?) The evil Najaf government authorities, themselves proto-Iranian, suddenly and for no reason launched a massive attack on the Hawatimah, massacring them, as they approached Najaf. In this narrative, the Diwaniyah tribal group had nothing to do with any millenarian cult (al-Mahdawiyah), and were just killed at the instigation of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Badr Corps (pro-Iranian political and paramilitary groupings who basically run Najaf) because they dared object to Iranian influence in Iraq. It is even being alleged in al-Zaman that the Hawatimah were only implementing Bush administration strictures against Iranian machinations in Iraq.

Note that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which controls Najaf, is Bush's major ally in Iraq even though it is close to Iran. Those fighting the Najaf government and Iraqi army forces were anti-Iranian. Rightwing bloggers seem confused on these points.

It is, of course, possible that the Hawatimah got caught up in the fighting between the Mahdawiyah and the Badr Corps as they were proceeding toward Karbala. And the Najaf authorities did themselve no favors by trying to depict this Shiite group as al-Qaeda (a hyper-Sunni movement) or related to the old Baath Party.

But the story in Mafkarat al-Islam makes no sense at all. If the Hawatimah convoy was heading to Karbala, why would it need to go into downtown Najaf? And what was a big convoy of armed tribesmen doing heading for downtown Najaf at night? At night? With Iraq's lack of security? The al-Zaman narrative even justifies them being heavily armed on the grounds that they were traveling at night. But doesn't explain why they were operating under cover of darkness in the first place. The traveling at night thing seems suspicious to me.

In contrast, al-Hayat reports in Arabic that its stringers interviewed residents of Zarqa just north of Najaf who confirmed that the Mahdist sect leader, Diya' Kazim Abd al-Zahra, who also went by Ahmad Hassaan al-Yamaani, of Diwaniyah, 38, had indeed bought orchards there and settled there with hundreds of followers. They kept bringing in truckfuls of sand. When asked why, they said that they wanted to build barriers to mark of "their property."

Hmm. The Mahdist leader was from Diwaniyah. The Hawatimah were from Diwaniyah and were coming in a big armed convoy at night toward Najaf.

If we set aside the claims of this group of Hawatimah to be innocent victims and assume that they were Mahdists coming to help with a planned assault on Najaf (empty and unguarded while all the other Shiites converged on Karbala for Ashura), then it would explain a lot. Heavily armed tribesmen could easily have overwhelmed the Iraqi army, if they had RPGs and automatic weapons. They would have the element of surprise, esprit de corps, and probably some would have served in the old Baath army and might well have much more military experience than the green Iraqi army troops thrown against them. Tribesmen are formidable and often outfitted like private armies. And if they were coming to support the Mahdawiyah cultists in the orchards, that explains where the high-powered weapons came from. They so devastated the Iraqi forces that the US had to send troops, tanks and helicopters to rescue the latter.

If we posit an involvement of the Hawatimah from Diwaniyah in the Mahdist uprising at Najaf, it raises the question as to whether they were the "rogue elements" that launched an uprising in Diwaniyah itself in late August, 2006. At the time, this violence was blamed on the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, but spokesmen for Muqtada at the time complained that "rogue elements" not under his control were stirring up trouble there. The Mahdawiyah was founded in 1999 by Abdul Zahra, a young civil engineer from Diwaniyah who had been a follower of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (Muqtada's father) but established a group that split off from the Sadrists.

Admittedly, a lot of what I have written is speculative, and I'm open to being corrected by better evidence. (That is the fate of all historians but especially those who try to catch history on the run.) But I think it is pretty easy to resolve the contradictions among the major accounts by assuming that this was a Mahdist uprising aimed at taking Najaf, centered on the coming of the Promised One, to which a group of Hawatimah clans were coming to lend aid. The Hawatimah story of their innocence, as reported in the Sunni press, seems to me to have a lot of holes in it.
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Cole in Salon.com: Bush's Anti-Iran Fatwa

My Salon.com column this week is now available:
"The danger of Bush's anti-Iran fatwa":

The president's decision to use force against Iranian "agents" inside Iraq could snare innocent pilgrims, and raises the risk of open warfare.

Excerpt:

' George W. Bush last week announced that American troops in Iraq were henceforth authorized to "kill or capture" any Iranian intelligence agents they discovered in Iraq. The announcement came on the heels of his pledge in the State of the Union address to bring another aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, a move that clearly targeted Iran. A prominent Iranian parliamentarian responded to Bush's threat by saying, "Such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms." Iraq's deputy prime minister, meanwhile, put a pox on both Iran and the U.S. for conducting their geopolitical battle on Iraqi soil. '

Read the whole thing.
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Mahdist Cult Almost Defeated Iraqi Army at Najaf
Wave of Bombings, Mortar attacks in Baghdad

Marc Santora of NYT reveals that the Iraqi army was very nearly overwhelmed and defeated by the Army of Heaven militia of the Mahdawiya millenarian movement near Najaf on the weekend. They had to call in not only US airstrikes but also US troops to save themselves from being surrounded and killed.

The Mahdawiya is a splinter group of the Sadr movement, which broke away in the late 1990s, and was led by Ahmad al-Hassaani al-Yamani of Diwaniya. He styled himself styled himself Ali b. Ali. b. Abi Talib, that is, he was claiming to be the return of an (otherwise unknown) son of Ali (d. 661), whom Shiites believe was the true successor to the Prophet Muhammad. The Mahdawiya leader is alleged to have been killed in Sunday's battle.

Al-Hayat's identification of this movement with another Sadrist splinter group, that of Mahmud al-Hasani al-Sarkhi, appears to have been incorrect.

The buzz in the Right blogosphere that the Mahdawiya is somehow linked to Iran is a profound falsehood. Sadrist splinter groups in Iraq generally are Iraqi nativist and deeply distrust Iran. These cultists wanted to kill Sistani (an Iranian).

The LA times reports:

' Every day someone claims he's the Mahdi," [Iraqi security official Ali Nomas] said.

Nomas said the leader of the hitherto unknown Heaven's Army had told followers that he was a missing son of the Imam Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. Ali's remains are entombed in Najaf.

"They believe that the Mahdi has called them to fight in Najaf," Nomas said, adding that fighters had converged on the Najaf area from other predominantly Shiite cities in Iraq.

He lamented that Iraq's death and destruction had convinced some Shiites that the end of days was coming.

"There's nothing bizarre left in Iraq anymore," Nomas said in a telephone interview. "We've seen the most incredible things." '

McClatchy wire service gives some more details of the leader, including further pseudonyms.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Ahmad al-Hassaani claimed to have descended directly from the heavens.

For more on the ideas of al-Hassaani, see Reider Vissar's comments at Helena Cobban's Just World News.

The claim of the Najaf authorities that the Mahdawiya has "al-Qaeda" ties is just propaganda and should not be taken seriously. They are embarrassed that there was Shiite on Shiite violence.

Dan Murphy of CSM has more on the background of Shiite millenarianism. I am quoted to the effect that the hatred of the Mahdawiya for the grand ayatollahs is akin to the sentiment among some Protestants that the pope is the anti-Christ.

Reuters reports numerous car bomb and mortar attacks in Baghdad on Monday. Also a sectarian attack in Kurdish territory:

' *TUZ KHURMATO - Five worshippers were killed when a rocket propelled grenade hit a Shi'ite mosque in the town of Tuz Khurmato, 70 km south of Kirkuk, police said.

BAGHDAD - Three mortars killed 11 people and wounded 28 more in Zaafaraniya, southeast of Baghdad, a police source said . . .

BAGHDAD - A bomb planted inside a minibus killed four people and wounded five others near al-Mustansiriya Square in northeastern Baghdad, police said. . .'

McClatchy says that police found 21 bodies in Baghdad on Monday. There was also heavy fighting in Baquba, Diyala province.

LAT also reports on the renewed tensions over the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra, the blowing up of which last Feb. threw Iraq into a whole new level of communal violence.

'OK, if you say so' Department:

The USG Open Source Center translates:

Iraqi Kurdish leader, Al-Sadr delegation discuss ties
Kurdistan Satellite TV
Monday, January 29, 2007 T14:46:23Z

Iraqi Kurdish leader, Al-Sadr delegation discuss ties

Text of report by Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) satellite TV on 29 January

(Iraqi) Kurdistan Region President Mas'ud Barzani received yesterday a delegation of the Al-Sadr Current, led by the head of the movement's bloc in parliament, Nassar al-Rubay'i, and comprising Al-Sadr leadership member and MP Falah Hasan Shanshal, leadership member and head of parliament's Legal Committee Baha al-A'raji and leadership member and MP Salih Hasan Al-Agili.

In a meeting, relations between the people of Kurdistan and the Al-Sadr Current were discussed and the need for further cooperation in moving Iraq's political process forwards was stressed. Moreover, views on the security situation in Baghdad were exchanged.

The visiting delegation shed light on the Al-Sadr Current's operations within the political process and in the federal government of Iraq.

The need for cooperation between the people of Kurdistan and the Al-Sadr Current, with a view to serving the interests of the people of Iraq, was stressed.

(Description of Source: Salah-al-Din Kurdistan Satellite TV in Sorani Kurdish -- Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) satellite TV)

City/Source: Salah-al-Din

Muqtada is also sending his people to talk to fundamentalist Sunni leaders.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is still promoting the idea of a Shiite regional confederacy, an idea the Sunni Arabs and the (Shiite) Sadrists vehemently oppose.
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Cole Interview on CNN Monday

Cole on CNN.

YOUR WORLD TODAY Aired January 29, 2007 - 12:00 ET

JIM CLANCY, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, from the raging battle outside Iraq, to the political posturing by Washington and Tehran, what's really at stake? Earlier, we spoke with Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan, first asking him about that cult that was allegedly aiming to reshape religious and political history.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JUAN COLE, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN: The Iranians are coming into Iraq for development aid. They've pledged a billion dollars, there are going to be joint refineries. And the U.S. announcement that it would kill or capture anyone that it thought was an intelligence agent has the potential for roiling relationships between the two.

CLANCY: Now, the U.S., Washington, clearly upset with Iran's nuclear program, but it's important to remember here there's a complete difference between Iran and other countries in the Middle East, and that's say it's not only because it's Shia, and these are Iranians and the other countries are Arabs. It's because if you go to the street in Iran, you will find people that are very supportive of Americans, want good relationships, while leadership is very anti- American.

This is the opposite what you find in other Arab countries. How important is it for Washington to take that into account as they go ahead with what appears to be confrontational policy?

COLE: Well, the Iranian public is very pro-American, and it's one of the few publics in the Middle East, I think, that would reform, if it could, in a way that was friendly to U.S. interests. If the United States goes into a frontal confrontation with Iran, however, it will push the Iranian public away. The Iranians are very nationalistic and they don't want to be dominated by the U.S.

CLANCY: Let's go back and focus though on the situation in Iraq. This short-term troop increase appears to be a last-ditch effort to improve security in the country.

What chance does this mission have and the overall mission in Iraq?

COLE: Well, I think it's very difficult for the United States to establish security in Iraq now. We simply don't have enough troops to do proper counterinsurgency. And the country really is now mobilized politically.

As we have just seen, you know, the Shiite south was considered to be relatively calm. Then out of nowhere you get this millenarian movement that thinks the promised one of Islam is about to come, and invades Najaf, so the country is really in a great deal of chaos. And securing a few neighbors in Baghdad just isn't going to do it.

CLANCY: What would do it? Will anything do it? Does anyone have an answer?

COLE: Well, I think the big Iraqi political leaders, who are usually communal leaders as well, need craft a national pact, a compromise that they can all live with and convince each other to put away their arms. This is the kind of thing that ended the Lebanese civil war in 1989. That's the only thing really that would work in Iraq.

CLANCY: We don't see much leadership there in Baghdad. Often the elected leaders wait until someone form outside the country comes in with these ideas.

Does Iraq have a leadership problem?

COLE: Well, there are big communal leaders -- Abdul Aziz al- Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Kurdish leaders. The problem is that they're not willing to compromise with one other.

They're pushing for their maximum goals. And I think the U.S. could do the most good by just knocking some heads together and getting them to compromise.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CLANCY: Some advice there for Washington coming from Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan.
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Fighters for Shiite Messiah Clash with Najaf Security, 250 Dead
Over 60 Dead in Baghdad, Kirkuk Violence

Well, a big battle took place at the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Saturday night into Sunday, but there are several contradictory narratives about its significance. Iraqi authorities, claimed that the Iraqi army killed a lot of the militants (250) but only took 25 casualties itself. The Shiite governor of Najaf implied that the guerrillas were Sunni Arabs and had several foreign Sunni fundamentalist fighters ("Afghans") among them. He said that they based themselves in an orchard recently purchased by Baathists. Other sources said that the militants were Shiites. I'd take the claim of numbers killed with a large grain of salt, though the Iraqi forces did have US close air support. I infer that the guerrillas shot down one US helicopter.

That's one narrative. Here is another. The pan-Arab London daily al-Hayat reported that the militiamen were followers of Mahmud al-Hasani al-Sarkhi. It says one of his followers asserted that the fighting erupted when American and Iraqi troops attempted to arrest al-Hasani al-Sarkhi. The latter tried last summer to take over the shrine of al-Husayn in Karbala. It may have been feared that he would take advantage of the chaos of the Muharram pilgrimage season to make a play for power in Najaf. Al-Hayat says that although As'ad Abu Kalil, governor of Najaf, said the attackers were Sunnis, the director of the information center in Najaf, Ahmad Abdul Husayn Du'aybil, contradicted him. The latter said, "At dawn, today [Sunday], violent clashes took place between security forces and an armed militia calling itself "the Army of Heaven," which claims that the Imam Mahdi will [soon] appear." He added, "The goal of this militia is the killing of clergymen and the grand ayatollahs." The group follows Ayatollah Ahmad al-Hasani al-Sarkhi, called al-Yamani, who is said by his followers to be in direct touch with the Hidden Imam or promised one. In the fighting 10 Iraqi security police were killed and 17 wounded. One official said that the death toll among the militants was not known.

Al-Hayat, however, quotes a member of the group, Abu al-Hasan, who is said to be close to al-Hasani al-Sarkhi. He said that the rumors that the group intended to conduct a campaign of assassinations inside Najaf was "devoid of truth." It says that an attempt had been made to arrest al-Hasani al-Sarkhi, who was present in the al-Zarkah, an agricultural area east of Najaf, which caused his followers to revolt.

Al-Hasani al-Sarkhi's followers had earlier burned down the Iranian consulates at Basra and Karbala, and demonstrated in Hilla and elsewhere.

Sawt al-Iraq in Arabic says that a number of al-Hasani al-Sarkhi's aides were arrested early last week as part of the current crackdown in preparation for the American surge.

Then there is yet a third narrative. Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that on Saturday night into Sunday morning, a Shiite millenarian militia calling itself "The Army of Heaven" (Jund al-Sama') attempted to move south from the Zarqa orchards just north of Najaf to assassinate the four grand ayatollahs of Najaf-- Ali Sistani, Bashir Najafi, Muhammad Ishaq Fayyad and Muhammad Said al-Hakim. The holy city of Najaf, where Ali is buried, is the seat of Shiite religious authority in Iraq. The militiamen, devotees of an obscure religious leader named Ahmad Hassaani, are said to have infiltrated the area from Hillah, Kut and Amara. The well-armed, black-clad militiamen were heard to call upon the Mahdi, the awaited Promised One of the Muslims, to return on that night.

This group is not the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which bears no enmity toward the grand ayatollahs, but rather a separate and different sect altogether. Shiite clerics told the NYT that the sect is the Mahdawiya of Ahmad al-Basri (possibly Ahmad Hassaani al-Basri?). Although the NYT was told that this millenarian sect (it believes that the end of time is around the corner) was supported by Saddam, you can't pay any attention to that sort of allegation when it comes to Iraqi sectarianism.

It seems most likely that this was Shiite on Shiite violence, with millenarian cultists making an attempt to march on Najaf during the chaos of the ritual season of Muharram. But who knows? It is also possible that the orthodox Shiites in control of Najaf hate the heretic millenarians and the threat of the latter was exaggerated. Darned if I know. The reports of the Army of Heaven being so well armed make no sense if it was a ragtag millenarian band. But those reports could be exaggerations, too.

It seems most likely that the Mahdawiya is the sect of Sheikh Mahmud al-Hasani al-Sarkhi and that al-Basri was the founder of the sect. That would be a way of reconciling al-Zaman with al-Hayat.

The dangers of Shiite on Shiite violence in Iraq are substantial, as this episode demonstrated. Ironically, given Bush's mantra about Iran, the trouble makers here are a sect that absolutely hates Iran.

According to Reuters, Sunday would have been a horror show in Iraq even if you hadn't had the Najaf clashes. Three US troops were killed Sunday, and more were announced killed. Police found 29 bodies in the capital, victims of sectarian violence. Over 20 people died in bombings in the capital, including a mortar strike on a girl's school. More deadly bombings in the northern oil city of Kirkuk.

NYT strikes me as being a little breathless about Iranian plans for investment and development aid in Iraq. These plans were negotiated by two Iraqi prime ministers, Ibrahim Jaafari and Nuri al-Maliki on trips to Iran where wreaths were laid on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. They were reported on at length at the time of those visits, and there is nothing new here. As for American officials, when asked about such plans in the past, they said that they hoped Iraq would have good relations with all its neighbors and understood that there would be economic relations with Iran. I can't see what the big crisis is. By the way, the Iranians are building an airport at Najaf to bring in the Shiite pilgrims, too.



Hillar Rodham Clinton made the reasonable point that George W. Bush has a responsibility to get the US back out of Iraq and end the quagmire by January 2009, instead of bequeathing this disaster to his successor.

Unfortunately, Cheney, who really decides these things, thinks the US will be there for decades. Of course in the 1940s Winston Churchill thought Britain would be in India for decades. Dreams of empire die hard; empire, that goes away quickly.

Sabrina Tavernise of the NYT says goodbye to Iraq and to any illusions she might have had. She's done a great job there, and has illumined the situation for us in a clear-eyed way. She also told us more about the situation of women and families than most other reporters.

You have to wonder whether Iraq can any longer be reported on in any ordinary sense of the word.
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Elhanan Guest Editorial: Another Way for Israel

Another Way for Israel

Elik Elhanan
Combatants for Peace
Via The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace

This is the message we want to bring to the American Jewish community: Let us try another way. In the eyes of many, the key to this conflict lies in the US. Your support is invaluable just as the lack of it is disastrous. Israel is now refusing to negotiate with Syria, the reason being that Washington wants it so. My question is: What do you want?

For many people in Israel this bleak picture serves to prove that indeed there is no partner and that the formula of land for peace does not work. These attitudes are supported by the political system both in Israel and internationally, and are frequently promoted by the media as undisputable truths. Both societies, the Palestinian and the Israeli, seem to be locking themselves in a violent nationalistic mindset where the needs of the other simply do not exist.

How should one deal with such a situation? The simplest answer would be to play along. The other answer is to confront these false notions, to insist on telling truth to power, to work and expose the contradictions that exist in any black-and-white vision of reality.

Our organization, Combatants for Peace, is trying to do just that. Through our dialogue group, where Israeli and Palestinian former combatants meet regularly, we try to touch the hearts and minds of both societies. We try to help our communities become more aware of the reality of the other side, so that nobody can say "I didn’t know." We want Israelis to comprehend the full scale of the oppression inherent to the Israeli occupation, and we want the Palestinians to know that behind the occupation there are humans, who are also suffering. We want both sides to understand the price of violence. Our message is simple: Peace is possible. The only way to reach peace is through dialogue and negotiations, and the only solution is a two state solution -- an end the occupation, in keeping with UN resolutions.

People frequently respond to us as if we were detached from reality, yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Our Palestinian members were all active in violent opposition to the occupation, serving long prison terms for their activities; the Israelis among us all served many years as combat soldiers on the conflict's front lines. We know the lay of the land, and we know the reality. We know the price we’ll have to pay for peace, and we’ve learned with our very flesh that the price of war is a hundred times greater. We live among our peoples and we see and suffer the consequences of this conflict.

People often say "but you're just a few good people. The majority feels differently." But this is not the case. First of all, we’re not good people. Indeed, until not long ago, we were very bad. As soldiers we killed and maimed, we bombed and tortured. Our Palestinian counterparts stabbed, and shot and planted bombs, killing and maiming as they went.

But we’ve changed. We understood that power has limits and that violence can only lead to more violence; that non-violence is better, as both a tactic and as way of life. Like us there are many more "bad" people who might change, who will change, if they’re given just a bit of hope.

In some cases our members are even treated as traitors. But we have all proven our merits in long years of service. Though we're presented as radicals, we don't contest the national values of our respective peoples; on the contrary, we struggle for them. We don't contest the right of Israel to exist in security and prosperity; nor do we contest the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation and achieve their own state. We question only the methods that have been employed to achieve these goals in the past. These methods were not only ineffective, they were wrong.. Israel is not safe, Palestine is not free, and only the cemeteries are flourishing. Let us try another way.

It is very easy not to believe in peace. The chances of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in the near future seem slimmer than ever. The mistaken perception that Israel has “no partner” and that “we gave everything and got nothing” is still widely held. The radical elements currently in play in both political systems, Hamas on one hand and right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman on the other, combined with the violence between Israel and the Palestinians, between the Palestinian factions, and between Israel and its neighbors can make the search for peace seem at the very least misguided.

Elik Elhanan
Combatants for Peace
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7 US Troops Killed
Bombing kills 13 in Baghdad, 40 Bodies Found
Massive Anti-War Protest on Mall in DC

It was announced Saturday that 7 US soldiers have been killed by guerrillas deploying roadside bombs in the past 3 days.

I cannot see any sign in this Reuters roundup of violence in Iraq on Saturday that guerrillas in Baghdad are lying low or relocating in expectation of the arrival of further US troops.

Police gathered the usual macabre harvest of 40 tortured bodies in the capital. Guerrillas cheekily fired rockets into the Green Zone, the US HQ in Iraq. They detonated car bombs in one neighborhood, killing 13 and wounding 43. Guerrillas dressed as special police commandos kidnapped 8 persons from a computer store downtown. In Diyala province, guerrillas attempting to elude US troops were bombed to death by the US from the air. In Ramadi, a member of the Iraqi National Congress, a secular party headed by Ahmad Chalabi, was kidnapped and killed.

In the US, tens of thousands of protesters gathered at the Mall in a major rally against the Iraq War.

That event was not the only reminder of the Vietnam era. Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the Navy, remembers with regret not having spoken out more forcefully during the Vietnam War, when the generals kept coming and saying they just needed another increas of 10,000 troops to win this thing.

Iraq much more than Vietnam can only be settled through political negotiation, as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki on Friday. It is unlikely that the extra troops the US has available could prevail in the sense of bringing order to the country or even just the capital (see the opening paragraph for what such order does not look like).

Tehran is trying to control the flow of thousands of Shiite pilgrims into Iraq for the commemoration on Tuesday of the martyrdom of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Husayn's tomb is at Karbala in Iraq, a holy site for Iran's some 62 million Shiites. My advice to the US military is not to try to kill or capture these thousands of Iranian pilgrims even if some of them may be spies--whatever Bush says. Shiites are touchy during Muharram, especially about infidels killing or capturing them in their own holy land, where they don't think the infidels have any business being in the first place.

The US is building an alliance with 50 tribal sheikhs in Ramadi. The US military reports good results in the sense that entire neighborhoods controlled by Sunni militants are now rare. But the radical Salafis clearly still have a presence in the city, and tribal sheikhs are notoriously factional and fickle. I'd say that is a check that may well bounce. The larger problem is that people in Ramadi just don't want US troops there, and don't want Shiite or Kurdish troops there, either. To the extent that the sheikhs are successful in authorizing and allowing the recruitment of local police, that might be a real achievement. On this one, I'm from Missouri (i.e., "show me!").

The Bush administation upbraided Japanese Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma who called Bush's war on Iraq on the basis of its possession of WMD a "mistake". Isn't that just common knowledge? Why protest such an obvious statement? The new Abe government is rapidly slipping in the polls at home, and is presumably more afraid of the Japanese public than it is of Bush, who owes the Japanese a lot of money. A big majority of Japanese in polls opposed the extension of the Japanese Self Defense Forces mission in Samawa, Iraq, which was therefore withdrawn. Bush has fewer friends abroad with every passing day. Aznar of Spain, Berlusconi of Italy, Koizumi in Japan-- who used to run interference for him-- are all gone.
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Dabbous Guest Editorial: Getting Home in Beirut

My View from our Sunni-Beiruti Neighbourhood

Eugène Richard Sensenig-Dabbous

'For those of you who know Beirut, I drove from my office at the Maronite Catholic Notre Dame University Zouk Mosbeh up the hill from Jounieh) Thursday, via Sassine Square to Sodeco/Damascus Street at the north-western edge of predominantly Eastern Orthodox Achrefieh, on my way home from work. Crossing Bechara El Khoury Avenue (where his statue stands) I wanted to traverse this major metropolitan intersection in order to drive straight towards Basta and ultimately reach Mar Elias Street, which I call home. The police wouldn't allow me to drive forward and they didn't have a clue what a resident should do.

So I did what many say was the worst possible thing, I must have had a guardian angel or God was watching over this lost soul; I turned left down Bechara El Khoury Avenue toward Barbir and then took the first available right turn, hoping to drive to the main road above the Salim Slem highway tunnel, which leads to the Sports Centre and the Rafic Hariri International Airport; and of course to the predominantly Shi'ia, Hizbollah controlled, suburban towns called Dahiyeh.

Burning all bridges

I drove right into street fighting in Barbour & Wata Mossaitbe, hardcore Amal territory. Looking up the streets I crossed, as I drove in the direction of Mar Elias Street and Mossaitbe proper, I could see burning tires at both ends of these streets. In this pocket of Shi'ia minority population, an island in a larger Sunni sea of humanity, people looked as scared as everyone I had seen in my neighbourhood, as they were terrorising us the previous Tuesday. I guess in the end it really doesn't matter "who started it!"

I parked my semi-new, but very dirty Toyota Corolla in front of the Sunni mosque above the Salim Slem highway tunnel; I couldn't drive into Mossaitbe because guys with yellow scarves were blocking the access roads. So I walked home, past the large Baptist School and the inconspicuous Shi'ia Husseinnyah (prayer centre). Dima wasn't home; she was out getting the army and local Sunni vigilantes to find me. These young boys are primitively armed with broom sticks and wooden flag poles, baseball bats haven't caught on yet in this otherwise very trendy country, thank God!

We then gave a young fighter (who turned out to be Shi'ia) my car keys and begged him to go up on his motor scooter and retrieve my car. He came back 10 minutes later, having traversed the various road blocks. As night fell and the curfew was introduced, Dima and I were safe at home and her daughter Farah was at her grandparents, only 5 blocks away, but not within reach because she would have had to cross Mar Elias Street. The Syrian and Palestinian snipers, who many claim have been brought into town by the Ba'ath Party and the Damascus secret service, in order to kill indiscriminately and thus lead us all to another civil war, were shooting at civilians on Mar Elias Street, so you didn't want to be out on foot either.

What is to be done?

It's now Saturday morning and we have had a full day of "normality," i.e. guarded peace or at least no immediate threat of open violence. I have been asking around about what the next step could be, in order that none of the conflicting parties loses face and we can return to our jobs, be with our families and help develop this amazingly thriving country and ensure that it reaches its full potential. Nobody seems to know. Most are still concentrating on the blame game. I guess you can indeed teach young dogs old tricks.

I suggest that those of us who are of good faith and actually care about all the people of this country, concentrate on things that can be dealt with immediately and solved in the foreseeable future. These include 1) a debate on the Draft Election Law of 31 May 2006; 2) a movement to enforce the already existing regulations on quarrying stone, gravel and sand (so closely linked to the re/construction industry); and 3) discussing the social implications of the Paris III agreement for the middle classes and working poor. These three issues are all largely technical and affect the overwhelming majority of the population equally. Let's allow doing hard work and re-establishing cooperation be the litmus test to determine who really cares about Lebanon. '

Greetings from Mossaitbe,

Eugen Dabbous

Professor Eugène Richard Sensenig-Dabbous, MA PhD
sensenig a_t_ cyberia d o t net d o t lb

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Gul: A Partitioned Iraq Means "Endless War"
Bombings, Killings in Baghdad Leave 50 Dead

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is warning the US not to just leave Iraq in chaos, allowing a civil war that leads to partitioning the country-- a situation that he says will lead to "endless war." Gul is right about all that. If Iraq breaks up, it will undo the post- WW I Lausanne settlement altogether and open all the cans of worms in the Middle East at once. He says it might draw Turkey into Iraq. But it would also draw Iran and Saudi Arabia in.

Bombing of a Shiite mosque in Mosul during the beginning of the month of Muharram, the most sacred 10 days of the Shiite ritual calendar: Not good.

McClatchy wire service reports that 27 bodies were found in Baghdad on Friday.

In the western Baghdad districts of Shurta, Khamsa, Rai and Muwasalat, Iraqi police and guerrillas fought running street battles.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb at Alawi al-Hilla in downtown Baghdad, killing 2 Iraqi soldiers and injuring 14 other persons.

Clashes in and around Muqdadiyah in Diyala Province east of Baghdad left several people dead and dozens injured. In Barwana and Thiyaba villages outside the city took deadly mortar fire.

Reuters reports on political violence on Friday in Iraq. A bombing of the Ghazil pet market in Baghdad killed 15 and wounded 55.

Another bombing near a Shiite mosque killed 2.

Another US GI was killed at Fallujah.

There were other assassinations and bombings around the country.

Bush says US troops are authorized to "kill or capture" suspected Iranian intelligence agents operating in Iraq. Thousands of Iranians go in and out of Iraq as pilgrims to the Shiite holy sites, so personally I'm skeptical you can know which ones are spies. And, like, it wouldn't be good to kill the pilgrims. Might cast the US in a bad light with the Shiites and all that. I'd say this man is looking for a pretext for another war.

Plus, when you look at where US troops are being killed, it is in Sunni Arab al-Anbar Province, and Sunni Arab Salahuddin, Diyal, Mosul, and West Baghdad. Those Sunni guerrillas are not being helped by Iran. They are being helped by Sunnis in countries allied to the US.

And then, the US hold over 10,000 prisoners swept up on suspicion of insurgent activity in Iraq. What number of them is Iranians? Slim to none. More Syrians and Jordanians and Saudis by far than Iranians.

So if 99 percent of the problem is with the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, why all this big talk about Shiite Iran?

Because this man is looking for a pretext for another war.

Tom Engelhardt says that the rural areas of the US are paying the price of the Iraq War.

AP is reporting new details on the killing of 5 US troops in an operation that began at Karbala a few days ago. The troops were helping plan security precautions to stop Shiite pilgrims being blown up during the Muharram commemorations of the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, al-Husayn. Guerrillas dressed in US uniforms and speaking English showed up, infiltrated the building, killed a GI, and captured 4 others, taking them to Mahawil in Babil province, and then executing them there.

Mahawil, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city, is a Sunni Arab guerrilla arena of action, and it now seems likely to me that this was a Sunni Arab operation aimed at harming security arrangements. Shiite Mahdi Army ghetto militiamen don't know English. If I were in charge of Karbala, I'd put extra extra security around the city for Tuesday's Ashura commemoration of Imam Husayn's martyrdom. The only thing I can't figure out is that it clearly was an inside job, and so how would there have been Sunni Arab guerrilla sympathizers at this police and army meeting at Shiite Karbala. Maybe mixed units were involved?

This is a good roundup of the week's events in Iraq. That only 160 of 275 members of parliament were present for the vote on al-Maliki's security plan is incredible. That is barely a quorum (a simple majority is 138) for perhaps the most important vote parliament will take this year.
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Karrada Bombing kills 26, 40 Bodies Found
Maliki Threatens Sunni MP


Reuters reports on political violence in Iraq's ongoing civil war.

In Baghdad:

*Police found 40 bodies on Thursday, most of them showing signs of torture.

*Guerrillas set off a car bomb in a shopping district of the Karrada neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, killing 26 persons and wounding 40.

*Guerrillas detonated a car bomb in the Muraidi market of Sadr City (Shiite east Baghdad), killing one person and wounding 13.

*Guerillas fired rockets into the Green Zone in central Baghdad, site of the US embassy and Iraqi government offices. The attack seriously wounded one person and lightly injured 5 others. The Green Zone has often taken mortar fire, but seldom has suffered casualties. That nearly 4 years into the war, the US HQ in Iraq is subjected to rocket fire just underlines how helpless Gulliver is before the supposed Lilliputians.

Guerrillas set off other bombs in Baghdad, some of which killed as many as 4 persons. There were also bombings in Tal Afar and Fallujah, and violence in several other cities.

The NYT reports that PM Nuri al-Maliki presented his security plan to parliament for approval. Sunni Arabs claimed that the plan punished Sunnis and let Shiite militias off the hook. In the course of the debate, he got into a shouting match with a Sunni Arab MP, Abdul Nasser al-Janabi, whom he then accused of being directly involved in the kidnapping of 150 persons from his district.. The PM threatened to release information about the man. The speaker of the house Mahmoud al-Mashahani tried to call for order, then threatened to resign, himself. In the end, the plan was passed by parliament, but only after an ugly scene in which Sunni-Shiite conflict and resentments erupted.

Al-Janabi is a member of the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalists). Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that after the meeting, al-Janabi attempted to approach al-Maliki, but the security would not let him get close.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr gave its unstinting support to al-Maliki's security plan. It was speculated that this step is an attempt to avoid a confrontatation with US forces. The London daily also confirms that the Sadrists have appointed a negotiator to talk directly to the Americans on behalf of the commanders of the Mahdi Army militia. It says that some Mahdi Army commanders have scattered to Kut, Babil and Taji or even to neighboring countries, and that al-Maliki has avoided having to choose between his American partners and his Sadrist allies by convincing the Mahdi Army to fade away for the moment. It says US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad expressed concern that gunmen in Iraq may go into hiding during the US "surge," and then reappear when it is over.

I think that is what Gen. Abizaid tried to warn about when he argued against an escalation.

Iraq is in talks with Chevron and Exxon regarding the building of a $3 bn. oil facility.

When I said that the attack on the US embassy in Athens would prove to have something to do with the Amerian war in Iraq, there were those that scoffed.
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Battle at Haifa Street kills 30
Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejects Escalation

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 12 to 9 for a non-binding resolution condemning the Bush administration's escalation of the war. All but one of the 10 Republicans on the committee voted against it. The dissenter was Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

US forces with some Iraqi army accompaniment fought a pitched battle with Sunni Arab guerrillas at Haifa street just north of the Green Zone that houses government offices and the US embassy. They killed thirty persons whom they identified as "insurgents".

That Iraqi guerrillas killed 3 more US troops was announced on Wednesday.

Reuters reports on political violence in Iraq on Wednesday:

* Police found 33 bodies in Baghdad. Several showed signs of having been tortured.

*Guerrillas clashed with Iraqi army troops in Suwayra 25 miles south of the capital. 3 soldiers are said to be missing.

Iraqi Shiites rejected Bush's comparison of Iraqi Shiite militias to al-Qaeda. They said that the militias are mainly neighborhood protection committees, not a global terrorist organization aimed at the US.

Patrick Cockburn of the Independent continues his indispensable and clear-eyed reporting from Iraq with this piece on the paralysis of Baghdad. Major points:

*The crew of the Blackwater helicopter may have survived being shot down, but then they appear to have been executed on the ground.

*The toney al-Mansur district of Baghdad is now too dangerous to visit and its posh restaurants have long been closed.

*Baghdad residents are being shanghaied into militia service.

*Baquba is very dangerous but is not addressed in the Bush Baghdad/al-Anbar escalation plan.

The Palestinians, kicked out of their own country by groups like the Stern Gang, are now being kicked out of Iraq. The Palestinians are a homeless nation.

The average percentage by which esteem for the US fell in a BBC poll of publics in 25 country was 7%, i.e. from 36% to 29% in just a couple of years. In the late Clinton period, 75 percent of Indonesians reported that they held the US in high regard. It is now less than 30%.
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Iraqi Television on Bush's State of the Union

It is odd that US media seem completely uninterested in how Bush's State of the Union speech was received in Iraq, where half of it would be implemented. The Open Source Center of the US Government did a report on this issue, below. Note that former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari says that Iraq does not need the 21,500 US troops Bush is planning to send. Jaafari worked closely with the Americans as prime minister and his views should be considered. The report follows:

=======

Iraqi TVs' Treatment of President Bush's State of the Union Address
Iraq -- OSC Report
Thursday, January 25, 2007 T01:06:19Z . . .

Cairo Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel in Arabic -- Pro-Sunni, anti-US Iraqi channel believed to be affiliated with the Association of Muslim Scholars;

Baghdad Al-Iraqiyah Television in Arabic -- government-sponsored television station, run by the Iraqi Media Network;

Cairo Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television in Arabic -- Private Iraqi television known for its opposition to the US presence in Iraq;

Baghdad Al-Sharqiyah Television in Arabic -- Independent, private news and entertainment channel focusing on Iraq, run by Sa'd al-Bazzaz, publisher of the Arabic-language daily Al-Zaman; and

Baghdad Baghdad Satellite Television in Arabic -- television channel believed to be sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party

-- are observed on 24 January to report and react to President Bush's State of the Union Address as follows:

Al-Rafidayn TV: During its 1600 GMT news summary, following a six-minute security roundup, Al-Rafidayn Satellite Channel carries the following report: "Democrats in Congress have accused US President George Bush of demonstrating recklessness by involving the United States in the war in Iraq. In a harsh response to his State of the Union address, they called for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. In his address, Bush urged the Americans to give a chance for what he called his new strategy in Iraq. Bush deemed early withdrawal from Iraq a nightmare for the United States, as he put it, claiming that such a step would serve Washington's enemies. The US president affirmed his determination to continue with his strategy of promoting what he called democracy in the Middle East, considering it a critical element in the war on what he calls terror."

Al-Iraqiyah TV: Following a security roundup and other local news, Al-Iraqiyah Television at 1713 GMT carries the following report: "In his State of the Union address, US President George Bush reiterated his support for the national unity government and his willingness to support it in all areas. He also urged the Senate leaders to back his Iraq plan, particularly the part of the plan pertaining to Baghdad, to protect it from terrorists."

This is followed by a report by Ali Shakkur, Al-Iraqiyah TV correspondent in Washington, who says: "For its part, the Democratic Party expressed its view toward the US president's speech in a statement read by Senator James Webb, Congressman for the Democratic Party. In the statement, the party members expressed their concern over the president's new policy on Iraq, saying that this war hurt the reputation of the United States and squandered many opportunities to defeat world terror."

Shakkur continues: "The latest opinion polls published in US newspapers indicated a decline in the approval ratings of the US president, as 64 percent of the American people do not support the way the Bush administration is managing the country's affairs."

Immediately afterward, Al-Iraqiyah TV newsreader Thamir al-Shammari reads the following report: "The reactions of Iraqi politicians to the address of US President George Bush have varied. A member of the Council of Representatives affirmed that Iraq needs support for its troops as well as intelligence information more than it needs an increase in the number of (US) troops in Iraq."

Then, former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari is shown saying: "In my assessment, we do not necessarily need an increase in the strength (of US forces). We are not engaged in a conventional war against an invading army or something of the sort. We are facing terrorist actions which can be handled by precise security operations, by upgrading the security performance, and by getting the necessary information and intelligence data."

Al-Shammari adds: "Another member of the Council of Representatives affirmed that Iraq is not suffering from religious extremism. However, there are parties that seek to make gains using the Iraq question.
Then, Iraqi MP Jalal-al-Din al-Saghir is shown saying: "What I would like to say is that victory against terror cannot be achieved by sloganeering; rather, certain mechanisms and policies that are indicative of a proper diagnosis of terror must be adopted. The war on terror must be waged based on this diagnosis and knowledge. Unfortunately, US policies have been driven by what it knows about terrorism, not by what is happening in Iraq."

At 1726 GMT, Al-Iraqiyah TV carries a live satellite interview with Alberto Fernandez, director of the Office of Press and Public Diplomacy in the Bureau of Near East Affairs at the US Department of State, in Washington, speaking in Arabic, on President Bush's State of the Union address. Fernandez says that "there is a sort of consensus on the importance of Iraq, and the importance of making progress in Iraq." He plays down reports on "differences between the US Administration and the Iraqi Government."

Al-Baghdadiyah TV: At 1513 GMT, following a few reports on security developments and local news items, Al-Baghdadiyah Satellite Television carries the following report: "US President George Bush has urged the American people and his adversaries in Congress to give his plan to dispatch 21,500 additional troops a chance for success. In his annual State of the Union address at a joint session of both houses of the US Congress, Bush said that the United States is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq. He called for giving this strategy a chance for success."

In a follow-up report, the TV channel says: "Bush affirmed that Al-Maliki's government should honor the undertakings it has taken upon itself, warning it that the US commitment to Iraq is not open-ended."

Al-Sharqiyah Channel: During its 1400 GMT, 1600 GMT, and 1900 GMT newscasts, Al-Sharqiyah was observed to repeat the same factual report that was carried in earlier newscasts. No commentaries or reactions were carried.

Baghdad Channel: Baghdad Channel was observed at 1628 GMT to carry an announcer-read report over video on the comments of Abbas al-Bayyati, representative of the Unified Iraqi Coalition in the Iraqi Council of Representatives, on the State of the Union address.

The report says: "Member of the Iraqi Coalition Abbas Al-Bayyati has said that there was nothing new in Bush's speech which was delivered yesterday. He noted the importance of providing the Iraqi Government with the needed support to enable it achieve stability.

(Begin Al-Bayyati recording) There is nothing much in Bush's speech; the US strategy was announced prior to this speech. Perhaps the speech was primarily meant to address the domestic audience, because it has the tone and marks of the democrats, whose voices have begun to grow louder.

We believe that supporting the current national unity government will enable it to carry out its duties and mission. Therefore, we cannot be pressured to do certain actions. We need support to do them." (end recording)

This report was followed by a repeat of the factual report that was carried in earlier newscasts . . .
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Another Helicopter Downed, 5 Americans Dead
Mahdi Army Pledges not to Respond to US Arrests

Sunni Arab guerrillas used some sort of surface to air rocket or missile a heavy PKC machine gun of a sort the US has trained the Iraqi Army in to shoot down a Blackwater helicopter guarding a high-level US ground convoy.* This downing of a helicopter is the second such attack in the past few days. See Today in Iraq.

Guerrillas (probably Shiite militiamen) wounded 7 British troops in Basra on Tuesday with bombings or mortar attacks.

In Baghdad and Mosul, a further 45 persons were killed by new violence or showed up dead in the streets, and US forces killed a further 16 in clashes. Guerrillas detonated five car bombs in the capital, including one in the Karrada district. Some districts of Mosul, according to al-Zaman, witnessed pitched battles most of the afternoon on Tuesday. Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that guerrillas in Mosul killed 5 policemen and wounded 3.

US and Iraqi troops launched an operation in the Sunni Adhamiya district of Baghdad.

Reuters reports a US firefight with guerrillas at Ramadi, guerrilla attacks in the supposedly pacified cities of Fallujah and Tal Afar, and killings and assassinations in a wide number of Iraqi cities.

US forces have captured some 600 Mahdi Army militiamen since the current push against guerrilla violence began.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that leaders of the Mahdi Army are saying they will not retaliate for the arrests. Baha' al-A'raji, a Sadrist MP, said that the followers of young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would not stand against the Baghdad security plan.

Oh, great. Now Bush's Iraq War is in danger of destabilizing Pakistan, too.

Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) will introduce a bill forbidding Bush from undertaking military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. Good for him! Maybe someday we'll get our Constitition back.

-----

*Thanks to readers who corrected this point and provided additional information.
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Arguing With Bush

Yet one question has surely been settled - that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy.

Actually, it is unclear what "taking the fight to the enemy" means in Bush's ill-conceived "war on terror." He is probably still trying to sneak Iraq into the struggle against al-Qaeda through the back door. If so, that dog won't hunt. By launching an unprovoked and illegal war of aggression on a major Arab Muslim country, Bush hasn't "carried the fight to the enemy" but has rather dishonored the 9/11 dead by using their killings as a pretext to carry out his own preconceived and Ahab-like plans to "take out" Saddam Hussein. Nothing could be better calculated to increase the threat of terrorism against the United States than an attempt militarily to occupy Iraq, with all the repression and torture it has entailed. And, if Bush was so good at taking the fight to the enemy, why is Ayman al-Zawahiri still free to taunt him by videotape. Al-Zawahiri was a major force behind the September 11 attacks. Why is he at large?

Bush then claims some successes in breaking up terror plots. But these plots were broken up by old-fashioned detective and intelligence work, with some substantial dependence on our allies. It has even been suggested that Bush broke the news about the alleged airplane liquids plot in the UK before British intelligence was ready for it to become public. In any case, it is hard to see what these counter-terrorism successes have to do with his expansion of the US military or his quixotic war in Iraq.

Every success against the terrorists is a reminder of the shoreless ambitions of this enemy. The evil that inspired and rejoiced in Nine-Eleven is still at work in the world. And so long as that is the case, America is still a Nation at war.

Do we have to be at war? Couldn't we just be vigilant and do good counter-terrorism. Isn't "war" a distraction from the latter?

Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country. By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty.

Yes but it isn't so important what your enemy's intentions are. You always have enemies with bad intentions. What is important is your enemy's capabilities. Al-Qaeda was never very large or powerful, and it is increasingly clear that the September 11 attacks were a fluke. The fact is that al-Qaeda cannot overthrow the Egyptian government, or any other government, and cannot actually harm the United States or its way of life in any prolonged or serious way. This small band of 5,000 to 12,000 men in Afghanistan, now largely killed or scattered, cannot possibly be a pretext for keeping all Americans on their toes all the time, and keeping them willing to cede their constitutional liberties to Bush.

It has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah - a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken.

The major Shiite religious parties with long histories of anti-American rhetoric and activity are the Islamic Call or Da'wa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Both of these Shiite religious parties are now allies of Bush. The Iraqi Da'wa actually helped to form the Lebanese Hizbullah in the early 1980s. A major figure in its Damascus bureau at that time was Nuri al-Maliki, now the Prime Minister of Iraq and a Bush ally. Al-Maliki supported Hizbullah versus Israel in the war last summer. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is close to the Iranian regime but whom Bush hosted in the White House on Dec. 4.

So if these Iraqi Shiite parties and militias can be brought in from the cold, why is it that Bush demonizes and essentializes other Shiite groups that are equally capable of changing their policies given the right incentives?

As for the Lebanese Hizbullah, it was formed in 1984 and so was not responsible for the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. That was carried about by the Islamic Amal faction of Abbas al-Musawi. Elements of the latter may have later joined Hizbullah.

Hizbullah's energies have not been put into killing Americans during the past two decades, but rather into getting the Israelis back out of their country. In fact, it isn't clear that the Lebanese Hizbullah has done anything to the US for 20 years.

It is arguably the Israeli invasion and military occupation of south Lebanon that created Hizbullah in the first place. Prior to that, the southern Lebanese Shiites weren't very political and often were pro-Israel.

What every terrorist fears most is human freedom - societies where men and women make their own choices, answer to their own conscience, and live by their hopes instead of their resentments. Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies - and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance. So we advance our own security interests by helping moderates, reformers, and brave voices for democracy. The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security . . . we must.

First of all, "terrorists" are just political activists who commit violence against noncombatants. Lots of political movements have used this technique including some whose goal was liberal democracy. So it simply is not true that all those who deploy terror have the same goals.

Second, people in capitalist democracies resort to terrorism all the time. Indeed, the most horrific regime of modern times, that of the Nazis, came out of the liberal parliamentary Weimar Republic and was elected to office. The Baader-Meinhoff gang in liberal West Germany, the Japanese Red Army, the McVeigh-Nichols "Christian Identity" terrorism in Oklahoma-- all of these examples prove Bush's premise wrong.

And, even if it were the case that capitalist democracies don't produce terrorism (which it is not), Bush cannot spread democracy in the Middle East by his so-far favored military means. Ask any Middle Easterner if he or she would like to have a situation such as prevails in Iraq. They will say, if that is democracy I want none of it. Bush has actively pushed the Middle Eastern publics away from democracy for an extra generation or two.

In the last two years, we have seen the desire for liberty in the broader Middle East - and we have been sobered by the enemy's fierce reaction. In 2005, the world watched as the citizens of Lebanon raised the banner of the Cedar Revolution ... drove out the Syrian occupiers ... and chose new leaders in free elections.

What universe does Bush live in, that he brings up Lebanon as though it were not in flames these days, with 3 killed and 100 wounded in the opposition strike. I mean, he did once admit he doesn't read the newspapers. But couldn't he listen to the radio or something?

Note, too, that the "Cedar Revolution" government was joined by the Lebanese Hizbullah. It was a national unity government. The US ambassador in Lebanon encouraged this development. What destabilized that government was the brutal Israeli war on Lebanon of last summer. Bush collaborated in that war and even worked against the early cease-fire called for by the Seniora government. Bush can't pretend to be a friend of the Lebanese government and yet approve publicly of a sanguinary war on it by Olmert. Bush puts all the blame for instability in Lebanon on Syria, which is implausible.

Bush then goes on to complain that "the enemy" has adjusted its tactics and thrown up new challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in reality, Bush just imposed a 'winner-take-all, devil-take-the-hindmost' situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, generating profound ethnic and religious resentments that have exploded into violence.

This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in. Every one of us wishes that this war were over and won. Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned, and our own security at risk. Ladies and gentlemen: On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. So let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.

Puh-lease. Spare us the Rumsfeldisms. Either we are in charge or we are helpless leaves being blown by the wind of the enemy. If we aren't in charge, then we have already lost.

As for the idea that we still have the power to shape the outcome, that is contradicted by his previous admission that we have been maneuvered into a different kind of war that we hadn't planned on. We couldn't shape the outcome, which is why the war is going badly. We cannot now shape the outcome by main force. We have to negotiate, with the insurgents and with Iran and Syria, if we are to avoid a catastrophe.

We are carrying out a new strategy in Iraq - a plan that demands more from Iraq's elected government, and gives our forces in Iraq the reinforcements they need to complete their mission.

You don't have a new strategy. You may have some new tactics, but that remains to be seen. Iraq's government in any case has already rejected the idea that it must meet artificial US 'benchmarks.' And, the "government" is anyway weak and divided. Most of the major political figures are linked to guerrilla or militia groups. It cannot stop the fighting because its members provoke the fighting.

And in Anbar province - where al Qaeda terrorists have gathered and local forces have begun showing a willingness to fight them - we are sending an additional 4,000 United States Marines, with orders to find the terrorists and clear them out. We did not drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq.

I'm confused. I thought Bush and Cheney maintained that Iraq under Saddam was already a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Now he is saying that he won't let Iraq become such a safe haven, implying that it wasn't before.

Bush's cynical use of "al-Qaeda" to confuse the American public hides the simple fact that the vast majority of violence in Iraq is perpetrated by Sunni Arab Iraqis who want an end to what they see as a foreign military occupation of their country. Most are either Baathists or Salafi Sunni revivalists. There isn't really any al-Qaeda in Iraq in the sense of a group directly tied to Bin Laden. How would they even find him to give him fealty?

If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country - and in time the entire region could be drawn into the conflict. For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective.

Yes, Mr. Bush, and you are the one who got us into this mess. Nor can you get us back out by 'staying the course' or with a mere 21,500 further troops. Any other ideas how to extract us from the dilemma?

And out of chaos in Iraq, would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens... new recruits ... new resources ... and an even greater determination to harm America.

When Britain got out of Kenya, no Kenyan terrorists took advantage of the withdrawal to plot bombings of London. Kenyans were pretty happy about the British getting out. When the US got out of Vietnam, no Vietnamese terrorists followed us to the US mainland to inflict terrorism on us. Bush's charges are just propaganda.

The war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others. That is why it is important to work together so our Nation can see this great effort through.

The struggle against al-Qaeda proper is over with. No big new arrests have been made in its ranks for years. There are other counter-terrorism targets, which should be monitored and broken up on a continual basis. That isn't a war and doesn't require the Pentagon. The 'war on terror' as a trope won't succeed Bush by even a day from his last moments in office.

Americans can have confidence in the outcome of this struggle - because we are not in this struggle alone. We have a diplomatic strategy that is rallying the world to join in the fight against extremism.

Of all the lies and misrepresentations, this is the most egregious. Bush's policies have left the US isolated and deeply unpopular throughout the world. Some 75 percent of Indonesians had a positive view of the US before W. It has more lately been around 30% and at one point fell to 15%.

The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Iran, and made it clear that the world will not allow the regime in Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agcency hasn't certified that Iran even has a nucear wapons esearh program. Iran was, at least a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Bush may be pushing it out of the treaty.

Bush has exacerbated conflicts throughout the Middle East. He has contributed heavily to the outbreak of three civil wars, in Iraq, in Palestine and Lebanon. His incompetence and self-contradictory policies have deeply endangered Americans and American interests. Now he is holding his own failures over our heads to blackmail us into throwing good money after bad.
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Ashura Massacres Shake Iraq
At Least 130 Killed

The Western press reported on 130 of the iraqis killed in political violence in Iraq on Monday, and the some 200 wounded.

It isn't ordinary time in Iraq for the Shiites, it is ritual time, sacred time. It is a time of deep mourning, of grief and the beating of chests and even flagellation with chains. It is the season for commemorating the martyrdom, the cosmically wrongful killing of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who led the people of Kufa in what is now Iraq against the tyrannical empire of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. His generals cut the plucky scion of the House of the Prophet down without mercy, along with his relatives and followers. They are said to have carried Husayn's head aloft on a stave and to have deposited it before the caliph in his palace in Damascus. The death of Husayn is the "passion" of Shiite Islam, their Good Friday. His shrine is in the Iraqi city of Karbala, where guerrillas dressed as American troops killed 5 American soldiers on Sunday. Emotions run high already. A sense of the meaning of the commemoration for Shiites can be gained from this British Shiite web site.

The Sunni guerrillas' killing of over 100 Shiites in Baghdad and Khalis on Monday was therefore no ordinary carnage, even in an Iraq where to have 70 persons blown up by a single bomb is no longer a novelty to say the least. But for it to be done during these days is to drive Shiites wild with grief, to push them to take revenge. It is to universalize the martyrdom of Husayn, making all Shiites martyrs. The guerrilla movement depends on people taking revenge, from every side.

That blackhawk helicopter that crashed, killing 13 Americans on Saturday was probably shot down with a shoulder-held missile launcher. If the guerrillas ever get hold of a big supply of those, we'd be in big trouble. The Soviet-made SA-14s and SA-16s, with good guidance systems, are available on the international arms market and have occasionally shown up in Iraq. The more common SA-7s, mostly from a big batch made by the Soviet Union in 1971, are by now a hit or miss sort of thing.

Richard Engel points out that Bush's escalation plan for Iraq concentrates solely on Baghdad and al-Anbar provinces, ignoring hotspots such as Diyala Province, where Sunni-Shiite violence is extreme.

Shiite militiamen have demanded that all Palestinians leave Iraq on pain of death. Yes, no doubt they should go back to their own country. Ooops. I forgot. They don't have one.

So long, Iraqi Christians. Their new sobriquet? Syrian Christians.

Another translation of Muqtada al-Sadr's interview with an Italian newspaper.


On the all but forgotten eastern front, a suicide bomber in eastern Afghanistan killed 10 and wounded 14 just outside a US military base.
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Rightwing Smearers of Obama Don't know a School from a Madrasa

The rightwing smear campaign against Barack Obama, waged by a magazine funded by the far rightwing Korean businessman and part-time messiah, the Reverend Moon, has foundered on CNN's good reporting. The allegation was that he had gone to a radical "Saudi-funded" madrasah. Wolf Blitzer had the professionalism to send out an experienced reporter to the school that Obama attended when he was 6 years old in Indonesia. He found it just an ordinary modern school with boys and girls and both male and female teachers, which taught modern subjects.

The smear campaign would be hilarious if it weren't so satanic.

First of all, let's explain about the word madrasah. In Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, words are mostly made up of three-letter roots. In Indo-European languages, words tend to have two-letter roots. In roots, you don't count short vowels. So in Arabic, the root for to learn (as in school learning) is d* r *s*. Arabic is an elegant, almost mathematical language. If you put those three-letter roots in certain "molds," it produces a linked vocabulary. Dars is a lesson. Darrasa with a doubling of the "r" is "to teach." You make a noun of place by putting an "m" in front and a soft "h" at the end. Thus, madrasah is the place where you study. Thus, madrasah means . . . school.

Now, there are lots of kinds of school, after all. But an ordinary elementary school attended by boys and girls and offering a modern curriculum would be called a madrasah in Arabic, i.e. a school. And this word has gone into lots of languages, especially ones spoken by Muslims, as a loan word.

So, yes, if one is speaking Arabic, Barack Obama went to a "madrasah," i.e. an elementary school! So did you.

The schools for young children that train them in specifically Muslim subjects are not properly called madrasah/school but rather they are maktab (from the root kataba, to write) or kuttab.

Now, it is true that there are higher seminaries for training clerics that are called madrasat al-`ulum, or "seminary for religious sciences" (`ulum is the plural of `ilm or knowledge, which here means 'religious science'). That phrase is shortened sometimes to madrasah. But you don't send 6-year-olds to a seminary for higher education. They have to start studying religion in a maktab. Apparently in Pakistan the distinction is sometimes lost, but they are not native Arabic speakers.

By the way, very few terrorists or suicide bombers have ever graduated from a seminary/ madrasah of `ulum. The lead hijackers on 9/11 had all gone to modern schools and Western universities. Relatively few seminary students or graduates in Pakistan even bothered to come out and demonstrate in fall of 2001 against the building US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In places like Egypt, Muslim political activists tend to be engineers with a modern university education, whereas the clerics trained in seminaries/ madrasahs of `ulum are typically coopted by the regime and are relatively moderate. So not all Muslim seminaries are hotbeds of radicalism.

A lot of words in Arabic have both an older, religious meaning and a newer, secular one. Thus, `ilm means "science" in modern Arabic but can also still mean "religious branch of knowledge." Someone who specializes in `ilm is an `aalim, plural `ulama'. But in Arabic you can only tell by context if someone is talking about `ulama'/scientists or `ulama'/ clerics. Thus dual meaning is also characteristic of the word madrasah or school.

So the entire report was brain dead and deeply ignorant and offensive. Let's judge Barack Obama on what kind of person he is, how likely he is to prove a great public servant. Who his father was or the religion of his paternal ancestors is not relevant.

By the way, most Europeans have some Muslim ancestors if you go back. The British royal family is descended in part from Muhammad. Many Sicilians have Arab ancestors. A lot of Latinos/Latinas have direct Muslim background, given the forced conversion of hundreds of thousands of Spanish Muslims to Catholicism from the 1400s and subsequent intermarriage with them. In fact, by the principles of population genetics, almost all persons of European heritage probably by now have some Arab ancestry. You have a million ancestors if you extrapolate back a few centuries. How likely is it that none was from Southern France, from Sicily or from Spain, where there had been Arab Muslim populations in the medieval period?

The real question is why foreign billionaire cultists own so much of America's media. Lou Dobbs, who is so concerned about illegal immigration, should leave the poor alone long enough to look into the rich and influential, rightwing aliens. This smear was brought to us by the media owned by the Reverend Moon (who did jail time for tax evasion) and by Rupert Murdoch (which picked it up shamelessly). Americans will never get back their purloined liberty until they stop letting the super-rich tell them what to think.
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Sadrists Rejoin Government
Talabani: US Should Talk directly to Syria

Reuters reports on political violence in Iraq on Sunday. Two more US troops were killed, and the death toll in al-Anbar for Saturday was revised up to 5. In Baghdad, "A bomb killed at least six people and wounded 15 when it destroyed a minibus in Karrada, in central Baghdad . . ." McClatchy reports that 29 bodies were found in Baghdad on Sunday. US troops arrested a member of the Salahuddin Provincial Council, a chief of the Dulaim tribe. The Dulaim are a large and important tribe. I don't think they are going to like this. US troops at the same time raided the house of a member of the Association Of Muslim Scholars.

AP reports that US military intelligence has convinced Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr contains groups acting as death squads, and that al-Maliki's support for it is isolating him in the (largely Sunni) Arab world.

Muqtada and his followers lie low in times when they are under direct military pressure, which is why the Sadrists in parliament and the cabinet have gone back to work and stopped their boycott of the al-Maliki government, and are storing their arms in their closets. But what happens a year from now when they can come back out?

Iraqi President Jalal Talibani is calling on the US to talk to the government of Bashar al-Asad in Syria. Good geopolitical strategy would be to detach al-Asad from Iran. All it would take would be, as a new friend pointed out to me this weekend, a demilitarization of the Golan Heights and its return to Syria. (Well, there'd probably have to be movement on the issue of the Palestinians, too, but Golan is the key). But see Joe Biden's quote below.

CSM writes on new counter-insurgency efforts by US in Iraq. The article points out that such efforts depend on good intelligence on the enemy. I'm not sure how we are going to get that.

In the US, the Democrats are warning Bush not to ignore their objections to his Iraq policies. Senator Joe Biden rejected VP Richard Bruce Cheney's allegation that Democratic opposition is emboldening Bin Laden [a McCarthyite smear technique, or maybe it is time to attribute the technique to Goebbels as is only right]. Biden said that Bin Laden is not now the issue, but if Bush goes on like this, he may become an issue, adding,

"The issue is there's a civil war...That's what we have. That's what the president has to deal with. And he's doing it the exact wrong way. And he's not listening to his military... To his old secretaries of state... To his old friends. He's not listening to anybody but Cheney, and Cheney is dead-wrong. . ."

Zaid al-Ali argues for US withdrawal from Iraq.

Steven Silberman of Wired Magazine is reporting that the treatment and evacuation medical facilities for treating US troops injured in Iraq have become infected with an opportunistic bacterium, acinetobacter baumanii, that under intense exposure to antibiotics has evolved to become immune to them. The Pentagon initially suggested that the pathogen was in the soil in Iraq, but an investigation showed that actually they were picking it up in the hospitals to which they were evacuated. While this bacterium largely preys on the already-weak and ailing, it isn't good news that we've evolved it to be untreatable.

Here's the link to the Wired piece.

A US officer who gave his soldiers in Iraq (they say) the impression that they should not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, leading to the murder of 4 Iraq men (one 70 years old), has been punished with . . . a reprimand.

This Bloomberg wire service report is about how historians will view the Bush administration. The consensus appears to be that he'll be ranked toward the bottom of presidents. The only contrary views the reporter seems to have been able to elicit are not from historians but rightwing political figures. I think the domestic failures will bulk larger than this article incidents, especially the New Orleans fiasco, the gutting of government science, and the opposition to efforts to reduce global warming. That last one will really, really bother historians in the future. They like their archives dry and above the water line.
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22 US Troops Announced Killed
29 Bodies Found in Baghdad

Reuters reports that police found 29 bodies in Baghdad on Saturday and 5 more in the northern city of Mosul.

There was other major violence, with bombings, mortar attacks and assassinations in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul and elsewhere.

A suicide bomber attempted to get a car full of explosives into the Green Zone where US diplomatic and Iraqi government offices are located.

AP reports that the killings of 22 US troops were announced on Saturday. Thirteen died in a helicopter crash in Diyala Province that may or may not have been a shoot-down. Diyala is the scene of a great deal of political violence and guerrilla activity. Militiamen at the Shiite holy city of Karbala south of the capital killed another 5. Guerrillas killed two more on Saturday, one in Baghdad and one in Mosul. Another two were announced killed on Friday, one in Mosul and another in al-Anbar province.

The killing of US troops in Shiite Najaf and Karbala has been a rare event since hostilities ending in late August 2004 between the American military and the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The resurgence of lethal hostility in this Shiite area almost certainly has to do with the ongoing US crackdown on the Sadr Movement.

Shiite militiamen also killed a British soldier with a roadside bomb.

68 percent of Americans oppose Bush's escalation of the Iraq War.

John Edwards called on Congress to oppose the "troop surge."

The current draft of the proposed Iraqi petroleum bill vests decisions in the central government, as the Sunni Arabs had wanted. The Kurds had argued for a more decentralized system.

Qatar-based Sunni preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi called on Iran to cease trying to "Shiitize" the region and accused it of playing an unhelpful role in Iraq. Al-Qaradawi was for a long time party of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Tom Engelhardt discusses the US war on Islam. It is well worth reading.
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Militiamen Wound 6 British Soldiers
Sadrist Rejoin Parliament

Shiite militiamen fired mortars at a British base at Basra, seriously wounding one British soldier and lightly injuring 5 others.

The Sadr Bloc of deputies in Parliament, who had staged a walkout to protest PM Nuri al-Maliki's meeting with George W. Bush, are now returning to the United Iraqi Alliance (the Shiite fundamentalist coalition). They did so despite the arrest by US and Iraqi forces of Abdul Hadi Darraj, a major Sadr aide.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Muqtada al-Sadr's lieutenants are predicting major chaos if the US moves against him.

Mclatchy reports on political violence in Iraq, including several bombings and 17 bodies showing up in the street on Friday

Iraq's system of higher education was near to collapsing even before the recent bombing at al-Mustansiriya University. Attendance is down by as much as half, and thousands of professionals have fled the country.
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US moves on Sadr Aide
Bombings Wrack Baghdad, Mosul
Baathists Plan Convention in Damascus

US and Iraqi troops arrested Sadr aide Abdul Hadi Darraji in East Baghdad at midnight Iraqi time last night. The Sadr movement maintains he is just a spokesman and is not involved in militia operations. The US accuses him of running private religious courts in which people are punished for being lax with regard to implementation of Islamic law. Young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is enormously popular in the Shiite south and a US confrontation with him could throw that region into turmoil.

Mahdi Army figures in Sadr City say they are under siege and that five commanders have been killed or captured in the past week.

UpdateMuqtada al-Sadr has sent his family into hiding in anticipation of an American crackdown on his movement. He appears to anticipate an attempt to arrest or kill him. He maintains that the crackdown has been underway for a month, with 400 of his followers arrested. He is accused of maintaining a private militia, the Mahdi Army, that is implicated in death squad activity against Sunni Arabs. Local Shiites often see the militia as a kind of neighborhood watch that keeps them safe from Sunni incursions when the central government does not.

A direct US conflict with Muqtada al-Sadr could throw the Shiite south into turmoil.


*Shorter Condi Rice: Maliki's government is on borrowed time.

*Shorter Bush: Maliki is hard to support.

*Shorter Maliki: The Bush administration is the one living on borrowed time, after the November elections. And, if there is no security it is because Bush would not give Iraq troops sufficient arms and armored vehicles.

(This mutual taunting is immature. It points to how difficult the Bush-Maliki partnership has it in getting Americans to support the president.)

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:

*Police found 26 bodies in Baghdad, bearing signs of torture. Police in the large northern city of Mosul found 9 bodies.

*Guerrillas detonated 3 car bombs in a wholesale vegetable market in Dura, south Baghdad, killing 10 and wounding 30. Guerrillas set off several other bombs and mortar attacks. They detonated a car bomb in Saadoun Street, killing 4 and wounding 10. Another in East Baghdad killed 3 and wounded 7.

*Several attacks were launched in Mosul, where the security situation appears to be rapidly deteriorating. One car bomb targetting a police patrol killed a civilian and wounded 4 policemen. Others tossed a bomb that killed a policemen and wounded another. Guerrillas shot up a wedding convoy, killing 2 and wounding 4.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani revealed that during his visit to Tehran last month, Iranian authorities evinced their willingness to engage in talks with the Americans in order arrive at a mutual understanding that both sides would be pleased with-- and which would stretch from Afghanistan to Lebanon. Talabani explained the circumstances that caused both meetings that he attempted to arrange between the two to collapse.

Talabani spoke to al-Hayat at the presidential palace in Damascus, where he is currently visiting as president a city that had greeted him many times in the past as a leader of the opposition to Saddam Hussein. He discussed his profound pain and grief and disappointment in the security measures that had been taken in Iraq, when he reads about the number of corpses received by the morgue in Baghdad. He complained bitterly about the terrorist groups, especially "al-Qaeda," whom he accused of launching a genocide against the Iraqi people.

He admitted that death squads had infiltrated the police apparatus and that they engaged in ehtnic cleansing. He expressed optimism about the new plan for security in Baghdad, and expected it would be successful insofar as security duties were being transferred to Iraqi hands. He said he did not expect a precipitate American withdrawal from Iraq, saying that the Democrats in Congress did not agree that the US troops should leave without achieving an acceptable situation in Iraq. He pointed out how dangerous that would be.

The president admitted that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites are killing one another, but insisted that the prerequisites for an all-out general civil war are absent. He praised the role being played by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in preventing the outbreak of civil war. [Sistani forbids Shiites from engaging in reprisal killings against Sunnis; but it has to be said that his authority in that regard has weakened over time, contrary to what Talabani implies].

Talabani said that he had no foreknowledge of the moment when Saddam would be executed, and that he learned of it from the radio. He again stated his opposition to capital punishment, though at the same time he admitted that the execution had ended the fantasy among some elements [i.e. the Baathists] that they might yet return to power. He said most Kurds and Shiites were satisfied with the execution.

He stressed the need for Iraq to be ruled in accordance with the consensus of all major groups. No one group should try to monopolize power. He again called for the abolition of the "Debaathification Committee."

He expressed his satisfaction with his consultations with President Bashar al-Asad. He denied that the latter gave him a letter for Washington. He did say that improved Syrian-American and Iranian-American relations would benefit Iraq. He also said that Syria and Iran have begun helping the Iraqi government.

Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that Iraqi Baathists are organizing a party conference in Damascus to found a joint leadership for the Arab world some 30 years after the Syrian and Iraqi branches of the Baath split with one another. They would also elect a new leadership of the Iraqi branch of the party that would show willingness to participate in the political process if the Iraqi government agrees to abolish the "Debaathification Committee." (That committee excludes Baathists above a certain rank from participation in public life even if they have not been found guilty of any particular crime).

But Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, formerly a vice president of Iraq under Saddam, warned in a letter against a "plot" led by schismatics who broke off from the real Baath Party. Another communique warned that the Damascus conference was an American conspiracy.

Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad is warning of a US plot to topple the al-Maliki government in Iraq. The USG Open Source Center translates from the Iranian "al-`Alam" satellite channel:

' Iranian President Warns Against 'US Plan Aimed at Toppling' Iraqi Government
Al-Alam Television
Thursday, January 18, 2007 T21:19:54Z

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad has warned against a US plan aimed at toppling the Iraqi government. He said during a visit to the Iranian media organization that Washington was seeking to sow division in the region, destabilize security in Iraq and weaken its government in order to justify its presence (in the country). He added that its (US) interests were achieved in a climate of sedition. The president went on to say that the occupation forces were releasing the terrorists arrested by the Iraqi government.

The Iranian president also said during his meeting with Sudanese Minister of Defence Abd-al-Rahim Muhammad Husayn that creating disagreements between Muslim Shi'is and Sunnis served the interests of the arrogant and Zionist powers. He urged the need for resistance to foil the arrogant plans.

(Description of Source: Tehran Al-Alam Television in Arabic -- IRIB's 24-hour Arabic news channel, targetting a pan-Arab audience) '

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