Major Iraqi Parties Anxious over Possible Massive Ballot Fraud

Iraqis go to the voting booth a week from today, on Sunday, March 7, to elect the second full-term parliament (4 years) since the fall of the one-party Baath regime in 2003. Given the turmoil surrounding last summer's elections in Iran and Afghanistan, with massive vote fraud and stolen elections being alleged in both, many Iraqis are worried ballot and other irregularities in their polls, as well.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement is complaining bitterly about a rash of arrests by the government of Sadrist activists. The hard line Shiite movement asserted that these arrests were aimed at influencing the course of the election.

Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that the National Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shiite religious parties, has alleged that there are 800,000 imaginary voters' names on the election rolls. Member of parliament for the National Iraqi Alliance, Qasim Da'ud, told al-Hayat that his coalition has already detected numerous instances of attempted fraud in the upcoming election. He said that there is evidence that the Independent High Electoral Commission has come under undue pressure in this regard.

Da'ud was speaking in a roundabout way about Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in making these charges. He went further, asserting that the sitting government had begun acting improperly given the closeness of the election date, with the prime minister misusing his position for electoral purposes. Da'ud said al-Maliki had distributed land and gifts to tribal sheikhs and citizens. He had also decided to purge some military officers and pardon others. Da'ud said that the most brazen such move was the addition of 800,000 imaginary names to the voting rolls just days before the election.

(With regard to the purging and reinstatement of military officers, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced late this week that 20,000 Saddam-era officers in the Baath army would be reinstated (most are at the rank of colonel or below). Critics maintain that al-Maliki is trying for the Sunni vote with this move.

Muqtada al-Sadr's website for Friday carried the sermon of Sadrist preacher Shaykh Abd-al-Hadi al-Muhammadawi, who also complained about al-Maliki's gifts in his Friday prayer sermon, referring to an account that al-Maliki gave out pistols to tribal sheikhs who visited him, to curry their favor (USG Open Source Center translation): "His Eminence wondered: Where from did the prime minister bring money to distribute pistols to some chieftains? These are the methods of the destroyer Saddam. Where are the state's fund? What did Operation Knights Assault and the operations of the so-called Law Enforcement Plan achieve? What are the results of investigations on the crime of the Al-Ummah Bridge and the bloody Wednesday, Sunday, and Tuesday? What is the fate of the corrupt ones, particularly the ministers who have stolen the state's funds? Where is the wronged people's share from the ration card's items?"

Back to the al-Hayat article: The Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi said it is worried about massive fraud in the election, given that, it alleged, the Independent High Electoral Commission had printed up an extra seven million ballots. The party dismissed the explanation that the Commission had had to print more ballots because the originals did not meet international criteria.

In al-Anbar Province, Ahmad Abu Risha is a leader of the 'Awakening Councils' or 'Sons of Iraq' movement, wherein Sunni Arabs took money from the US to fight radical Muslim extremists such as the 'Islamic State of Iraq.' He is now part of the Unity of Iraq coalition led by Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani. He said that the Committee of Justice and Accountability's disqualification of some 500 candidates out of over 6000 was itself a reason to suspect that some political parties intend to commit ballot fraud.

The Independent High Electoral Commission issued a statement denying the validity of the charges and calling them "inexcusable" and "detached from reality."

Meanwhile, The Eye Network dedicated to observing the elections has expressed its fears of ballot fraud in the votes cast by Iraqi expatriates. There are about a million Iraqis in Syria, and a couple hundred thousand in Jordan, with perhaps 50,000 each in Egypt and Lebanon, as well as about 40,000 in Sweden and a few thousands in other countries. (These figures are based on my own research and that of specialists who have presented at conferences I've attended; the numbers are much exaggerated in the press for both Jordan and Egypt). The Eye Network says it is precisely the unknown number of voters abroad and the lack of authenticated voter rolls that makes fraud so potentially easy in this regard.

Thre are also fears of undue religious interference. Last week the Pakistani Shiite grand ayatollah in Najaf, Bashir al-Najafi, implicitly denounced several of al-Maliki's cabinet members, some of them running on his State of Law ticket for corruption and incompetence (criticizing the provision of services such as electricity and water).

Apparently as a reaction to this intervention, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who outranks al-Najafi, reaffirmed the neutrality of the great Shiite clerics in this election. Sistani also announced that he would not meet with any further candidates in the week before the election.

The USG Open Source Center translated the second Friday prayer sermon of Sistani representative Abd al-Mahdi Karbala'i:

' 26 February 2010, His Eminence Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i, representative of the Higher Religious Authority, said: "Higher Religious Authority His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, may God maintain his shadow, has warned of the refusal to participate in the coming elections. He said that this is because the citizen's refusal to participate in the elections will give a chance to others who reject the democratic way of transferring power and running the country's affairs and who take violence and illegitimate ways as a means to change the situation, to assume power, and impose their policy on the others. He said that this would involve the country in a whirlpool of chaos and continuous instability.

"He pointed out: So as to foil the plans of these sides and in order to prevent them from taking Iraq back to square one, everyone should participate in the elections. All this is in order to consolidate and entrench the democratic way of the rotation of power and to take the country far from the ghost of violence and military coups. If the citizens refuse to participate in the elections, a day will come when they will regret this strongly, but after it is too late." '

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Advice to Climate Scientists on how to Avoid being Swift-boated and how to become Public Intellectuals

Climate Scientists continue to see persuasive evidence of global warming and climate change when they speak at academic conferences, even though, as Andrew Sullivan rightly put it, the science is being 'swift-boated before our eyes.' (See also Bill McKibben at Tomdispatch.com on Climate Change's OJ Simpson moment).

This article at mongabay.com includes some hand-wringing from scientists who say that they should have responded to the attacks earlier and more forcefully in public last fall, or who worry that scientists are not charismatic t.v. personalities who can be persuasive on that medium.

Let me just give my scientific colleagues some advice, since as a Middle East expert I've seen all sorts of falsehoods about the region successfully purveyed by the US mass media and print press, in such a way as to shape public opinion and to affect policy-making in Washington:

1. Every single serious climate scientist should be running a blog. There is enormous thirst among the public for this information, and publishing only in technical refereed journals is guaranteed to quarantine the information away from the general public. A blog allows scientists to summarize new findings in clear language for a wide audience. It makes the scientist and the scientific research 'legible' to the wider society. Educated lay persons will run with interesting new findings and cause them to go viral. You will also find that you give courage to other colleagues who are specialists to speak out in public. You cannot depend on journalists to do this work. You have to do it yourselves.

2. It is not your fault. The falsehoods in the media are not there because you haven't spoken out forcefully or are not good on t.v. They are there for the following reasons:

a. Very, very wealthy and powerful interests are lobbying the big media companies behind the scenes to push climate change skepticism, or in some cases (as with Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp/ Fox Cable News) the powerful and wealthy interests actually own the media.

b. Powerful politicians linked to those wealthy interests are shilling for them, and elected politicians clearly backed by economic elites are given respect in the US corporate media. Big Oil executives e.g. have an excellent rollodex for CEOs, producers, the bookers for the talk shows, etc. in the corporate media. They also behind the scenes fund "think tanks" such as the American Enterprise Institute to produce phony science. Since the AEI generates talking points that aim at helping Republicans get elected and pass right wing legislation, it is paid attention to by the corporate media.

c. Media thrives on controversy, which produces ratings and advertising revenue. As a result, it is structured into an 'on the one hand, on the other hand' binary argument. Any broadcast that pits a climate change skeptic against a serious climate scientist is automatically a win for the skeptic, since a false position is being given equal time and legitimacy. It was the same in the old days when the cigarette manufacturers would pay a 'scientist' to go deny that smoking causes lung cancer. And of course we saw all the instant Middle East experts who knew no Arabic and had never lived in the Arab world or sometimes even been there who were paraded as knowledgeable sources of what would happen if the United States invaded Iraq and occupied it.

d. Journalists for the most part have to do as they are told. Their editors and the owners of the corporate media decide which stories get air time and how they are pitched. Most journalists privately admit that they hate their often venal and ignorant bosses. But what alternative do most of them have?

e. Journalists for the most part do not know how to find academic experts. An enterprising one might call a university and be directed to a particular faculty member, which is way too random a way to proceed. If I were looking for an academic expert, I'd check a citation index of refereed articles, but most people don't even know how to find the relevant database. Moreover, it is not all the journalists' fault. journalism works on short deadlines and academics are often teaching or in committee and away from email. Many academics refuse (shame on them) to make time for media interviews.

f. Many journalists are generalists and do not themselves have the specialized training or background for deciding what the truth is in technical controversies. Some of them are therefore fairly easily fooled on issues that require technical or specialist knowledge. Even a veteran journalist like Judy Miller fell for an allegation that Iraq's importation of thin aluminum tubes in 2002 was for nuclear enrichment centrifuges, even though the tubes were not substantial enough for that purpose. Many journalists (and even Colin Powell) reported with a straight face the Neocon lie that Iraq had 'mobile biological weapons labs,' as though they were something you could put in a winnebago and bounce around on Iraq's pitted roads. No biological weapons lab could possibly be set up without a clean room, which can hardly be mobile. Back in the Iran-Iraq War, I can remember an American wire service story that took seriously Iraq's claim that large numbers of Iranian troops were killed trying to cross a large body of water by fallen electrical wires; that could happen in a puddle but not in a river. They were killed by Iraqi poison gas, of course.

The good journalists are aware of their limitations and develop proxies for figuring out who is credible. But the social climbers and time servers are happy just to host a shouting match that maybe produces 'compelling' television, which is how they get ahead in life.

3. If you just keep plugging away at it, with blogging and print, radio and television interviews, you can have an impact on public discourse over time. I could not quantify it, but I am sure that I have. It is a lifetime commitment and a lot of work and it interferes with academic life to some extent. Going public also makes it likely that you will be personally smeared and horrible lies purveyed about you in public (they don't play fair-- they make up quotes and falsely attribute them to you; it isn't a debate, it is a hatchet job). I certainly have been calumniated, e.g. by poweful voices such as John Fund at the Wall Street Journal or Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute. But if an issue is important to you and the fate of your children and grandchildren, surely having an impact is well worth any price you pay.

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ahmadinejad once again fails to call for the annihilation of Israel, despite what you heard on CNN

I saw Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN Friday afternoon. Oren said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called for the annihilation of Israel, and was therefore speaking of genocide.

It is dreary to see this constant drumbeat of dishonest propaganda. Whatever one thinks of Ahmadinejad or the Iranian regime, one should not misrepresent their statements, since that will lead to bad policy-making.

The Washington Post also wrote, "Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, spoke of Israel's eventual "demise and annihilation". In fact, Ahmadinejad never mentioned Israel as a country at all, and spoke only about what he called the 'Zionist regime.' He favors an admittedly odd form of the 'one state solution' in which Palestinians and at least some Jews would all vote for the same government.

So this is what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday at a press conference in Damascus:

"Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Resistance and Lebanon are ready to meet any conditions, and we hope that the enemies of the nations of the region will change their course and instead walk beside regional states in cooperation. Insofar as the Zionist regime threatens Lebanon and Syria and prominent personalities of these two countries every day, it must accept its end and grant in their entirety the rights of the Palestinian nation."

That is, Ahmadinejad began by offering an olive branch to any former enemies that wanted to make peace. But he characterized the 'Zionist regime,' i.e. the Israeli government with its current ideology, as intrinsically belligerent, and insisted that this 'regime' must 'accept its own end' and grant Palestinians their full rights (presumably, citizenship and property rights, which they now lack).

Ahmadinejad seems to see Zionism as an ideology as essentially unwilling to allow Palestinian human rights, and so calls for it to acquiesce in its obsolescence.

Ahmadinejad did not mention Israel and did not call for any genocides, or anyone to be killed, or war. He asked Zionists to see that their ideology has no future. In the past he has compared his vision of the fall of what he calls the Zionist regime to the fall of the Soviet Union, which happened peacefully and with no annihilation of the population.

Personally, I see Zionism as just a garden variety form of modern romantic nationalism not different in any way from scores of other nationalisms (including Arab nationalism, Serbian nationalism, and Iranian nationalism).

Zionism constructs Palestinian-Israelis as second-class citizens, and attempts to deny Palestinians in the Occupied Territories basic rights. But other nationalisms are also guilty of exclusions, though there are unique aspects to the Zionist project. Shiite-tinged Iranian nationalism insists that the head of state be a Shiite ayatollah and disallows Sunni Iranians, perhaps 10-15% of the population, from serving even as elected president, and Sunni provinces such as Baluchistan are the most deprived of resources and services. Only civic nationalism of the American and French varieties has universalistic aspirations, and even there it is flawed by a latent privileging of some groups within the nation (Protestant whites in the US, secular-minded native-born French of Catholic extraction in France).

Ahmadinejad may be blinkered and hypocritical, but he did not call for the annihilation of or genocide against anyone.

Only committed Zionists would see a one-state solution as the 'annihilation' of Israel.

In any case, now that a two-state solution has been made virtually impossible by Israel's determined colonization of the West Bank, a one-state solution is the most likely outcome of what will probably be a 50-year struggle for basic Palestinian rights to citizenship in a state. The rest of us are going to be mightily inconvenienced by this unnecessary and stupid conflict, and the inconvenience will only be increased by equally stupid propaganda from unreliable narrators like Oren.


End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Taliban Hit 5 Star Hotel, Indian Hostels in Downtown Kabul; 18 Dead, 32 Wounded; Indians Targeted

The Afghan capital was struck by three suicide bombings early Friday morning, beginning at 6:30 am local time. Radio Azadi reports that there were five attackers, who struck in the area near the entrance of the Hotel Safi Landmark. The first bomb damaged the hotel.

Two of these bombings, Aljazeera Arabic says, targeted guest houses for Indian expatriates in Kabul who work for companies or NGOs. The third blast was huge, and the guesthouse was left in rubble, such that there may be bodies still within. As I write, the death toll is estimated at 18, with 32 wounded, and some of the dead are Indians and many of the wounded are. The Aljazeera correspondent says that Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told him that the mission had been to hit the "enemies of Afghanistan from among the foreign Indians." The Sydney Morning Herald confirms that the Taliban were targeting Indian hostels.

The Taliban have hit the Indian embassy in Kabul twice, once in July 2008, and again in October 2009. Many Taliban have helped train or fought alongside Pakistani militant vigilantes fixated on overthrowing Indian rule of Muslim-majority Kashmir.

India is also a significant provider to Afghanistan of development aid and investment, and so is helping build up the government of Hamid Karzai. Having offered $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid, India is the largest regional donor. There are some 4,000 Indian workers in the country, some of them "security personnel," according to the US Council on Foreign Relations.

Several prominent Tajik (Persian-speaking Sunni) politicians have long-standing ties to New Delhi because India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW, the equivalent of the CIA) provided aid to the old Northern Alliance at a time when it was under siege in the late 1990s by the Taliban. These Tajiks are die-hard enemies of the Taliban, who had committed massacres against them. The Taliban animus against India thus is multifaceted.



The attack lasted about 4 hours, according to Radio Azadi, with some of the attackers using small arms fire. All five were ultimately killed.

Some observers were surprised that the attack was launched on the commemoration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. But many hard line Salafi revivalists, who say they want to go back to the practice of Islam that prevailed among the first generation of the companions of the Prophet, oppose celebration of birthdays in general and of that of the Prophet in particular.

Pollster Matt Dabrowski tweeted from Kabul that he was awakened by the first blast, and could see a smoke column bigger than the downtown indoors market building.

US Navy Lt. Joe Halstead tweeted from Kabul, "Insurgents using Mohammed's Birthday and attempting to counter progress in Marjah with attack in Kabul today."

Friday's attack resembled one in January. Although the Taliban are attempting to project an image of Kabul as having little security and the Karzai government as helpless in the face of their assaults, actually they are just proving that the Afghanistan security forces are pretty good and can fairly easily capture or kill attackers.

The Taliban have lost momentum on two fronts in recent weeks. The CSM estimates that Pakistani authorities have captured 7 of the 15 members of the Quetta Shura, the command council of the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar. American drone strikes killed another major Taliban leader in North Waziristan on Thursday, Muhammad Qari Zafar. He was a mastermind of the attack on the US consulate in the southern Pakistan port of Karachi in 2006.

The other front is Marjah, where Taliban direct attacks are becoming rare as the US military and the Afghanistan National Army establish control of the city of 80,000. Some twenty thousand residents have fled to nearby Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. The Taliban are still fighting with roadside bombs, and are likely to go doing so for some time.

In the wake of these two defeats, the Taliban are apparently attempting to destabilize the capital and to punish foreigners working to stand up the new government (in this case India), using the tactics of Sunni radical insurgents in Baghdad. While this tactic can indeed slow state formation, it is just the act of a spoiler and does not lead to any positive political achievements.

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Maliki's Polling Shows His Party Getting Nearly 1/3 of Seats in Parliament, with Allawi's Iraqiya at 1/5

Al-Hayat [Life] reports via AFP Arabic on the poll just released by the National Media Center, which reports to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office. According to this sounding, the major coalitions will perform thusly in the March 7 parliamentary elections (rounding up to the nearest whole number):

State of Law (Nuri al-Maliki): 30%
Iraqi National Movement (Iyad Allawi): 22%
National Iraqi Alliance (Ammar al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr): 17%
Kurdistan Alliance (Jalal Talibani and Massoud Barzani): 10%
Unity of Iraq (Jawad al-Bulani): 5%
Iraqi Accord Front (Iyad al-Samarraie): 3%
No Opinion: 5%

(State of Law: Shiite religious/ nationalist coalition of the current prime minister; Iraqi National Movement: coalition of secular Shiite and Sunni parties led by a former interim prime minister; National Iraqi Alliance: coalition of Shiite religious parties, including Sadrists and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq; Kurdistan Alliance: The major but not the only Kurdish political force; Unity of Iraq: party of Interior Minister, an independent Shiite; Iraqi Accord Front: Coalition of Sunni fundamentalist parties.)

The other 8% must be for small, probably Sunni Arab or Kurdish, parties not so far detailed by the Arabic press.

There are strange things about this poll. First, it gives the major Kurdish coalition only 10%. The Kurdistan Alliance got 21% in December, 2005, or 53 seats. It is true that the Kurds lost out in the expansion of the number of seats in parliament, insofar as they have only had 43 seats set aside for the Kurdistan superprovince, or 13%. But Kurds in the mixed provinces of Kirkuk, Diyala and Ninevah should return some seats for the Kurdistan Alliance or one of its challengers. Moreover, there is no reason for a weighted poll to reflect seat apportionment. This poll is missing half the Kurds who should have turned up in it, and they can't all be in the 8% that wasn't detailed. That gap is a major flaw.

Second, the Sunni Arab parties have also disappeared. The Iraqi Accord Front gained 44 seats or 15% in December, 2005, and the National Dialogue Front of Salih Mutlak won 11 seats or 4%. So Sunni Arab parties should also have shown up as nearly 20 percent of the poll results. Instead the IAF has been reduced to 2.6%, and no other Sunni Arab parties are mentioned, though some might be in the unannounced 8%. That poor black hole of 8% cannot magically cover both the missing Sunni Arabs and the missing Kurds. Some proportion of the missing Sunni Arabs may be supporters of Allawi's National Iraqi List, but can that possibility really account for this anomaly? A lot of Sunni Arabs have not forgiven Allawi for cheerleading the US military's invasion of and virtual destruction of Fallujah in late fall of 2004.

It is true that Allawi went to visit Saudi Arabia recently in hopes of receiving King Abdullah's backing as the secular alternative to the pro-Iranian Shiite religious parties. And his coalition partner Tariq al-Hashimi is in Cairo, seeking Egypt's backing. Al-Hashimi was constrained to deny that the National Iraqi coalition had sent an envoy to Tehran seeking Iran's acquiescence in Allawi's return as prime minister, because just such a rumor was flying around Iraq. The visits to Riyadh and Cairo are intended to position the Iraqiya as the secular, Sunni-Shiite alternative to rule by religious Shiites linked to the ayatollahs in Tehran. It is a message that will resonate in the Sunni Arab provinces.

I conclude that somehow this poll over-represented the Shiite Arabs at the expense of Kurds and Sunni Arabs. The National Media Center maintains that they polled in a weighted way in all 18 provinces, so its results should be proportional. But they clearly are not.

If we focus on the Shiite parties, the results make some sense in the light of the provincial elections of January, 2009, when Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law coaltion (the core of which is his Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party) took over a third of seats in the major urban centers of Baghdad and Basra, and did well in the Shiite provinces of the south, though not so overwhelmingly well.

In last year's provincial elections, the Shiite fundamentalist Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the core of today's National Iraqi Alliance, virtually collapsed after having been dominant since 2005--though it still gained between 8% and 17% of the vote. The party suffered from an anti-incumbent mood, given poor services and bad security, as well as, allegedly, public distaste at how close it is to Iran. On the other hand, the hard line Sadr Movement, another constituent of the National Iraqi Alliance, did respectably in much of the Shiite South, gaining as much as 15-17% in some provinces. So the non-Da'wa Shiite religious parties could well gain as much as a fifth of the national vote if the trends visible in the provincial elections have continued.

Allawi's Iraqi National Movement only got 9% in the December, 2005 elections, but it has been reformulated away from being mainly Shiite secularists to being cross-sectarian, and presumably some of the 20% who said they would vote for it were Sunni Arabs. The INM was joined by Tariq al-Hashemi, a vice president and a Sunni Arab who formerly led the Iraqi Islamic Party, and by Salih Mutlak, the secular, Sunni Arab leader of the National Dialogue Front. Mutlak's disqualification from running because of allegations of links to the banned Baath Party, and his recent call for his supporters to boycott the vote, could hurt Allawi's poll numbers if the poll were taken now.

For this and other reasons, I doubt Allawi's list will actually get 20% of seats in the new parliament. Iraqis have a discourse of national unity to which the list is appealing in its rhetoric. And Iraqis typically are embarrassed by sectarianism and deny its importance. But when they have gone to the polls in the past 5 years, they have almost always voted for ethnic or sectarian parties once in the privacy of the voting booth. There was also buzz for Allawi in fall of 2005 coming from polls done in the provinces by US AID and from the American Enterprise Institute (so I was told by journalists who interviewed us both), and it turned out not to amount to anything; Allawi's contingent in parliament shrank from 14% to 9%.

The poll also gave some provincial estimates for voter support for al-Maliki's State of Law coalition:

Baghdad: 32%
Basra: 41%
Babil: 49%
Dhi Qar: 42%
Karbala: 50%
Qadisiya: 56%
Muthanna: 44%

These numbers, if true, speak of a revolution in affairs since last year's provincial election, since the State of Law only won 9% in Karbala then, and the most it got outside the two big Shiite cities was 23%. Because these results are so divergent from those of only a year ago, I have trouble accepting them as accurate. Services and security aren't better, and unless al-Maliki is buying off constituents with patronage, it is hard for me to understand such a big swing in his favor.

There may also be a fear effect. Al-Maliki has been establishing tribal militias in the Shiite south loyal to him, and has moreover gotten control of a lot of the local police forces as well as the national army, so Iraqis may be reluctant to say to pollsters that they oppose him.

This poll suggests that al-Maliki's party will pull in about 108 seats in the 325-seat parliament, and that Allawi's list will get 72.

But the Shiite religious coalition, the National Iraqi Alliance, has done its own soundings, and thinks it will get 70-80 seats or as much as 25% of seats, not the 17% the National Media Center gives them. And the NIA thinks that 80 would make them the single largest party.

Although not all their leaders agree with such a strategy,it still seems most likely that al-Maliki's State of Law and al-Hakim's National Iraqi Alliance will make a post-election coalition, emerging as the largest bloc in parliament and forming the government again. Assuming al-Maliki's party doesn't actually get 30%, such a coalition might be the only way for him to remain prime minister, assuming he hasn't burned too many bridges with the other Shiite religious parties to be viable.


End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Gates wants Europe to beggar itself on War Expenditures the Way the US Has

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decries Europe for general anti-war sentiment, unwillingness to beggar itself with expenditures on war.

But as far as I can tell, Europe is the world's largest economy and got there without any recent substantial wars except those the US dragged it into. Moreover, the fastest-growing economy for the past nearly 30 years has been China, which spends a fraction on their military of what the US spends on its, and, aside from a skirmish with Vietnam in the early 1980s, has been at peace. Apparently massive war expenditures are unrelated to economic growth or prosperity.

In contrast, the US has been at war for 19 of the last 47 years (not counting US-backed insurgencies such as 1980s Afghanistan, on which we spent billions) but has not grown faster than the other two economically. Moreover, the increasingly unwieldy US national debt, deriving from the US government spending more than it took in in recent decades, would not exist if the US military budget had been the same as that of the European Union since 1980. The US overspent on its military because Washington mistakenly thought the Soviet economy was twice as big as it actually was, and vastly over-estimated Soviet military capabilities. The bloated military budgets continue now, apparently because of a couple thousand al-Qaeda operatives hiding out in caves in the Hadhramawt and Waziristan.

Some statistics to ponder:

US Military Budget 2009: $711 billion
European Union Military Budget 2009: $289 billion
China Military Budget 2009: $122 billion.

US GDP 2009: $14.4 trillion
European Union GDP 2009: $16.5 trillion (PPP)
China GDP 2009: $8.8 trillion (PPP)

US economic growth 2009: 0.2%
European Union economic growth 2009: -4%
China economic growth 2009: 8.7 %

The real military-related expenditures of the US are closer to $1 trillion. If the US cut those back to the level of the European Union and spent the money on promoting solar energy and making it inexpensive, America would have a chance of remaining a great power in the 21st century. If it goes on rampaging around the world bankrupting itself by invading and occupying other countries, the Chinese will laugh at us all the way to world dominance.


End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Afghan Senators demand Execution of Foreign Troops; Karzai Usurps Control of Election Watchdog; BlackwaterTraining Scandal

Pajhwok News Agency reports that on Tuesday, the Afghanistan senate deplored the foreign airstrikes that killed 21 innocent civilians in the province of Daikundi on Sunday, and demanded that NATO avoid any repetition of this sort of error.

But some senators went farther, demanding that NATO or US military men responsible for the deaths be executed. Senator Hamidullah Tokhi of Uuzgan complained to Pajhwok that the foreign forces had killed civilians in such incidents time and again, and kept apologizing but then repeating the fatal mistake: "Anyone killing an ordinary Afghan should be executed in public."

Lawmaker Fatima Aziz of Qunduz concurred, observing, "We saw foreign troops time and again that they killed innocent people, something unbearable for the already war-weary Afghans."

Maulvi Abdul Wali Raji, a senator from Baghlan Province, called for the Muslim law of an 'eye for an eye' to be applied to foreign troops for civilian deaths. Pajhwok concludes, "Mohammad Alam Izdiyar said civilian deaths were the major reason behind the widening gap between the people and Afghan government."

Note that those speaking this way are not Taliban, but rather elected members of the Afghanistan National Parliament, whose government is supposedly a close US ally.

Sarah Chayes, a former National Public Radio correspondent who lived for years in Qandahar but has been on Gen. Stanley McChrystal's staff for the past year, told CNN that she sees increasing frustration in the Afghan public over the killing of civilians by NATO and US strikes. She implies that how the government of President Hamid Karzai deals with this issue could determine its fate, given that it is acting like, and perceived as acting like a criminal syndicate.

In the meantime, Karzai is taking no chances. Radio Azadi reports in Dari Persian that Karzai took control of the supposedly independent Electoral Complaints Commission, and will appoint all 5 of its members. The system had been that 3 members were appointed by the United Nations, and the other two chosen by the supreme courty chief justice and the independent high electoral commission.

The ECC threw out about 1 million fraudulent ballots in last summer's presidential election, a move that could have forced Karzai into a run-off election against rival Abdullah Abdullah. But the latter withdrew from the race on the grounds that Karzai controlled the in-country electoral commission and refused to relinquish control of it. Many observers believe that Karzai stole the election. In short, Karzai is increasingly acting like a Middle Eastern dictator, manipulating state institutions to ensure that he cannot be unseated in an election.

Whatever US troops are fighting for in Afghanistan, it is not democracy.

As for those nearly 100,000 trained Afghan troops that Washington keeps boasting about, it turns out that the Pentagon sub-sub-contracted the troop training and "a Blackwater subsidiary hired violent drug users to help train the Afghan army." Many journalists doubt that there are actually so many troops in the Afghanistan National Army, citing high turnover and desertion rates, while others suggest that two weeks of 'show and tell' training for illiterate recruits is not exactly a rigorous 'training'-- even if it were done properly, which it seems not always to have been.

Canadian Brig. Gen. Daniel Ménard said that some estimates of the number of Taliban roadside bombs planted in Marjah were too low, putting them at 400 to 500. He said that despite what happened in Marjah, where Taliban took advantage of the ample warning NATO gave that it was coming, the same procedure will be followed this May when the Qandahar campaign begins. It is aimed at blunting the summer campaign of Taliban coming over the border from Pakistan.

Former Pakistan chief of staff, Mirza Aslam Beg, wrote in Nava-e Waqt for February 23, 2010, explaining Taliban strategy in Marjah. These passages were translated from Urdu by the USG Open Source Center:

' Marjah is located some 15 km from Lashkargah City, which is the provincial capital of Helmand Province. It is a flat desert area. It has a few scattered mud houses. There is a green belt to its north and west, which is irrigated by the Helmand River. This green belt has large agricultural farms and orchards, with a population of about 6,000 to 7,000 people. The entire terrain is flat and totally unsuitable for guerilla war, which is the preferred style of the Taliban. It will be very easy for the allied air forces and ground war machine to control the movement of the Taliban in this area. Now, the question arises is why are the allied forces preparing for a similar kind of heavy attack in an area where there is hardly any resistance?

It appears there is a historical and psychological factor behind this decision. History says that every army that went to this area did not return safely. The allied forces believe that if they succeed in taking control of Marjah and the Taliban are compelled to back off, the allied forces will gain a psychological upper hand, making it easy for them to carry out operation against the Taliban in other provinces in Afghanistan as well.

The Taliban have become experts in fighting a war in the difficult desert terrain of the northern regions for the past 30 years. They are brave mujahids [holy warriors] who have full confidence in themselves and in their quest for success against their enemies. Time and circumstance are totally on their side. Thus, it is easy to understand their strategy in the battle of Marjah.

One of their strategies is to send 1,000 to 2,000 fighters under the command of Commander Mullah Abdul Razzaq. These fighters are committed to fight until their last breath and will bleed the allied forces to the end. They will defend the region with their scattered fighters spread all over the area. They will also defend the area against the attacking forces through the use of improvised engineering devices (IEDs), including the Omar bomb and booby traps. Their ground defense system, which was used by the Hezbollah against Israel in 2006, can also be used as a defense weapon. This strategy has been used by the Taliban during the last four days of this war.

The number of Taliban present in the adjacent areas of Helmand is around 10,000 to 12,000. These troops have the ability to attack the allied forces from the nearby areas of the main battleground and keep them engaged by attacking them regularly. Moreover, they will cut off the supply line of the allied forces. Under this strategy, on one side, the Taliban will continue the battle in Marjah, and on the other side, they will create problems for the allied forces by increasing attacks on them in provinces under their control. '

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Harvard Professor's Modest Proposal: Starve the Gazans into Having Fewer Babies

Martin Kramer revealed his true colors at the Herzliya Conference, wherein he blamed political violence in the Muslim world on population growth, called for that growth to be restrained, and praised the illegal and unconscionable Israeli blockade of civilian Gazans for its effect on reducing the number of Gazans.

M. J. Rosenberg argued that Kramer's speech is equivalent to a call for genocide. It certainly is a call for eugenics.

It is shocking that Kramer, who has made a decade-long career of attacking social science understanding of the Middle East and demonizing anyone who departs even slightly from his rightwing Israeli-nationalist political line, should be given a cushy office at Harvard as a 'fellow' while spewing the most vile justifications for war crimes like the collective punishment of Gazan children.

Kramer is after all not nobody. He was an adviser to the Giuliani presidential campaign. He is listed as an associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the influential think tank in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He is associated with Daniel Pipe's 'Middle East Forum,' a neo-McCarthyite organization dedicated to harassing American academics who do not toe the political line of Israel's ruling Likud Party.

Kramer's remarks are wrong, offensive and racist by implication. He is driven to them by his nationalist ideology, which cannot recognize the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israelis in 1948, cannot see that most Palestinians have been deprived by Israeli policies of citizenship rights (what Warren Burger called 'the right to have rights', as Margaret Somers pointed out), and that Palestinians are even at this moment being deprived of basic property and other rights by Israeli occupation. To admit that any of these actions produces a backlash is to acknowledge the Palestinian movements as forms of national liberation activism, and to legitimize Palestinian aspirations. Rightwing Zionism is all about erasing the Palestinians from history. And now Kramer wants to make it about erasing future Palestinian children!

Where have we seen the picture Kramer draws before? It is just a recycled form of Malthusianism, where the population growth rates of "some people" is seen as dangerous to society. Barbara Brown wrote of Apartheid South Africa:

' [White] South Africans who express a [concern with Black population growth] perceive a close relationship between population growth rates and political instability. There are two variants of this approach. The first holds that a growing black and unemployed population will mean increased poverty which will in turn lead to a black revolt. . .

In an opening address to a major private sector conference on 'population dynamics' in South Africa, the president of the 1820 Foundation argued that 'Rapid population growth translates into a steadily worsening employment future, massive city growth . . . and an increase in the number of poor and disadvantaged. All are rightly viewed as threats to social stability and orderly change.'

A second, but smaller, group believes the black threat arises simply out of the changing ratio of white to black. This group sees that 'THE WHITES ARE A DWINDLING MINORITY IN THE COUNTRY' and argues that this situation will lead to a 'similar reduction of white political authority'.

Some argue for birth control on even more overtly racist grounds, but few people in leadership positions do so, at least publicly. Debates in the House of Assembly have included remarks to the effect that blacks are unable to make a contribution to South African society and so should be encouraged to limit their numbers. The organiser of a 'Population Explosion' conference, a medical doctor who is deputy director of the Verwoerd Hospital, argued that whites must organise a family planning programme for blacks because the latter group is biologically incapable of exercising foresight.'

- Barbara B. Brown, "Facing the 'Black Peril': The Politics of Population Control in South Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2(Jan., 1987), pp. 256-273, this quote pp. 263-64.

There are other notorious examples of this sort of argument, including eugenics theorist Madison Grant, who warned in the early 20th century that white Americans were being swamped by inferior eastern and southern Europeans such as Poles, Italians, and Jews.

How ironic, that Kramer should now resort to the very kind of arguments Grant used to condemn Martin Kramer's ancestors being allowed to come to the United States.

As usual, Kramer, a notorious anti-intellectual opposed to the mainstream academic study of the Middle East, is wrong as a matter of social science.

Population growth in and of itself explains nothing, and certainly not terrorism. Between 1800 and 1900, Great Britain's population tripled, whereas France underwent a demographic transition and grew very slowly. Yet Britain experienced no revolution, no great social upheavals in that period. France, in contrast, lurched from war to war, from empire to monarchy to empire to Republic, and saw the rise of a plethora of radical social movements, including the Paris Commune.

High population growth can be a problem for development, and can contribute to internal conflict over resources, but it is only one factor. If economic growth outstrips population growth (say the economy grows 7 percent and population grows 3 per year), then on a per capita basis that is the same as 4 percent economic growth per capita per annum, which would be good for most countries. Or if a place is thinly populated and rich in resources, population growth may not be socially disruptive. Most countries in the world have grown enormously in population during the past century, yet they display vastly different rates of social violence.

Although under some circumstances, rapid population growth can contribute to internal social instability, it is irrelevant to international terrorism as a political tactic. The deployment of terror, which the US Federal Code defines as the use of violence against civilians for political purposes by a non-state actor, is always a form of politics. The Zionist terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, which killed 91 persons and wounded 46, did not act because Jewish Irgun members had too many brothers and sisters. (And if you think about who exactly might have made an argument of that form in the 1940s, it becomes clear how smelly Kramer's is.) Irgun blew the hotel up because British Mandate intelligence had offices there, and because these Zionist activists did not care if they killed dozens of civilians.

Studies of groups that deploy violence against civilians for political purposes show that [pdf link] they are characterized by higher than average education and income, which correlate with smaller family size.

Political violence is about grievances, land, resources and politics. Palestinians were no more violent than any other group in the Middle East until they were ethnically cleansed and their property was stolen by Jewish colonists in their homeland, for which they never received compensation. As Robert Pape has shown, suicide bombings cluster in the area in and around Israel, in Iraq and Afghanistan/ Northern Pakistan, places where people feel militarily occupied. But there are none in Mali or Benin, countries with among the highest population growth rates in the world.

Kramer's argument is implicitly racist because he applies the population-growth calculus mainly to Arabs, whose family size he minds in ways that he does not others. Belize and the Cameroons have higher population growth rates than Libya. Is Kramer afraid of those two countries? Why is it only Arab children he marks as a danger?

If population growth rates were the independent variable in predicting a turn to terrorism, moreover, the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jewish population of Israel would be a concern. But in fact they refuse to serve in the Israeli army and so are the least violent part of the population (though there have been occasional Haredi attacks on Palestinians.)

Kramer will find, in his new role as the Madison Grant of the twenty-first century, that his arguments are a double-edged sword that even more unsavory persons than he will gleefully wield against groups other than Arabs.

End/ (Not Continued)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombing in Lashkar Gah Kills 7; Karzai Cabinet Denounces NATO over Civilian Deaths; Russia wants Heroin Industry Destroyed

Operation Enduring Freedom is now responsible for the deaths of 1,000 US troops, the bulk of them in Afghanistan. It has now also gone on longer than the Revolutionary War.

You have to wonder how many of those troops would be alive if the Bush-Cheney administration had not taken its eye off the ball and deprived them of resources, sending the resources instead to Iraq. Efforts to develop and build governmental capacity in 2002 and 2003 might have averted the rise of a neo-Taliban insurgency. Once an insurgency gets going, it is almost impossible to stop it militarily (only 20 percent of insurgencies are defeated on the battleground).

A bicycle bomb detonated remotely killed 7 persons and wounded 14 on Tuesday morning in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province. The bombing is a bad sign, since Lashkar Gah was supposedly the secure base for the US/ Afghan National Army attack on Marjah to the West, but even the capital is not stable.

In Zabul-- another southern, Pashtun province-- a roadside bomb wounded 5 Romanian troops.

The Afghanistan cabinet issued a strong condemnation of NATO for an airstrike in the province of Dai Kundi, which is alleged to have killed 21 civilians and wounded 14 in 3 vehicles. Aljazeera Arabic noted that the US and its allies have repeatedly mistakenly fired rockets at civilians and repeatedly apologized, and that Afghans are getting tired of it.

Pakistani Cmdr. Khalid Iqbal (ret.) critiques Operation Mushtarik (together) from a military point of view. It is a fine piece of analysis, though he is wrong that the Taliban 'call the shots' in most Afghan provinces. They only control 10-15% of the country, though they have "a presence" in some other parts of it; but the presence exactly overlaps with areas of Pashtun settlement (e.g. 1/3 of the northern province of Qunduz is Pashtun, and there are some Taliban among them; but most of the north has few Pashtuns and only tiny numbers of Taliban). He says:

1. American commanders ignored the lessons learned in Swat Valley by the Pakistani military, particularly the need to set up checkpoints to prevent the escape of large numbers of militants.

2. Instead, the US actually closed down some checkpoints along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, virtually guaranteeing that large numbers of insurgents would flee Marjah for safe haven in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

3. This influx of militants into Pakistan could well reinvigorate the militant movement in the northwest, which has been devastated by Pakistani military and intelligence moves, by arrests or killings of leaders, and by US drone strikes. Calming down Marjah while stirring up FATA is not a particular advance.

4. The Americans are not taking account of the possibility of a popular Pashtun backlash inside Afghanistan against their 'surge.'

5. President Hamid Karzai lacks the political standing inside the country to be an effective partner in working for a political settlement. Not all of his foes are necessarily 'Taliban.'

6. The Afghanistan National Army is not actually ready to provide security in Marjah after the Taliban are quelled. Therefore, either the US troops will get bogged down there trying to keep the Taliban from taking back over, or they will leave affairs in the hands of the ANA, which may well open the door to a Taliban return, given the Afghan Army's unpreparedness. Either way, the Marjah campaign is either a trap or a Sisyphean task.

In contrast, the Russians are very pleased by the destruction of the heroin labs in Marjah by the US Marines. In an interview with Ekho Moskvy Radio on Monday, February 22, 2010, Dimitri Rogozin-- the Russian Federation's permanent representative to NATO-- explained that Russia's main interest in AFghanistan is not fear of the spread of Muslim extremism into southern Russia but rather the spread of heroin, which has already produced 2.5 million addicts and 30,000 deaths a year. Russian leaders see drug and alcohol use as among the prime reasons for the country's catastrophic loss of population since the fall of the Soviet Union (the population fell by approximately 10 million, a virtually unheard-of decline given the absence of famine or plague as causes. And they see demographic decline as a security problem).

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases or translates the Rogozin interview, and here is the Afghanistan bit:

' Russia's permanent representative to NATO, Dmitriy Rogozin, has said that Russia will not send its troops to Afghanistan "under any circumstances". Rogozin was the studio guest of the "Dnevnoy Razvorot" ("U-Turn") programme on Gazprom-owned, editorially independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on 22 February. Rogozin also said that Russia would only provide support for NATO operations in Afghanistan on the condition that the alliance became engaged in "destroying drugs laboratories and drugs mafia" in that country. In the wide-ranging interview, Rogozin also talked about Georgia, the current state of relations with NATO, US missile defence plans in Europe and Ukraine.

Afghanistan

At the start of the interview, Rogozin was asked to comment on NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen's recent statement on the possibility of Russia becoming engaged in NATO's operation in Afghanistan. To a question whether this is possible, Rogozin said: "No". He explained: "Because our position of principle is that we are not taking part in the military phase of the operation in Afghanistan. We shall not send our soldiers or officers there under any circumstances." Rogozin then added that Russia was ready to provide "any other assistance" to NATO in Afghanistan.

Speaking of Russia's interests in Afghanistan he said that "they are specific. For example, we are not afraid of Taleban, right? They are not threatening us as some kind of a force that will attack Russia. I don't believe this." He went on: "But we are afraid of drugs. That is, the heroin aggression is real. It is on such a scale, it has increased approximately 40 times, well, the volumes of production of opiates on Afghan territory have increased 40 times since 2002, that is - you can practically count from the moment of foreign armies, foreign troops appearing there.

And therefore we believe that because our borders are practically porous in the southern direction, deliveries of hard drugs - and heroin is a hard drug, much harder than cocaine, than synthetic substances, than all sorts of grasses - this heroin is killing us. According to our estimates, approximately 30,000 people annually." Rogozin added that there were at least 2.5 million heroin addicts in Russia.

He also said that the scale of drug trafficking did not depend on whether Taleban would strengthen its position in Afghanistan or not, as Taleban's attitude to drugs was "cynical".

Rogozin then mentioned "dogs of war" as a second threat to Russia. "That is not Taleban, but fighters drawn in by war from other countries, who are now bogged down in the war with the Americans and their allies, but if the war ends, they will look for a use for themselves. There are about three to four thousand well-trained militants who are such crazy citizens. Naturally, if the war ends, they will most probably go to somewhere in Central Asia."

Asked to clarify what Russia's main interests were, Rogozin said: "Our first interest consists of the Americans - by waging war and resolving their own interests in Afghanistan, which do not contradict our interests - destroying that extremist element which in any other s

ituation will fight against us or our allies in Central Asia. And our second interest consists of the Americans and their allies - having a large grouping in Afghanistan, they are interested in transit and many other things, in logistical, rear support of their grouping, but we are making this support conditional on them having to fight against heroin. That is we are putting in front of them the enemy which we consider as being the main enemy, not a virtual one, such as Taliban, which will not attack Russia - we understand that this is a purely internal Afghan phenomenon - but, let's say, heroin is already attacking our country."

Rogozin was then asked about talks that are currently being held with NATO. He said that such talks "are being held constantly. We are saying that we shall not do anything for our NATO colleagues unless they deal with the problem, tackle the problem of destroying heroin supplies. They have now reported to us that last year, the amount of heroin coming from Afghanistan decreased, including the amount of crops which decreased. But we consider this to be useless scrap of paper, I'm sorry to say, because the amount of heroin mainly decreased precisely because it had been overproduced, that is there is such an amount of processed heroin in warehouses, there is such an amount of precursors in warehouses, which had already been brought into Afghanistan, that demand has simply decreased. Therefore our future support for NATO actions in Afghanistan will now be made conditional to the absolute degree upon their intentions and their real actions aimed at destroying drugs laboratories, destroying drugs mafia, cooperating with our structures, including the CSTO, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also conducts specialized operations aimed at intercepting drug supplies."

Rogozin also said that he receives information about NATO's specific operations in Afghanistan. He added that approximately 30 per cent of his working time in NATO is spent on discussing Afghanistan. '

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Facebook Fan Page

Facebook keeps promising to lift the 5000-friend limit, but has not done it. So my account over there is more or less full. Just to let readers who are interested know that the Facebook Informed Comment fan page works nearly as well, and that I've been trying to spend some time there, making a few extra postings and comments.

Also, remember that there is an Informed Comment iPhone app.

Since social media is so important to what used to be called blogging, and some action has shifted to news upvote sites, I'm always grateful to readers who submit postings to Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc.


End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Five Questions for the Afghan Surge; Or, Getting Past the Hype

Gen. David Petraeus, a straight shooter, admitted on Meet the Press Sunday that the Afghanistan War will take years and incur high casualties.. His implicit defense of President Obama from Dick Cheney on the issues of torture and closing Guantanamo will make bigger headlines, but sooner or later the American public will notice the admission. The country is now evenly divided between those who think the US can and should restore a modicum of stability before getting out, and those who want a quick withdrawal. The Marjah Campaign, the centerpiece of the new counter-insurgency strategy, is over a week old, and some assessment of this new, visible push by the US military in violent Helmand Province is in order.

There was never any doubt that the US and NATO would win militarily, fairly easily occupying Marjah and nearby Nad Ali. Marjah at 85,000 or so is a city smaller than Ann Arbor, Michigan. The campaign is only significant in a larger social and political context. The questions are:

1. Can the stategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, of taking, clearing, holding and building be extended deep into the Pashtun regions? Marjah is only a stepping stone to the key southern city of Qandahar, which has a population of a million, more the size of Detroit.

This outcome has yet to be seen. But for rural Pashtuns to come to love foreign occupiers is an unlikely proposition. Even the WSJ admits that in Marjah, the Marines are not exactly feeling the love from the civilians they have supposedly just liberated. Since the Taliban are typically not as corrupt as the warlords, in fact, to any extent that the US and NATO re-install corrupt warlord types in power, they may alienate the locals. And keeping civilian casualties low so as to win hearts and minds is key here. That task will become more difficult as the US inserts itself more deeply into Pashtun territory, since insurgent villages will have to be defeated. The Soviet occupation produced 5 million externally displaced and 2 million internally displaced, along with hundreds of thousands dead. A campaign in Qandahar could easily displace half a million people, and they might mind. Meanwhile, on Monday, the governor of Dai Kundi asserted that a US airstrike killed 27 persons, mostly civilians. There is also the question, raised by Tom Englehardt, of whether the US is capable of good governance in Afghanistan when it is not in Washington, DC.

2. Can the demonstration of vitality and of a sense of progress mollify NATO publics long enough to fight a prolonged war and do intensive training of troops and police over several years?

No. Over the weekend, the center-left government of the Netherlands fell over whether to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war is universally unpopular in continental Europe, and governments have troops there mostly in the teeth of popular opposition, because NATO invoked article 5 of its charter, 'an attack on one is an attack on all' with regard to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks. It may take months after the next elections this spring for the Dutch to form a new government, in part because of the surging popularity of the far-right populist anti-Muslim 'Freedom Party' of Islamophobe Geert Wilders-- a smelly party the others will probably not want in their coalition. Holland's 2000 troops are likely to be withdrawn by late summer. Canada's military is also departing Afghanistan. Are these one-off situations, or are they the beginning of a NATO withdrawal over-all, which will leave Obama in the lurch? Australia is already refusing to take up the Dutch slack, and its government is under public pressure to get out, itself. While it is entirely possible that scandal-plagued rightwing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi will survive the next elections in Italy, it is also possible that he will not, and his successor may well want out of the unpopular Afghanistan quagmire. Moreover, the Pashtun insurgents may smell blood in the water with the Dutch withdrawal from Uruzgan (the home province of Mullah Omar), and target the smaller NATO contingents (the deaths of 6 Italian troops last fall raised public ire against the war).

There are about 45,000 NATO and other allied troops in Afghanistan, and 74,000 American. Obama wanted to increase the European contingent by 10,000, but NATO generally declined that offer, and now the NATO contingent may begin to shrink just when more trainers in particular are desperatedly needed. The Afghanistan National Army is supposedly nearly 100,000 strong, but many critics say the true number is half that, and that even that half is mostly illiterate, poorly trained, and often suffers from uncertain loyalties, drug use, or other debilitating considerations.

3. Can an Afghan army be stood up in short order that has the capacity to patrol independently and keep order after the US and NATO troops withdraw?

Unlikely. The answer to the question about Afghan military preparedness-- after nearly a decade of training and an investment of $1 billion that Afghan troops are not ready for prime time. In the Marjah campaign, they showed no initiative, no ability to fight independently. They are poorly served by their junior field officers, and they are 90% illiterate. (The NYT reporter expected to see them with maps out planning approaches!) The ethnic make-up of the particular Afghanistan National Army units sent into Marjah is also not clear. Almost no ANA troops hail from Helmand Province, and Tajiks (native speakers of Dari Persian, often from towns and cities) are vastly over-represented in the army. There is often bad blood between Tajiks and Pashtuns, the group that predominates in Marjah. The same skill set of the ANA most prized by the US Marines during the assault-- the ability to sniff out which households are Taliban-- may be a liability in the holding and building phase, since it stems from a decade and a half of Tajik Northern Alliance battles against the Taliban.

4. Can the Afghan public, which includes many groups (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks) deeply harmed by Taliban rule, accept reconciliation, as well?

Unlikely. Former Northern Alliance leader popular among Tajiks, Abdullah Abdullah, warned Karzai against reconciling with the Taliban this weekend. Abdullah dropped out of last fall's presidential contest in protest against alleged ballot fraud in Karzai's favor. There is general hostility toward reconciliation with the Taliban among the parties representing northern, non-Pashtun ethnic groups.

5. Can so much pressure be put on the Taliban that at least their middle and lower ranks will accept reconciliation with the Karzai government?

So far, there is no sign that the Taliban leadership still at large is interested in negotiations. A Taliban spokesman replied to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's call for reconciliation with Kabul over the weekend with a resounding 'No!'. Qari Muhammad Yusuf Ahmadi told the Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto that the Taliban would cease fighting when there were not further foreign troops in his country. He said, according to the translation in The News:

“The entire world knows that foreign forces have invaded Afghanistan and occupied this country. They have also started the fighting. Taliban will neither lay down weapons nor will hold talks with Karzai administration even in the presence of a single foreign soldier in Afghanistan. . .”

“The ongoing war in Afghanistan is between Afghans and foreigners. The responsibility of the war lies on the foreigners and their slaves. They continue fighting in the populated areas and have sent 15000 troops to small area like Marja; and are killing civilians and trying to impose infidels on Afghans.”

“Karzai himself has no power. The foreigners control everything and the nation is fighting against them.”

Commenting on the deaths of 12 civilians in Marjah, Qari Muhammad said: “Karzai should have said who martyred the people. In fact neither Taliban kill the people and nor destroy their houses. These are foreigners who are bombing the houses and killing civilians everywhere as they have brought miseries to the people of Marja.”

On the other hand, those members of the Taliban shadow government now in Pakistani custody may be less categorical. A third Taliban commander, Maulvi Kabir (the shadow governor of Nangarhar Province) has been captured by the Pakistani military, allegedly based on information provided by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar, the military chief of staff for the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar, was picked up recently in Karachi in a joint operation of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and US intelligence, which picked up signals from Baradar. Serious inroads are being made by these arrests into the Taliban 'shadow government' of officials who plan out roadside bombings and other attacks in specific provinces of Afghanistan while hiding out in Pakistan.

Pakistan's Prime Minister, Riza Yusuf Gilani, and the military chief of state, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, appear to believe that capturing these high Afghan Taliban leaders will give Islamabad leverage in a negotiated settlement of the contest between the Karzai government and the Pashtun religious far right, which is in insurgency.

Obama's Afghanistan escalation among the sullen Pashtuns is a desperate policy, as dangerous as attempting to build a series of sand castles on the beach at low tide.

Ironically, his bigger success has come in Pakistan, where he appears to have convinced the Pakistani elite to intervene decisively against their own, Pakistani Taliban, and also now to begin arresting the Old Taliban shadow government that is hiding out on Pakistani soil. If he can go further and convince Islamabad that its support of the Afghan Taliban was all a long a key strategic error that has blown back on Pakistan proper, he will thereby come closer to victory than he could by any military measures inside Afghanistan itself.

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunni Party to Boycott Iraq Elections

The LAT reports that the National Dialogue Front, a secular party led by Salih Mutlak, is calling for a boycott of the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq. The NDF has 11 seats in parliament, but Mutlak and another prominent party member were among over 500 candidates (out of over 6000) for parliament disqualified as too close to the prohibited Baath Party. Many of those excluded from running had openly criticized the provision in the Iraqi constitution that bans members of the Baath Party from public life. The purge of Mutlak has been widely condemned in Iraq as unfair, since he left the party in the late 1970s.

Mutlak announced that the boycott decision was taken after remarks by American leaders in Iraq that the banning of candidates had been instigated by Iran. Mutlak said that the upcoming polls in Iraq had been hijacked by Iran and were being conducted according to the Iranian rules, wherein the regime predetermines who wins and some candidates are excluded from running.

Some observers worry that there will be a mass Sunni boycott of the elections, as happened with disastrous effects in January of 2005. I don't think that catastrophe can now be repeated, because at that time the elections were held on a nation-wide basis. The current elections instead have Iraqi provinces as the electoral unit. Thus, the largely Sunni provinces of al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Ninevah will return a lot of Sunni members of parliament even with a boycott (the resulting members of parliament just would not represent that many people).

Liz Sly of the LAT says that there are two main Shiite blocs for the first time in this election (the first two parliamentary elections saw the Shiite religious parties unite into a single coalition). But she says that the two " have an informal agreement" to come together as a mega-coalition after the elections, which will enable them to form the government. (In the Iraqi constitution, the largest single party or coalition in parliament gets first shot at choosing the prime minister.)

I have argued that the Shiite-dominated Accountability and Justice Committee may have banned Mutlak precisely in hopes that his National Dialogue Front would boycott, thus depriving the Iraqiya list of enough seats to make a bid to form the government.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the National Dialogue Front gave as further reasons for its boycott that it was also concerned about the lack of security for elections, by the government's arbitrary arrest of its candidates and party workers, and by the lack of a truly independent high electoral commission.

In contrast, the National Iraqi List, headed by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi-- which the National Dialogue Front had joined in a coalition effort-- announced that it would begin campaigning in earnest after last week's one-week hiatus. Allawi kicked off the campaign with a visit to the capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh, for consultations with King Abdullah. Saudi Arabia has backed Iraqi Sunnis behind the scenes, and is worried about Iranian influence in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the main Shiite bloc, the National Iraqi Alliance (which includes the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, formed in 1982 in Iran), accused the United States of interfering in Iraqi domestic politics and of plotting to bring the Baath Party back into prominence as the "neo-Baath."



End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Top Russian General: An American Attack on Iran would lead to US Collapse; Wants to Block It; Kremlin Rejects Crippling Sanctions

It appears that, the International Atomic Energy Agency is at least allowing for the possibility that documents allegedly found on a laptop some years ago --but discounted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency as of dubious provenance and incompatible with other intelligence gathered in Iran -- point to a nuclear weapons program that no one has been able to locate. Some close observers have concluded that the laptop documents are forgeries. A new IAEA report that declines to dismiss the alleged documents will certainly cause the war lobby in the United States to redouble its efforts to get up an attack on Iran.

Forged documents on the supposed purchase of yellowcake uranium by Iraq from Niger were used by George W. Bush to promote a war on Iraq. It was at that time the Intelligence and Research division of the Department of State that attempted to throw cold water on these "documents," but was ignored by the president. Then head of the IAEA, Mohammed Elbaradei, was able to show them false in one afternoon.

The UN inspectors have a right to be frustrated with Iran, which has allowed inspections of its Natanz nuclear enrichment site, but which has not been completely transparent or adhered to the letter of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the sum of those frustrations does not point to a nuclear weapons program, unlike the disputed laptop documents. In statements to the press this fall, US intelligence officials have said that they stand behind the conclusions first reached in 2007, that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

The Obama administration wants stricter sanctions on Iran, and the Sarah Palin/ Daniel Pipes lunatic fringe wants a military attack on Iran.

But Russia's General of the Army Nikolay Makarov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, warned that an American attack on Iran now, when the US is bogged down in two wars, might well lead to the collapse of the United States. He said that such an attack would roil the region and have negative consequences for Russia (a neighbor of Iran via the Caspian Sea). And, he said, the Russian military is taking steps to forestall such an American strike on Iran. Makarov made the remarks in Vzglyad on Friday, February 19, 2010, and they were translated or paraphrased by the USG Open Source Center:

'Makarov also commented on the recent rumors about the possibility of an attack upon Iran by the United States. In his opinion, this would be complete madness on the part of the American military. He said: "Admiral Michael McMullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently said that, in the United States, there is a plan for carrying out strikes against Iran but the United States clearly understands that now, when it is conducting two military campaigns, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan, a third campaign against Iran would simply lead to a collapse. It would not be able to withstand the strain."

Nevertheless, in proportion to the winding down of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, (the plan for) a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the opinion of General Makarov, may again come out to the foreground.

General Makarov, Chief of the General Staff, said: "The consequences of such an attack will be terrible not only for the region but also for us. Iran is our neighbor and we are very carefully following this situation. The leadership of our country is undertaking all measures in order not to allow such a (military) development of events." '

The less potentially catastrophic path, tougher United Nations Security Council sanctions, however, depend on Russia and China going along. Despite Washington's optimism that Russia is softening toward the idea of stricter sanctions, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov cast the severest doubts on that idea on Friday.

In a radio interview on Friday with Ekho Moskvy Radio, which was translated by the USG Open Source Center, Lavrov was asked, "What is the situation with Iran's foreign policy today? And is it true that we now have as a whole a united position with the United States on Iran?"

The foreign minister replied, "I don't think that we have a united position." He said that both Washington and Moscow agree on the importance of not allowing "a violation of the regime of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons." He said the two countries have the same position on this issue, "although we do not coincide 100 per cent in methods of implementing it."

So what Lavrov is saying is that the US and Russia do not actually have a common position or agree on really tough sanctions. They just both have a vague similar position that proliferation is bad.

Lavrov said that Moscow's independent stance toward Iran is rooted in the two countries' historical relationship as well as in Russian desire to get Iranian cooperation on such issues as the disposition of resources in the Caspian Sea. (For a quick overview of Russian-Iranian relations, see N.M. Mamedova, who also mentions Iran's tacit support for Russia against Georgia in the Caucasus.) Lavrov said:

' But Iran for us, unlike the US, is a close neighbour, a country with which we have had a very long, historically conditioned relationship, a country with which we cooperate in the economic, humanitarian and military-technology fields alike and, let me note this particularly, a country that is our partner in the Caspian along with three other Caspian littoral states.

Therefore, we are not at all indifferent to what happens in Iran and around it. This applies to our economic interests and our security interests alike. This also applies . . . to the task of early settlement of the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which is not an easy task and in the approaches to which the Iranian position is close enough to ours.

Therefore, speaking of the proliferation threats, yes, we are concerned about Iran's reaction. '

Lavrov is less convinced there is anything sinister about Iran's civilian nuclear research, though he admits that questions remain:

' in the process of work, questions arose both from the IAEA's inspectors themselves and on the basis of the intelligence which the IAEA obtains from various countries. They were questions that aroused suspicion as to whether there might in reality be some military aspects to Iran's nuclear programme.

These questions were presented to the Iranians, as required by the procedures applicable in such cases. And, some time ago, Iran answered most of them. In principle, its answers were satisfactory, in a way that was considered by the professionals in Vienna normal. However, some of the questions are still on the table. '

So Lavrov thinks Iran's answers are largely 'satisfactory,' though there remain small areas of uncertainty.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in Moscow earlier this week calling for 'crippling sanctions on Iran.' Lavrov's remarks clearly indicated that Moscow disagreed that that situation was so perilous as to call for such a step.

But just to be sure there was no misunderstanding, Lavrov sent out his own deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, to denounce any such talk.

Ryabkov said, according to Xinhua, "The term 'crippling sanctions' on Iran is totally unacceptable to us. The sanctions should aim at strengthening the regime of non- proliferation . . . We certainly cannot talk about sanctions that could be interpreted as punishment on the whole country and its people for some actions or inaction . . . " He said that Russia sought to settle differences with Iran through dialogue and engagement. He also pledged that Russia would honor its deal to provide Iran S-300 air defense systems. He said, "There is a contract to supply these systems to Iran and we will fulfil it. The delays are linked to technical problems with adjusting these systems . . . "

So on Friday, even as the hawks in Washington watered at the mouth at the prospect of being able to use the new IAEA report as a basis for belligerency against Iran, Russia's foreign policy establishment was engaged in a whirlwind of activity aimed at challenging the notion that Moscow is was in Washington's back pocket on Iran sanctions. The chief of staff predicted American collapse in an Iran conflagration, and vowed in any case to try to block any such attack. The foreign minister pronounced himself largely but not completely satisfied with Iran's answers concerning its nuclear activities, and underlined that Russia needs Iran because of Caspian issues (and he could have added, because of Caucasus and Central Asian ones). And then the deputy foreign minister was enlisted to slap Netanyahu around a little, presumably on the theory that it would sting less coming from someone with 'deputy' in his title.

Those who have argued that Russia's increasing willingness to acquiesce in tougher UNSC sanctions might influence China to go along, too, should rethink. Russia doesn't seem all that aboard with a brutal sanctions regime. China not only has its own reasons not to want its own deals with Iran to be declared illegal, but its leaders doubt Iran has the capacity to construct a nuclear warhead anytime soon.

Postscript: The head of Iran's nuclear program, interviewed on Aljazeera, warns the US against pressuring Iran.


End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Khamenei Again Decries Nukes as Illegal in Islamic Law

The USG Open Source Center monitored Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's speech at the christening of an Iranian destroyer, Jamaran, on Iranian official radio, in which Khamenei again denied that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and affirmed that they are illegal in Islamic law because they kill large numbers of innocent non-combatants.

"Khamene'i Denies Iran Seeking Nuclear Weapons
Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1
Friday, February 19, 2010 ...
Document Type: OSC Summary ...

Tehran Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 in Persian in its 1030 GMT newscast on 19 February broadcast a report on the acceptance ceremony for the Iranian navy's new destroyer, Jamaran, which was attended by Supreme Leader Seyyed Ali Khamene'i. The announcer-read report said Khamene'i delivered an address in which he stressed that Iran is not seeking an atomic bomb.

The announcer quoted Khamene'i as saying: "The old and idle talk about Iran making atomic bombs shows that even in terms of propaganda the enemies of the nation have resorted to repeating themselves out of sheer weakness."

He was also quoted as saying Iran would not become emotional in response to such "nonsense."

The announcer further quoted him as saying: "We have said repeatedly that our religious beliefs and principles prohibit such weapons as they are the symbol of destruction of generations. And for this reason we do not believe in weapons and atomic bombs and do not seek them."

According to the announcer, in another part of his speech Khamene'i referred to claims by the US and other Western countries about Iran's actions against its neighbors, saying: "Our neighbors know that such claims are lies. By creating discord, America and Israel are trying to divert the attention of the Islamic ummah from its main enemies, namely America and Israel." "

End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hypocrisy over IRS Bomber

If you hate the US government for collecting taxes from you and are willing to fly a plane into a Federal building, you just might be a terrorist.



But, nah, not if you're a white guy.



Some Tea Partiers, who likewise are outraged at paying taxes, are eager to adopt this domestic terrorist.



If he'd been a Muslim or a member of another minority group, they'd be calling for the posthumous beheading of his ashes.





End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Haqqani Son Killed in Drone Attack; 2 Taliban Leaders Captured; 4 NATO Troops KIA in Marjah

A US drone strike on N. Waziristan has allegedly killed Muhammad Haqqani, a son of guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Haqqani network is considered particularly skilled insurgents, and is the faction closes to both the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and to al-Qaeda. Jalaluddin's health is said to be poor and he may have already turned most decisions over to his other son, Siraj. The Telegraph hinted that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence has ceased supporting the Haqqanis behind the scenes, and may even have helped the Americans target their drone strike.

According to Dawn, the governor of the Afghan province of Qunduz is reporting that Pakistan has "arrested Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Mohammad, respectively the shadow governors of the northern Afghan provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan" in Pakistani Baluchistan (presumably in Quetta). Islamabad has yet to confirm the report.

The NYT revealed that Pakistan had captured the Old Taliban's no. 2 man, Mulla Abdul Ghani Baradar, and it is not impossible that these two were picked up with intelligence gained from him. Pakistan and the US have still not decided whether to treat Mullah Baradar as an enemy combatant or to attempt to persuade him to back a reconciliation of the Taliban with the Karzai government in Islamabad. Gareth Porter believes that the reconciliation idea was put forward by Pakistan as a means of asserting Islambad's indispensability to any settlement between Hamid Karzai and Mullah Omar.

These actions are degrading the leadership abilities of the Taliban and the Haqqani network, and creating a sense of momentum against the Taliban.

As US special envoy to Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Islambad Thursday for consultations with the government, a bomb was set off at a cattle market in the Khyber Agency. It killed 20 and wounded 80. One of those killed was militant leader Azam Khan, of the Lashkar-i Islam or army of Islam. The bombing may have been the work of Ansar-i Islam, a rival political grouping which has feuded for some time with the Lashkar.

Aljazeera English interviews the former governor of Helmand, now a cabinet member, about the progress of the Marjah campaign:



Aljazeera English probes the possibility of reconciliation between the Taliban and the Kabul government is very difficult.



Meanwhile, on the Afghan side of the border, guerrilla foes of the Karzai government and the foreign troop presence in Marjah killed 4 NATO troops with roadside bombs and sniping.

Richard Holbrooke claimed that some Taliban in the Marjah area are considering defecting to the side of President Hamid Karzai. (This assertion is not far-fetched. Some clan chieftains adopt a Taliban allegiance rather as a franchise, and they drop it just as easily.)

Brave New Films reports on the condition of Afghan women:



Nick Turse on US bases in Afghanistan at Tomdispatch.


End/ (Not Continued)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the 'Anti-Semitism' Charge

The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel's reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing around making fools of themselves by smearing critics of those policies as racists. (Anyone who knows how Likud supporters talk among themselves about Arabs and other outsiders can only be amused at their impudent hypocrisy in playing the race card.)

The mess that Mossad's mercenaries (some of them possibly from the Fateh Palestinian faction also opposed to Hamas) made of a routine political assassination in Dubai of a Hamas agent funneling arms from Iran is a blow against Ithe image of daring, stone-cold competence cultivated by the Israeli security establishment. The killing went smoothly, but it transpires that the assassins had not only stolen the passport identities of British and Irish citizens, but those of several Israeli dual citizens originally from the UK, as well. Mossad thus made potential problems for those passport holders for the rest of their lives, since Interpol will be interested every time the numbers pop up at an airport check-in.

The incident has roiled diplomatic relations with Ireland and the UK. But it is also controversial in Israel (not the assassination but the bumbling clumsy identity theft against Israeli citizens). After all, branding an innocent Israeli an assassin is a sort of blood libel. Indeed, casual political assassination as a routine Israeli method of statecraft makes many Jews uncomfortable, as is visible in Steven Spielberg's film, Munich.

But the harbingers of isolation are numerous. The Netanyahu government has largely defied President Obama's requests for a halt to the colonization of the West Bank (a freeze on building new settlements in part of the West Bank, while existing settlements are expanded and Palestinians are thrown in the street in Jerusalem does not count).

The Israeli siege of the children of Gaza, some of whom are looking skinnier, is impossible to justify and provoked even a US congressman to urge a forceful breaking of the blockade. The Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes (and which also acknowledges Hamas war crimes) for the United Nations is likely to attain an official status of a sort denied to previous such clear-eyed examinations of Israeli military action. (Israel's leadership suffered not the least from dropping nearly a million cluster bombs on the civilian farms of southern Lebanon in the last 3 days of the 2006 Lebanon War, though this targeting of civilians was illegal and the US Congress had stipulated that the weapons could not be used that way).

The reactionary parties of Likud, Shas, and Yisrael Beitenu have nothing in common with the vast majority of Jewish Americans, who voted for Barack Obama and are generally more progressive than non-Jewish Americans. The establishment of a liberal Jewish lobby, J Street, which supports a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine side by side), is a manifestation of the increasing unease of progessive Jewish Americans with the policies and aggressive wars of rightwing Israeli governments. Jewish Americans have been key to the securing of many of our civil liberties in this country and a major voice for peace and for culture and the arts, and a thug like Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister surely makes many of them uneasy. It is no accident that the Likud government has snubbed a delegation of US Congress members to Israel who support J Street. The Netanyahu government is all about colonizing more of the West Bank and preventing the rise of a Palestinian state.

Then you have Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein supporting the movement to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza civilians, including children.

The Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank provoked former president Jimmy Carter to warn of an Apartheid situation. Although he was viciously attacked by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and subjected to the typical dirty tricks deployed by fanatical nationalists of all stripes, he has been vindicated by remarks of Israeli politician Ehud Barak, who just said the same thing Carter had.

The occupation is also provoking an increasing move to boycott Israel, especially firms and concerns based in the West Bank settlements or connected to the Lebanon and Gaza Wars. The second largest union of Canadian federal employees has joined such a boycott. During the Gaza War, Scandinavian grocery chains cancelled their orders for Israeli fruit, and the South African longshoremen declined to unload Israeli ships.

It is anxiety over the prospect that the current far-right Netanyahu government is becoming increasingly isolated from the world community, including the Obama administration in the US, and from a new generation of progressive Jewish Americans that explains the rash of scurrilous charges of 'anti-Semitism' being thrown around by the 'Israel-can-do-no-wrong' crowd in recent days.

You had Leon Wieseltier's unsubstantiated and shameful attack on Andrew Sullivan, which Sullivan effectively refuted -- as did Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Ygglesias, and a number of others. As Greenwald points out, the use of the 'anti-Semitism' charge against ordinary every day non-bigotted people who just don't agree with some policy of Israel or of the American Enterprise Institute risks making the term meaningless and cheapening it, which can hardly be good for the Jews.

Meanwhile, the main strategy of the Israeli and Jewish-American Right to preserve Israeli capacity to continue the colonization and to act belligerently in the region had been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That strategem has failed, as I argued in Salon. The Shiite fundamentalists who have taken over Baghdad are pro-Hizbullah and pro-Palestinian. (Hizbullah was in part set up by the Islamic Mission Party, Da'wa, of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and Da'wa supported Hamas in the recent Gaza War). Moreover, Baghdad has ceased helping contain Iran for the Sunni Arab world and the West, and is now a close ally of Tehran. The prospect of a well-armed, 250,000-man Iraqi army now being reconstituted, and riddled with agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, must be a matter of consternation for Israelis. Only Jordan separates them from Iraq, now an outpost of the Shiite religious parties allied with Khamenei. The Neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle, David Frum, Paul Wolfowitz, Irv Lewis Libby, Michael Rubin, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Larry Franklin and others thus not only shot themselves in the foot, but they shot Israel in the chest.

This Iraq strategy, which intended to stop the Rabin peace process and prevent the return of Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians for their state, was laid out by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and other Neoconservatives in a white paper for Bibi Netanyahu in 1996. Many of the authors were subsequently put in high office by Bush-Cheney and pushed for an American war on Iraq with dirty tricks and false propaganda in 2002-2003. They included Canadian gadfly journalist David Frum, who authored Bush's 2002 'Axis of Evil' speech in consultation with Perle. The mostly Jewish Neoconservatives were only one faction in the Bush-Cheney coalition that wanted regime change in Baghdad, which included the Christian Right, Big Oil, and the military-industrial complex. However influential, they were not 'in control' and most Jewish Americans opposed their ideas and policies.

Frum, a Canadian who only became naturalized as a US citizen in 2007, was important in the early years of the Bush presidency and crafted many of the falsehoods and propaganda points that got up the Iraq War. He bears a heavy responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of over 4000 US military personnel, for the deaths of some 600,000 Iraqis, and for the displacement of nearly 4 million Iraqis. In a just world, David Frum would be on trial for his role in severe violations of international law, as would Bush, Cheney, Perle, and the rest of those bald-faced liars and warmongers.

To cover his prevarications and failed policies, Frum joined Wieseltier in playing the anti-Semitism card at CNN this week, piling on Sullivan but also smearing yours truly. His exhibit A was a passage in which I complained about supporters of the Israeli Likud party attempting to enlist the US military to fight wars on behalf of that party's platform. The column was mainly about Larry Franklin, a Catholic, who went to jail on espionage charges for passing classified Pentagon documents to AIPAC and the Israeli embassy.

Since supporters of the Likud government, Christian and Jewish, are even now attempting to foment a US war on Iran on behalf of rightwing objectives in Israel (Iran is no more a threat to the United States than Iraq had been), I rather stand by my condemnation of them.

As someone who travels to Israel, collaborates on research with Israeli colleagues, supports Israelis' right to live normal and fulfilling lives in security, and recently stayed in a kubbutz, I am puzzled by Frum's innuendo. I am critical of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank, but then so are former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak; I think I probably haven't said anything on the issue that clear-eyed Israelis haven't already said themselves.

But I will complain about David Frum's dual loyalties. I am very suspicious of a rightwing Stephen Harper-style Canadian becoming so influential in the United States. I like my Canadians in their normal, sane estate. I fear he may be influencing my country in directions that benefit rightwing Canadian politicians and war industries in Ottawa. Although Canada has also leant us treasures like William Shatner, Dan Akroyd and Paul Schaeffer, for which I'm grateful, the latter never became ensconced in the halls of power or encouraged anyone to fire a shot in anger off the set.


End/ (Not Continued)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.