Zinni on What Went Wrong



In the wake of Gen. Anthony Zinni's 60 Minutes appearance, it is worth looking in detail at his recent essay on what went wrong.



The Center for Defense Information has put up a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush administration Iraq policy by Gen. Zinni has presented a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. A summary by way of excerpts (I've omitted ellipses, but these grafs are not continuous with one another):

"And I think that will be the first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn't work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union, has worked with North Korea and others.



"The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed. I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.



"The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. The books were cooked, in my mind.



"We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.



"I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task . . . You are about to go into a problem that you don't know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.



"The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous "Gucci Guerillas" from London. We bought into their intelligence reports.



"The seventh problem has been the lack of planning . . . And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.



"The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground. There were a lot more troops in my military plan for operations in Iraq.



"The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there. No one can tell me the Coalition Provisional Authority had any planning for its structure.



"And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that's a series of bad decisions on the ground. De-Baathifying down to a point where you've alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don't have blood on their hands, but know how to make the trains run on time . . .



"Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it's not Mark Thompson it's somebody else, and says "What would you do now?" You know, there's a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it's time to just pull out, cut your losses. I'm not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we've come pretty close to that.



"I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that UN resolution. That's been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need."

Other Zinni links:



Before the war: 'What Planet are They Living On? - Salon.com".



September 2003 - Lehrer News Hour



May 15, 2004 - Abu Ghraib and other issues.

Continued Fallout of War of Holy Cities



Even though Karbala has fallen quiet, there were clashes on other fronts. 20 people were killed and 50 wounded in clashes between the US and the Mahdi Army militia in Kufa, the stronghold of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr.



In the fourth such incident in a week, angry Islamist students in Tehran attempted to attack the British embassy in protest over the fighting in the holy cities of Iraq. They clashed with riot police and were eventually forced back.



Iran also demanded formally that the United States withdraw altogether from Iraq, and expressed its anguish over the desecration of the holy cities. The BBC reports that sympathy may be growing among Iran´s hardliners for Muqtada.



Even the chief ally in Iraq of the US, the United Kingdom, produced an internal memo harshly critical of US heavy handedness in Iraq, instancing the prison torture scandal, Fallujah, and Najaf.

A Shiite International?



There was more heavy fighting in Karbala early on Friday, after which the city fell eerily quiet. By Friday night into early Saturday morning, Mahdi Army militiamen had mysteriously ceased fighting, and the US had withdrawn from sites like Mukhayyam mosque near the shrine of Imam Husain. Meanwhile, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on his followers to continue to fight even if he is killed.



There were big demonstrations Friday throughout the Shiite world, including Lebanon, Bahrain, Iran and Pakistan, against continued US fighting in Karbala, a key holy city for Shiite Muslims.



Geo-strategically, this entire episode is a huge disaster. Some Americans may feel it is unfair of Shiites to blame only the US for the fighting, when it is Muqtada's militia that is firing from the shrines. But life is unfair. People always mind what foreigners do to the symbols of their native identity more than they mind what their own radicals do.



Al-Qaeda's declaration of war on the US was a ploy to turn Sunni Muslims, especially hard liners like Wahhabis and Salafis, against America and recruit them as foot soldiers. In 2002 and 2003, the Pentagon replied in part by seeking Shiite allies. These included the Hazaras, who were part of the Northern Alliance that defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. They also included the Iraqi Shiites, which the Department of Defense wooed as allies against Saddam and the Baathists. In his unwise decision to try to get Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive and to send GIs into Shiite holy places with heavy firepower, Bush is in the process of turning the Shiite world decisively against the US and perhaps creating new centers of anti-American paramilitary action.



The demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, was small, but there were anti-American sermons in Shiite mosques throughout the country. Pakistan's population is 140 million or so, and I estimate Shiites at 15%. If I'm right, that's 21 million angry South Asians. Pakistani Shiites are afraid of al-Qaeda and its allies, like the radical Sunni group, Sipah-i Sahabah (Army of the Prophet's Companions), who assassinate Shiites for sport. They had been a support for Gen. Musharraf's policy of turning against the Taliban and allying with the US. Now Bush's attacks on Karbala and Najaf have begun deeply alienating them from the US. Someone give Bush a copy of "How to Make Friends and Influence People," quick!



I have commented on the demonstration, 5000-strong, in Manama, Bahrain, below. It produced a political casualty. The king fired the Interior Minister and declared his opposition to what the Americans are doing in Karbala and Najaf, as well as what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. ' "We share the anger of our people over the oppression and aggression taking place in Palestine and in the holy shrines (in Iraq). People had a right to peaceful protests. We are investigating," the agency quoted the king as saying. ' This is a formal, non-NATO American ally speaking! Bush is even pushing his closest friends into dissociating themselves from him, at least rhetorically.



The biggest demonstration was in Lebanon, called by the Hizbullah, perhaps numbering in the tens of thousands. Lebanon's population is only 3 or 4 million, about 40% Shiite. I figure ten percent of Lebanese Shiites may have come out for this rally!



The irony for me here is that I often give the Shiites of Lebanon as an example of how radical Shiites can evolve into democratic, moderate ones. The AMAL party was more or less a terrorist organization from an American point of view in the early 1980s, but in the 1990s it became a middle class parliamentary party and gave up its paramilitary. Its rival, Hizbullah, tended to appeal to poor Shiites in the slums or peasant villagers in the South, and it retained 5000 fighters in its paramilitary. It remained militant in order to get the Israelis back out of Lebanon, in which it finally succeeded in 2000 (once Sharon steals your land, it isn´t easy to get it back). Hizbullah seemed on the way to evolving into a parliamentary party, as well (it hasn't been involved in international terrorism for many years to my knowledge).



There is some danger of joint US and Israeli policies re-radicalizing Lebanese Shiites, and making the more militant Hizbullah more popular than the sedate AMAL. All you have to do is fire helicopter gunship missiles into civilian crowds in Gaza and then bombard Karbala, and somehow it mysteriously angers a lot of Lebanese Shiites.



In Iran, as well, of course US military action in the holy shrine cities is a gift to the hardliners. The latter have long tried to paint the reformists who want more democracy as traitors in cahoots with America to destroy Shiite Islam and Iranian culture.



I said the other day I thought Bush was pushing Europe to the left with his policies. I think he is at the same time pushing the Shiite world to the radical Right, and I fear my grandchildren will still be reaping the whirlwind that George W. Bush is sowing in the city of Imam Husain. I concluded in early April that Bush had lost Iraq. He has by now lost the entire Muslim world.

Guest Editorials



I'm going to be doing some traveling this coming week. I will be posting more guest editorials than usual, and may not be able to comment as often on hard news. Back to normal by May 31. In the meantime, the guest editorials are first rate, and it will be worth checking in for them.

Shiite Demonstrations in Bahrain



Violent demonstrations broke out in Bahrain protesting the US fighting in Karbala.

"Violence broke out on Friday after police fired tear gas to disperse thousands of mainly Shia Muslim demonstrators demanding the withdrawal of US forces from the southern Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala. One police car was set on fire. "Death to America...death to Israel," chanted the protesters in the pro-Western Gulf Arab state, home to the US Navy's Fifth Fleet."

You wonder whether, when Bush gave the order to get Muqtada "dead or alive", initially to the Spanish and then to the US military, whether he even knew that a majority of the population in Bahrain, where the US has a major naval base, is Shiite or that they would mind if the US army demolished much of the Mukhayyam Mosque in Karbala trying to get at Muqtada's militiamen.



In all probability? No.



Could these dmonstrations in Bahrain be significant? Yes. Bahrain has a Sunni monarchy. Lately it has taken baby steps toward democracy and more open elections, but these did not benefit the Shiites because they wanted even more open elections, and boycotted them. Therefore, the Sunni fundamentalists largely won the seats (and the Sunni fundamentalists don't even represent most Bahraini Sunnis much less the Shiites). So the situation there is potentially volatile. The US is doing nothing to make it less so, and everything to exacerbate it.



The other shoe? Will the Shiites of al-Hasa in Eastern Arabia, where the oil is and where there are 5,000 Americans at Dhahran, be the next to riot?



It is most unwise for the US miitary to fight in downtown Najaf and Karbala near the shrines. I say it again.

Heavy Fighting in Holy Cities



The Associated Press reports that

"American tanks and AC-130 gunships pounded insurgent positions near two shrines in the center of the holy city of Karbala early Friday, and the U.S. military said it killed 18 fighters loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The fighting began after insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. tanks patrolling Karbala's so-called ''Old City,'' said U.S. Army Col. Pete Mansoor of the 1st Armored Division. The tanks returned fire, and more than two hours of heavy fighting followed. Smoke billowed from burning buildings. A rebel weapons cache was hit, the military said. Much of the fighting was near the city's Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas shrines, which U.S. forces allege are being used by militiamen as firing positions or protective cover. Mansoor said the shrines were not damaged."

Even if the shrines were not damaged, you can't imagine how much Shiites don't want to hear phrases like "American tanks and AC-130 gunships pounded insurgent positions near two shrines in the center of the holy city of Karbala early Friday . . . " I cringed when I saw it. I don't see how Iraqi Shiites are going to forgive us for this. Ever.



There was also more fighting in the other holy city, Najaf. Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada al-Sadr met with local tribal chieftains from Najaf and its environs, who gave him a letter asking his forces to vacate the holy places of Najaf. The letter threatened that if he did not do so voluntarily, the tribes are strong enough to kick him out.



See Omayma Abdel Latif in al-Ahram for analysis of Shiite politics at the moment. The threat, mentioned at the end, that Sistani might give up his quietism seemed chilling.

More on Chalabi Raid



Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Chalabi aides said that 10 computers and lots of files were carted away from Chalabi's house, which they turned upside down. His nephew, Defence Minister Ali Allawi, who lives with Chalabi (the two stay in the house without their families) was at home, and was holding a meeting with the Foreign Minister (Hoshyar Zebari). An Iraqi National Congress spokesperson told the London newspaper that this was not the first time Coalition troops had come into the house, but it was the first time such an incident was made public. The troops said they wanted to arrest two members of the INC, but Chalabi told them they were not present in the house."



Chalabi told the newspaper that he believed the raid took place because he had been outspoken recently, and the Americans do not like it when a person speaks his mind.

Sullivan on Iraq War, Sept. 1, 2002



There has been no accountability for all the war hysteria whipped up by media pundits and politicians about Iraq in the year before the U.S. invaded. Although it is true that Doug Feith's various special offices in the Pentagon, and VP Dick Cheney's politburo of Scooter Libby and John Hannah, along with Ahmad Chalabi and others fed false and misleading information to the government and the press, many talking heads were pitifully gullible.



Let's start with Andrew Sullivan, who, at the beginning of the September before the war, published in the London Times a vicious tongue-lashing of the New York Time's Howell Raines for not being on board with the program. I present excerpts below:

Sunday Times (London), September 1, 2002

The liberal cheerleader getting a bad name



Andrew Sullivan



"At the beginning, few readers noticed any change. The new executive editor of The New York Times, Howell Raines, took over last September and was immediately embroiled in the biggest New York story in decades. The coverage of the 9/11 massacre was superb, detailed and thorough - exactly what the American elite demands of its paper of record.



"And then the rot set in. The New York Times has gone from being America's most reliable (if sometimes PC) compendium of news to being one of the most suspect media entities around . . .



"Why on earth should anyone care? The answer is, in fact, a critical one in assessing the current American debate about war against Iraq. Since September 11, polls have shown that a hefty majority of Americans favour a military effort to prevent weapons of mass destruction being used by Saddam and his allies against American allies and the homeland itself . . .



"Beginning in July, [Raines] used America's most authoritative front page to run inflammatory non-stories about the impending conflict. On July 30, the Times detailed how war "could profoundly affect the American economy". Duh.

Cole: Note that Sullivan dismisses the argument that the war could have a deep impact on the US economy as a commonplace. But in fact, Bush administration officials consistently low-balled the American public about the cost. It was to be $60 billion. Iraq's oil would pay for reconstruction. There would be no long-term impact on oil prices. Raines was right and the Bush administration officials were wrong. Sullivan here calls the prediction that the war would have a big impact on the US economy an "inflammatory non-story" (which by the way is a meaningless phrase and therefore bad writing. A non-story cannot be inflammatory. What he presumably means is that Raines ran inflammatory stories about the economic impact that were inaccurate. But they almost certainly underestimated the economic impact of the Iraq war, the full dimensions of which we can now only begin to guess.)

"After the first day of Senate hearings on Iraq, the headline was: "Experts warn of high risk for American invasion of Iraq". In fact, the hearings had been dominated by defectors' tales of Saddam's imminent nuclear capacity. Every other major outlet led with that troubling news. The Times buried it."

Cole: Sullivan here castigates Raines for not swallowing the crock of shit that Saddam had an imminent nuclear weapons capacity. No serious analyst thought Iraq had an imminent such capacity. At this point in time, Ambassador Joe Wilson had already demonstrated to the CIA and Cheney that Iraq had not bought yellowcake uranium from Niger. The defectors' tales were fairy tales. Sullivan not only swallowed this crock whole, he licked his lips, asked for more, and beat up on Raines for not wanting any.

"It was slowly becoming clear that Raines was intoxicated with the power of his position - and you can see the temptation. The Times has influence beyond its reach as a paper for the most influential people in the most powerful country on earth . . ."

Cole: Not content to question Raines's journalistic judgment, Sullivan now goes for the jugular of character. What is the explanation for Raines's puzzling reticence about the case for an Iraq war? Why isn't he buying the stories of a menacing Saddam, sitting atop massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and within a year or two of having a nuke, plotting to strike the United States? Is it possible that Raines just can't see reliable sources for such tales, corroborated by other, unconnected reliable sources? Is it possible that there is an honest difference of opinion here? No, Raines must be a megalomaniac, drunk on power.



Whenever a writer replies to an argument with an attack on his opponent's character, calling him "immoral" or "unscrupulous" or "full of pride," you are in the presence of propaganda. The reasoned response to an argument is a counter-argument. It is not always inappropriate to call someone unscrupulous. I have long felt that the unscrupulous deserve the epithet. But an argument made by an unscrupulous person can nevertheless be correct, and would need to be refuted on its own merits even after one was done with the name calling.

"Why would the Times risk its reputation as a liberal but fair paper of record to lurch to the left of The Guardian? Since Raines won't speak to the general press, it's hard to know for sure. Part of it, perhaps, is to do with his generation of liberals. Scarred by Vietnam, they see every war as a replay of that hell and assume war critics always have the moral edge over war supporters. Raines is also a white liberal from Alabama, eager to prove that he isn't a Southern bigot. He won a Pulitzer for a guilt-ridden memoir of his black nanny when he was a child. So he overshoots."

The lessons progressives drew from the Vietnam War were that it is unwise for the US to become embroiled in an Asian land war, that Asian nationalism is a potent force that Washington consistently underestimates, that wars cost innocent lives and brutalize those who prosecute them, and that you should not go into a war without an exit strategy. The chief post-Vietnam strategic thinker on these issues was Colin Powell, by whose guidelines the Iraq war should not have been fought. How Raines's alleged white liberal guilt could possibly have an impact on this argument is beyond me, but I guess when you are libelling someone mercilessly, you may as well throw in the kitchen sink.

"But there is also a paranoid hatred of the president among the paper's chief columnists. Almost universally, they hate Bush in the way that some extreme conservatives once hated Clinton. Payback, perhaps. These major voices are not simply anti-Bush for good, defensible reasons. They have entered the realm of conspiracy theories, knee-jerk suspicion and profound cynicism about an administration thrust into one of the most dangerous national security crises in decades . . ."

Cole: Yes, it was quite wrong of Raines to be in any way suspicious of the Bush administration. Why, it would not try to scare us with a reference to nuclear purchases in a State of the Union address that the CIA refused to validate, now would it? It wouldn't keep dropping hints about Saddam and al-Qaeda that were wholly unsubstantiated by the president's own admission, would it? It would not keep things secret from the American public, would not violate the Geneva Conventions on a massive scale, would it?



In actual fact, most Democrats gave the Bush administration far too much credit for sincerity, and allowed themselves to be duped into confusing the addled, weak Saddam with Dr. Strangelove.

"More conservative voices have been purged. After criticising the new direction of the Times, I was told that Raines had barred me from contributing to the paper. That's his prerogative, of course, But it helps reveal the closed mind running the most influential paper on the planet."

I just am too embarrassed to comment on this paragraph.

"Recently, there have been signs of improvement. Two weeks ago, the man who lost out to Raines in the race to be editor, Bill Keller, penned an op-ed all but chastising his boss. "The three Republican foreign policy luminaries who have been identified in the press as sceptics - Mr (Brent) Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger - spend much of their time courting well-paying clients who would rather not rock boats in the Middle East," wrote Keller."

Cole: It is true that Kissinger was misunderstood by the Times's reporter. But Scowcroft and Eagleburger had legitimate cautions about the rush to war that now seem quite prophetic, if insufficiently pessimistic in retrospect. Keller turns out to have been wrong and Raines was right. But here Sullivan slams Raines (and Scowcroft and Eagleburger).

"The real opponents of the war in America, therefore, are outside the elected political branch and are threefold: The New York Times, the men who left Saddam Hussein in power in 1990 and are thus partly responsible for the current crisis (Scowcroft, Colin Powell), and gun-shy military brass, who also opposed the first Gulf war. The three have worked together during the dog days of August to prevent a war. And they have made great headway, as polls have shown a slow decline in public support. But so far this has been a phoney war - between newspaper ideologues and security has-beens defending their own complicity in Saddam's survival."

Cole: Note that Sullivan again resorts to character assassination to undermine Scowcroft, Powell and others. They are not sincere, he says, and he does not even bother to recapitulate their arguments or try to refute them. Since they are abject human beings, he implies, he does not have to engage them at that level. In other words, he uses propaganda. Powell (who was later bamboozled into presenting false intelligence to the UN) had actually fought in a war. I suspect Sullivan has not, nor has he in all likelihood even lived in a war zone for any extended period of time. He had no standing to launch a vicious attack on the officer corps of the United States Army and Marines, accusing them of cowardice (I take it that is the meaning of "gun-shy.")

"Soon, the real debate will take place. The president will speak. Congress will vote. And the war, despite Raines's hysteria, will, barring unforeseen events, almost certainly follow."

Cole: An accurate prediction, even though actual debate was forestalled by a campaign of misinformation and intimidation. However, the blame for "hysteria" is placed on entirely the wrong party. It was ol' "Yellowcake Bush" who played chicken little.



Ironically, the NYT later acquiesced in the hysteria, and alowed Judith Miller to act as stenographer for Ahmad Chalabi's lies on the front page. That is grounds for slamming the New York Times. Sullivan's rant was wrong-headed from beginning to end.



By the way, I think that despite this particular shocking instance of lack of elementary journalistic judgement and knowledge of Middle Eastern society, Andrew Sullivan can't simply be dismissed as "unreliable" or "hopelessly biased." I find his arguments for gay rights cogent and persuasive, for instance. You can refute and dismiss an argument. It is harder to dismiss an entire human being.



Muslim mystics attribute to the Imam Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, the saying that "And you think that you are a but a tiny body, while in fact an entire universe is enfolded within you." That's true of each of us.



Truth in advertising: Sullivan attacked me on his weblog Thursday as having lost all "moral compass" because I dared to point out that the US Department of Defense and its allies are now killing Marsh Arabs around Kut, Amara and Majar al-Kabir--the very Marsh Arabs Mr. Wolfowitz said he was invading Iraq to protect from Saddam, who also used to kill them. In those days they were called the Iraqi Hizbullah. Many of them now are allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. There is an enormous difference in scale between what Saddam did to them and what the Coalition has done since the beginning of April. But it is early days, after all. And in issues of ethics and hypocrisy, scale is less important than principle.



I take it as a compliment that the Right is so afraid of this observation (the recent fate of the Marsh Arabs is not being discussed anyplace but the much-maligned Guardian) that they feel it necessary to resort to character assassination ("unreliable," "no moral compass") in my regard, in hopes of marginalizing me quick before the observation gains traction.



"Saving" the Iraqi Shiites was maybe the last rationale for their war that hadn't been discredited. Since April 2 they haven't been saving them any more. They have been killing them.

Martin and Malcolm, Chalabi and Muqtada



An informed Iraqi Shiite writes:

" 1.Chalabi is setting himself up to be Martin Luther King to Muqtada's Malcolm X. I predict he will head to Najaf soon to mediate.



"2. You are absolutely right: Muqtada has won, and alive or dead the movement he has sponsored will keep fighting the American forces until they leave. I think the likelihood of theocracy in Iraq has skyrocketed. What is the United States to do? Install Ayatollah Sistani as the anti-theocracy voice of secularism? Preposterous isn't it. History will record the Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr was the first hero of the Islamic Revoloution in Iraq. Iran's islamic republic has taken over 20 years and still hasn't evolved into a "real" democracy. I hope it won't take that long in Iraq. The war against the Americans will likely be followed by a civil war to oust whoever the Americans install as dictator. Then the Islamic Republic will be established and hopefully eventually evolve into a democracy, but that could take 50 years. I am not optimistic.



"3. I get your point with the analogy, but please do not compare Muqtada to David Koresh. I think a better analogy is that Ayatolah Sistani is the grandfather or patriarch of the family, and Muqtada is a teenager with issues. Like the kid who says "I hate you Dad!" but doesn't really mean it, or acts out anger or frustration. At the end of the day Muqtada has respect for Sistani (he has offered to disband his militia and leave Najaf if Sistani commands him to.) and Sistani considers Muqtada one of his own and will not critisize him by name publicly (i.e. outside the family).



"4. Your warnings to other Shia groups are right on target, anyone seen as siding with the US against Muqtada is politically doomed. The issue is not Muqtada's popularity vs. Sistani's the issue is Muqtada's popularity vs. Paul Bremer's. Six months ago most Iraqis would have prefered Bremer, now it is Al-Sadr by a landslide. Chalabi's attempts to distance himself from the US highlight that point.

Chalabi's House Raided; He is Suspended from the Interim Governing Council



Ahmad Chalabi's house was raided in Baghdad by US troops on orders of an Iraqi judge. He is said to have been suspended from the Interim Governing Council, though he maintains that Ghazi al-Yawer, the current president of the IGC, has called him to a meeting on Friday afternoon at 4 pm Baghdad time.



Rumors are swirling in Baghdad that Chalabi had been taking a percentage of some contracts or that he had been trying to transfer government assets to the Iraqi National Congress before the transfer of sovereignty on June 30. There are also rumors that his militia, which Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had flown into Iraq last year on a Pentagon aircraft, has engaged in coercive or extortionate activities. The problem is that these sorts of rumors have been swirling in Baghdad for many months. So why did the US move now?



Chalabi is charging that the crackdown on him is an attempt by the United Nations to squelch investigations into the bribes Saddam had paid UN officials under the oil for food program, and on which Chalabi had information. The Pentagon had quite outrageously turned over to the Iraqi National Congress the intelligence files of the old Saddam government, which Chalabi has threatened to use to blackmail officials of neighboring governments. Chalabi's charge is implausible and he is just trying to waft some smoke into the public's eyes.



Lakhdar Brahimi, the special UN envoy, had made it clear over a month ago that he would not appoint Chalabi to the caretaker government. In response, Chalabi has become increasingly critical of the US. He complained that rehabilitating the Baathists after the siege of Fallujah failed was tantamount to putting Nazis in power. He has recently loudly complained about the crackdown on the militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, saying that it has cost 1500 Iraqi lives, more than should be spent to arrest a single man.



Chalabi came on television on Thursday and said his message to the US was "Let my people go!" He is now playing an Iraqi Martin Luther King! He says he wants an immediate turn-over of all authority in Iraq to the Iraqis. I.e. he now has adopted the Dennis Kucinich position. Assuming that he manages to stay out of jail, Chalabi will run for political office in January, 2005, and will probably represent himself as an anti-Occupation Iraqi nationalist. You know, the wily old chameleon could still come out ahead.



Chalabi was for long a darling of the Department of Defense and VP Dick Cheney, and their initial plan had been to turn Iraq over to him. The State Department, the CIA and (I am told) Tony Blair all intervened in April 2003 to stop DoD from simply handing the country over to him. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress supplied to the US government and to Judith Miller of the New York Times false and misleading "intelligence" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear weapons program, and was connected to al-Qaeda. Chalabi later all but admitted that these allegations had been false, and said they didn't matter because Saddam had been overthrown.



The State Department and the CIA became increasingly less enamored of Chalabi in the course of the 1990s. In part, he could not account for the money they gave him. In part, his harebrained schemes to overthrow Saddam went awry. He retained strong supporters in Neoconservative circles, however, especially Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld and Cheney were also big boosters, at least until recently. The CIA and State Department appear to have leaked to Newsweek a couple of weeks ago intelligence that Chalabi had been sharing sensitive information with Iran, and was tilting toward Iran. Some Neocons have felt betrayed by Chalabi's inability to get Iraq to recognize Israel or provide it with petroleum, as he appears to have pledged to them.



One problem with the way the US has been behaving in Iraq, whatever the merits of this case, is that it is alienating all major political forces in the country. First its radical debaathification (so that a high school teacher out in Ramadi who had joined the Baath party but never done anything criminal was fired and excluded from civil society) alienated the Sunnis. They have not been mollified by recent steps belatedly to reverse this policy. Then the US came after Muqtada al-Sadr and began alienating a lot more Shiites. Now it has turned the Iraqi National Congress against it. The INC, whatever one thinks of it, has strong Kurdish and Shiite allies. What happens to a ruler without strong allies? Can you say Louis XVI?



Andrew Cockburn is worth reading on all this. But 1) I think calling what Chalabi had in mind a "coup" is exaggerated; 2) I think the idea that the Sadrists would follow a multi-millionnaire dapper expatriate is implausible and 3) the issue of Chalabi's nepotism and financial irregularities cannot be underestimated as an impetus for the raid. Brahimi and Bush in some sense need now to get back the Iraqi government from Chalabi's carefully planted nephews, sons-in-law and long-time associates, who control key ministries. In some senses, it is the CPA that made the coup.

Rockets Fired at Italian Base



News from Italy about Iraq via a kind reader there:

Drawing on ANSA News agency (Rome): "Two rockets (NB: Italian journalists aren't very precise with military terminology, you never know what really was fired) exploded today at dawn inside the "Tallil" base near Nassiriya, where most of the Italian contingent live. No injuries. Ansa got the information from local military sources. It's the first time that the super-protected base of Tallil has come under fire; besides Italians there are military people from other countries.



' "We saw where the explosions came down. We're now investigating to figure out where they came from," said Colonel Giuseppe Perrone, speaker for the Italian commander, without explaining exactly where the rockets landed. In any case, he said, there were "no consequences." Most of the Italian "Antica Babilonia" contingent has recently transferred to the Tallil base. There's Camp Mittica, with the brigade headquarters, the ROA (Autonomous Operating Group) of the Italian Air Force, the MSU of the Carabinieri and other groups. There are also Portuguese and Romanian military included in the Italian contingent, Korean soldiers, Americans and people from other countries.



==========



"Radio Popolare this morning described Berlusconi's conversation with Bush (carried on TV during the night, so nobody saw it) as being really hi-there-buddy-good-to-see-ya-again with no mention being made (in public) about the political difficulties here. Berlusconi declared (ansa carried this) that most Italians support the Antica Babilonia mission.



"On Bruno Vespa's important talk show "Porta a Porta" ("Door to door) last evening, Gianni De Michelis, leader of the resurrected Socialist Party, came out firmly in favor of staying, with only Fausto Bertinotti, of Rifondazione Comunista, loudly insisting for withdrawal. Marco Pannella of the Radical Party also favors staying. The argument for staying is fear of what would happen if the Coalition abandoned Iraq, and even fear of leaving the US alone with the problem. Not present on the program were the political leaders (on the left) who have to support Italy's contribution to world affairs but whose potential voters include a large number of no-global, anti-capitalist, and crypto-anarchist organizations, screw-the-public transport unions, knee-jerk anti-americans, peace-at-any-price flag-wavers and nostalgic Catholics, whose attitude is "screw Bush at any price." These leaders are in trouble.



So Berlusconi's "support" should be read as "most Italians realize that the Coalition is stuck with the problem and has to finish the job." "

Wolfowitz and the Marsh Arabs



Mickey Kaus responds to my explanation (below) of my view of the relative authority of Muqtada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He says, however, that I compared Wolfowitz to Saddam and that I was in his view too "shrill" to be "completely reliable" as a result. But this is what I said:

When I say Muqtada has won politically . . . I mean that he has made the US look like an oppressive tyrant. Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons.

I did not "compare Wolfowitz to Saddam." I compared the killing of dozens of Marsh Arab fighters in Kut and Amara by the US Department of Defense to the killing of dozens of Marsh Arab fighters by Saddam. I said that Muqtada has maneuvered the US into looking to the Marsh Arabs as though it is behaving like Saddam.



As for my reliability, well that depends on a record. Go back and read the Web Log over the past year and show me where I've been unreliable.

US War Planes Kill 40 Iraqis Near the Syrian Border



The NYT report on the US helicopter gunship attack that killed 40 Iraqis, including 15 children and 10 women is typical of reporting on this incident in showing puzzlement at what actually happened. The US military claims that they were hitting arms smugglers coming across the border from Syria, and have good evidence in the form of captured materials that that is what they did hit. Local people told reporters that the US had hit a wedding party. My suspicion is that the US military mistook the wedding party, which included celebratory fire, for combatants. They did this once before, in Afghanistan. And I wish the US military spokesmen could be more gracious about such errors. They seemed to deny having hit civilians, and insisted it was a righteous strike, even as all the reports were coming on the Arab satellite channels about the dead at the wedding party.



Can't they just say that they are deeply sorry for the Iraqis' loss, and that they are not sure what went wrong, and will investigate? If they did kill so many women and children, surely that is a mistake no matter how you parse it, and they may as well admit it. It is this arrogance and instistence that the US is always right that has caused almost 90% of the Iraqis to come to view the Americans as occupiers rather than liberators.



Update 5/20: I just saw Gen. Kimmit on television denying that US forces saw any children at the site that was hit. But video and Arab television and press reports clearly show women and children casualties! This way lies a further erosion of the credibility of the US military in Iraq.



A reader writes:

As someone who has spent 8 years in the Middle East, mostly in Saudi Arabia, I just had to shake my head when I read the following quote;



"Ten miles from Syrian border and 80 miles from nearest city and a wedding party? Don't be naive," said Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis in Fallujah. "Plus they had 30 males of military age with them. How many people go to the middle of the desert to have a wedding party?"



This guy obviously doesn’t know Arabs or Arab culture. On many occasions, Saudis I know spent the weekend “in the desert” for a wedding or other celebration. On one occasion, a Saudi that I worked with . . . asked me if we could trade cars for the weekend so he could attend a relatives wedding being held “in the desert”. I had great fun driving his Mercedes around Riyadh that weekend while he had great fun driving my jeep to and from the desert. And his “30 males of military age” comment? That’s truly ridiculous. I’ve been to LOTS of weddings that had “30 males of military age with them”. That comment was just plain stupid."

Cole here: I concur. In my trips to the Gulf I was always taken to the desert late at night by my hosts for a kind of extended picnic, with lots of (gender segregated) festivities, poetry, singing.

Sistani and al-Sadr: Demonstrations and Counter-Demonstrations



Mainstream Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the young sectarian leader Muqtada al-Sadr are now locked in a battle of wills, according to az-Zaman.



Several hundred Sistani supporters braved the dangerous streets of Karbala Wednesday to protest the continued battles near the shrine of Imam Husain and demanding that all combatants leave Karbala with their arms. Sistani had called for such demonstrations. Later in the day in Karbala, at least 7 Iraqis were killed and 13 were wounded on Tuesday night through Wednesday in clashes between the US and al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.. One of those killed was journalist Bassam al-Azzawi, who was covering the events there. Tanks spread through the city. It was deserted except for the one demonstration mentioned above.

Scheherezade Faramarzi of AP reports of Karbala: "Elsewhere in Iraq, U.S. military officials yesterday accused fighters loyal to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr of firing on American forces from one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines. Sheik al-Sadr's militia was operating from the Imam Hussein shrine in the center of Karbala, said Capt. Noel Gorospe, spokesman for the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. "They use mainly the windows of the second floor of the shrine [to fire at troops]," Capt. Gorospe said at Camp Lima, a coalition base on the outskirts of Karbala. Insurgents were using small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, and their use of the shrine was more noticeable in the past three days, he said. Witnesses said American troops and militiamen fought yesterday near a militia checkpoint 100 yards from another holy site in Karbala, the Imam Abbas shrine."

About 300 supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, on the other hand (many of them apparently from elsewhere in Iraq and newly arrived) staged a rally in the center of Najaf protesting Sistani's call for an end to armed hostilities in the holy city. AP reports that fighting started back up in Najaf, as well.

"In Najaf, about 50 miles south of Karbala, strong explosions could be heard late Wednesday along with the rattle of machine gun fire. Fighters from al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army were seen on the streets despite a call Tuesday by the premier Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, for both the Americans and the militia to vacate the city."

az-Zaman says it was told by informed sources that the elders of the Sadrist movement begun by Muqtada's father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, oppose Muqtada's policies and his resort to armed violence. They are remaining silent, however, for fear of being killed by his partisans. The newspaper also received a communique signed by major clerics of Najaf condemning the gathering of extremists in the city and accusing Muqtada of having ordered that Sistani's house be sprayed by machine gun fire.



Al-Hayat is reporting a breaking development, saying that US Coalition leaders have backed off their hard line toward Muqtada al-Sadr and are offering him a truce and direct negotiations. I'm not sure this overture is actually a backing off of Coalition demands that Muqtada surrender himself to Abu Ghuraib prison, something he obviously will never do. (Would you?)



Meanwhile, a US military commander in Kut is hiring members of the Mahdi Army who will put down their weapons to help rebuild an old and now rusted amusement park. They figure the men would rather earn a living than fight in a militia.

' "Call it 'Six Flags Over Al Kut,' " quipped Col. Brad May, the regiment's commander. '

Give that man a medal.

Poll: Muqtada Second Most Popular Politician in Iraq



Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times reports the results of a poll of 1600 Iraqis from all major ethnic groups.



The results confirm that radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is holed up in Najaf as his militiamen fight the Americans, has emerged as among the more popular politicians in Iraq, already suggested by a poll done in late March and reported in the Washington Post.

"Respondents saw Mr Sadr as the second most influential figure in Iraq, next only to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most senior Shia cleric. Some 32 per cent of respondents said they strongly supported Mr Sadr and another 36 per cent said they somewhat supported him. Ibrahim Jaafari, the head of the Shia Islamist Daawa party and a member of the governing council, came next on the list."

Nearly 90 percent of Iraqis surveyed saw the US troops as occupiers, not liberators. This is up from 20 percent in October of 2003 and 47 percent in January, 2004. Not a good curve for the US. Over half want US troops out now. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll done in late March had found that 56 percent of Iraqis wanted the US troops to depart immediately.



This poll was done before the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal broke, so I suspect the negative numbers for the US have increased.



Mickey Kaus at Slate.com contrasts my views on Muqtada al-Sadr to those of Amir Taheri, says that one or the other of us is dead wrong, and complains that is is hard for non-experts to know which it is.



In blogging Shiism in Iraq, I am trying to convey very complex social and intellectual realities from another society as I read them, to a wider audience. It is really tough material to get across. Journalism is quite rightly about trying to boil complex things down to something relatively simple and digestible. Academics are about understanding complex things in all their complexity. I confess to favoring the second, even as I realize that some simplification is necessary to communicate information.



I say this because I don't see a stark contradiction between what I have been saying and what Taheri wrote. The reason Mr. Kaus thinks there is a contradiction is that he is seeing religious authority as a zero-sum game. This is a game where there is one pie, and two or more pieces, such that if one person gets a bigger piece, the other person's piece must shrink. If Sistani has more authority, he reasons, Muqtada must have less. Thus, Taheri is saying Sistani has more; I am saying Muqtada is gaining more; and therefore one of us must be wrong or the pie comes out to 150 percent.



But religious authority in Shiism is not a zero-sum game. It is overlapping and nested. Shiites can follow both Sistani and Muqtada. They overlap. The poll cited above proves my point. Sistani gets approval ratings in the 70s or 80s, and Muqtada gets them in the 60s. This result is impossible in a zero sum game. But it is possible if we have an altogether different sort of game, where you throw different-sized blankets on top of a bed to see which covers it best. No blanket covers 100 percent of the bed, but some blankets can cover 66 percent and others can cover 80 percent without either detracting from the size of the other.



I don't contest Taheri's estimation of Sistani's enormous moral authority. What I do insist on is that Muqtada al-Sadr is very widely admired; that he is very strongly supported by about a third of Iraqis (I have been saying this for a year), and that he has fanatical followers and cadres in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The polling, the military and popular movements, all of the primary sources I read in Arabic, confirm these points over and over again.



When I say Muqtada has won politically, I mean that he has stood up to the US for a month and a half, has survived, is continuing to defy it, and his forces still occasionally show an ability to surprise the coalition (as when they briefly tossed the Italians off their base near Nasiriyah earlier this week). I mean that he has enhanced his popularity nationally. I mean that he has made the US look like an oppressive tyrant. Paul Wolfowitz kept crowing last summer about how the US saved the Marsh Arabs from Saddam, but now that many of them have joined the Sadrists in Kut and Amara, Wolfowitz is having the Marsh Arabs killed just as Saddam did, and for the same reasons. Muqtada may well be doomed, but his movement is not going to go away, and his doom will just make him a national martyr and cause all sorts of new problems for the US. If Sistani comes out strongly against Muqtada, that will make the game more like a zero-sum one, but a lot of Shiites will try to avoid choosing sides, even as the strong partisans of each come into starker conflict.



If Taheri underestimates Muqtada, he is not alone. Most Western observers do, including George W. Bush. But what he says about Sistani can be true even if I am right.

All Bush Wants to do is Dance



It seems clear that the weird Bush policy of doing the most destructive thing possible is likely to continue in Iraq until the Apocalypse. (See below.) In view of today's news (see below) I now formally propose an anthem for the Bush endeavor in Iraq. The Drudge story that Bush once got naked when drunk (he was apparently mostly drunk for about 20 years) and danced on a bar top is probably untrue. But I can only imagine there has been a lot of drunken dancing of one kind or another in his past. Reminds me of the Hindu God Siva and his Nataraja dance of destruction. Anyway, this one is dedicated to George's Yale partying days, and with apologies to Don Henley (sung to the tune of the Eagles' "All She wants to Do is Dance"):

All Bush wants to Do Is Dance



They're pickin' up the prisoners and puttin'

'em in the pen

And all Bush wants to do is dance, dance

Rebels been rebels since I don't know when

And all Bush wants to do is dance

Molotov cocktail-the local drink

And all Bush wants to do is dance, dance, dance

They mix 'em up right in the kitchen sink

And all Bush wants to do is dance

Crazy people walkin' round

with blood in their eyes

And all Bush wants to do is dance, dance

Wild-eyed pistol wavers

who ain't afraid to die

And all Bush wants to do is-

And all Bush wants to do is dance

and make romance

Bush can't feel the heat comin' off the street

Bush wants to party (oooo)

Bush wants to get down (oooo)

And all Bush wants to do is-

And all Bush wants to do is dance

Thousands March against US, UK in Iran

Molotov Cocktails thrown at UK Embassy



Heavy fighting continued on Wednesday between the Mahdi Army in Karbala, which was firing from the shrine of Imam Husain, and US troops. The US admitted to having used an AC-130 to fire on militiamen near the shrine on Monday. Meanwhile, several hundred young men answered the call of Muqtada al-Sadr and travelled to Najaf to demonstrate in front of the shrine of Imam Ali (this takes real courage, since lots of armed Sadr supporters have been killed in that vicinity by the US lately).



The other shoe has now dropped. The BBC is reporting that several thousand angry protesters came out on Wednesday in Tehran to denounce the continued US military operations in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. (Iran is a largely Shiite country of some 70 million, and many Shiites go on pilgrimage to those shrines and treasure them as sacred). The demonstration got out of hand when one group of protesters broke off and headed for the UK embassy, hurling "petrol bombs" at its grounds. No one was hurt.



Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979, there has been a strong tradition of vigilanteism in radical Iranian Shiism. I can only think that if they become sufficiently enraged, substantial numbers of Revolutionary Guards, Basij and other semi-irregular fighters will begin slipping across the border into Iraq to hit US-associated soft targets. Although some observers have attempted to make the case that this phenomenon is already common, I haven't seen good evidence for it on any kind of scale so far. The Sadrist movement of Muqtada al-Sadr is homegrown ghetto kids. But, it was always a possibility that Iranians would become radicalized by US encroachments on Shiite holy sites. The Iran-Iraq border is very long and rugged and would be impossible to police (even Saddam could not do it). Iranian vigilantes could also help smuggle in arms and explosives.



My advice to the White House is to get US troops and tanks out of Karbala tout de suite and stop bombing it aerially. Otherwise, the quagmire is going to spread to Iran and become 3 times bigger. An extra 4,000 troops stolen from the Korea division isn't going to be sufficient to deal with that.



Meanwhile, the antiwar.com blogger asks why the Khaleej Times is reporting that 200 young followers of Muqtada al-Sadr demonstrated outside the home of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Wednesday, if Sistani is the preeminent Shiite religious authority.



Think about Sistani as like an Episcopalian (Anglican) Bishop, and think of Muqtada al-Sadr as a much more popular David Koreish. Both are Protestants, but they wouldn't agree about much, and Koreish's followers had a suspiciously large stockpile of guns. Of course it is not an exact analogy. But you can see how an Episcopalian bishop like John Spong would speak for a lot of American Christians and be respected by them, whereas Koreish's message would resonate mainly in sectarian circles like Christian Identity and maybe beyond to some evangelicals.

Apocalypse Now in the White House



Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice acquired a damning memo ("you're not supposed to have that") demonstrating the hold the looney Christian far Right has on Bush Middle East policy. The gem in the article is the account of how Iran-Contra criminal mastermind and current National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams tried to reassure the Christian Zionists that an Israeli "withdrawal" from Gaza will not interfere with Jesus coming back because it wasn't part of ancient Israel. Actually, this is right. Gaza was in Philistia, not Judah, which was to its east. But for that matter, when the kindoms split, the West Bank wasn't in "Israel" either, it was in Judah. So the looney tunes Christians who are trying to kill and dispossess the poor Palestinians to drag Jesus back may as well just give it up. He wasn't treated well enough by humankind the first time to want to come back, so we're on our own, and we may as well stop being barbaric to one another in his name.



It has for some time been obvious to me that the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East is driven by irrational and often puzzling considerations. But I hadn't stopped to consider, until Perlstein's excellent piece, that the White House is trying to bring about an apocalypse that would hasten Christ's return. And a damn fine job they're doing of it, if that's what they are up to. Why the place is more apocalyptic every day. The one downside for Bush is that he is beholden not just to the far right Christian looney fringe but also to Wall Street, and the latter can't actually be very happy with the roller coaster ride his policies are producing for their investments. Unlike poor people, moreover, the monied both vote and give to political campaigns.

Sistani vs. Muqtada vs. US in Najaf



Daniel Williams, Scott Wilson and Saad Sarhan of the Washington Post report on the new test of wills between the young sectarian leader Muqtada al-Sadr

"Sadr had invited all Iraqis to come to the southern city and support his uprising, which U.S. troops are struggling to contain. The revolt is one of several serious security issues that U.S. officials face before the scheduled transfer of limited authority to an Iraqi interim government on June 30. "So rise up my beloved people," Sadr said in the statement issued by his office in Najaf. He called on "the people of great Iraq to express your opinion" in Najaf "as a reply to the serial violations, in order to be the best people for the best sacred shrines."

In response, az-Zaman says, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani demanded on Wednesday that the Shiite holy cities Najaf and Karbala be cleared of weapons and that security be turned over to the Iraqi police. He also asked Iraqis to demonstrate against the fighting in these cities by gathering at mosques in their own localities.



He asked his followers from among the tribesmen of Najaf, Diwaniyah, al-Hillah, and Samawah not to come to Najaf to demonstrate or protect him, responding to their requests to come in. He said, "We call on the citizens not to head for Najaf, because of the seriousness of the security situation in the city." He did ask that "all forms of arms must be expelled from the holy cities, and the police must be allowed to undertake their role in safeguarding security inside the cities." He thanked the Iraqis "for their willingness to defend rights and sanctity."



Tuesday night, 500 tribesmen from Shamiyah near Diwaniyah visited Sistani, expressing their regret for the incident in which his house was prayed with machine gun fire and saying they wer ready to defend it. Sources inside Sistani's office said that the new statement was largely intended as criticism of the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr.



Eyewitnesses in Najaf reported that fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr attacked an American base on the outskirts of the city on Tuesday with mortar rounds. The eyewitnesses said that two tanks positioned around the main police station 2 kilometers from the Imam Ali shrine set out toward the base and received rocket propelled grenade fire. No casualties were reported.



Eyewitnesses in Karbala said that American troops and the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr clashed early in the morning and that 8 Iraqis were killed and 13 wounded. (Other source report 9 killed.) One of the fiercest battles occurred only 100 meters (yards) from the Shrine of Imam Husain. Mahdi Army militiamen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an American tank advancing on the city center.



Meanwhile, ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a truce has been concluded between the US military and the clan elders of Sadr City (the slums of East Baghdad). It stipulates that militiamen must stop carrying arms in public, and that the US will not attempt to send patrols into Sadr City for several days.



Asahi Shimbun reports that the fighting in Samawah has raised tough legal questions for the government of Junichiro Koizumi. Japanese Self Defence Forces can only be deployed abroad in non-combat zones, and there is growing question whether the southern city of Samawah fits that description. A reader writes from Japan:

"About 10 days ago, on a TBS newscast, we were treated to a government video

on Iraq. It showed Iraqi's in SUV's, with Iraqi and Japanese flags, (the

old Iraqi flag, and where did they those Japanese flags, are Japanese flags

just laying around in Iraq?) streaming out of the windows, screaming Japan

is great, drive up tohe gate, and present the Japanese colonel with a

bouquet of roses. The video went to show Japanese Defense Ministerr beaming

in Tokyo, "See what a good job we are doing in Iraq?!) After the video,

Japanese's Chikushi Tetsuya (our equivilent of Walter Cronkite) went on to

explain that Japanese troops performed peacekeeping duties for 20 days in

March, and 10 days in April. It is not safe to go off base. A Japanese

reporter toured Al-Samawah. One year ago, he was welcomed and offered food.

Now people sullenly demanded, "Hey! Where is our electricity?"

"



Sam Dagher of Mideast-Online.com writes of how many ordinary Iraqis have begun seeing Muqtada as a Robin Hood figure or as playing David to the American Goliath.



For analysis see Rami El-Amine's "The Shia Rise Up."



A reader writes after a phone call to Najaf:

"Najaf appears to be a community filled "swing voters" right now. My friend told me of the planned big demonstration in Najaf two or three days ago. It was supposed to be a demonstration protesting against the actions of the US Army. People feel the occupation army is acting irresponsibly, by sealing off the city, indiscriminate bombing/grenading causing unrest. They´re ripping up the southern Iraq neutral stand! But so far they apparently haven't moved into the core of Najaf.



The same night the demo was announced bombs went off/missiles were fired into streets/grenades lobbed there. (Take a pick because nobody seems really know for sure what it was or where from it originated ) To my informant it appeared to be a swift reaction to the fact that the demo was issued to start next day.



Next day, as the demo took off, rumours got out about car bombs and after a while this big demo dispersed.



People are really scared now. Electricity and water is gone due to bombing and clashes and the Americans are occupying the hospital between Najaf and Kufa. US Army claims shots were fired from that location so they sealed it off.



Now there´s just a private hospital inside Najaf working - a hospital that doesn´t perform so well as the public one. My informant has got a friend who used to work inside the public one, and he now was forced to move over (or volutarily moved over) to the smaller inner city hospital.



A lot of people - civilians - are caught wounded in clashes and bombings/grenading and hospital capacity is far from sufficient caused by the US hospital occupation. It seems being another "hospital move" like the Falluja one. Do you remember the Americans prohibiting people reaching the Jordanian hostpital outside Falluja?



The holy mosqe is slightly damaged. The big door and some damage on top of it. And people do not dare approach the vicinity. US Army suggests that ex-Baathists might be responsible for the damages. Armed people fire warning shots from inside and from nearby. A block attached to Sistanis office was bombed/grenaded/rocketed. Two of his guardmen are said to have been wounded. What's going on? Anyway a lot of Najafis blame the Americans.



I was told that the murdered Dawa party member/head of Governing Council [Izzaddin Salim] visited Sistani recently. Now there is a [false] rumour in Najaf that he passed information to Sistani disadvantaging the Americans - and that´s why he was finished off - by the Americans!



Whatever facts and rumours - the Americans are swiftly causing divides inside Najaf. Siding with the "anti-occupation party" in this conflict I cannot stop myself thinking that this might be their aim right now. If so - how stupid.



Now, this is just a phone call, and as you put it, "a pinch of salt" should be added. " "

Italians Retake Base

Nasiriyah Library in Flames



Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi wants out of Iraq with honor, according to Italian sources. He is down in the polls and keenly aware of what happened to rightwing Spanish PM Aznar. The Italian public is increasingly against an Italian presence in Iraq, and opposition politicians are calling loudly for withdrawal. Even Berlusconi's own cabinet is drawing up withdrawal plans behind the scenes.



Bush may be pushing Europe to the Left. He may have already helped elect Gerhard Schroeder, who ran against the war before the fact, and PM Zapatero in Spain. Berlusconi could well fall victim to the same trend. There may yet be a Labor Party revolt against Tony Blair, similar to the one mounted by Michael Heseltine against Maggie Thatcher among the Tories over a decade ago, which indirectly led to her being dumped for John Major.



Xinhua reports:

"In Nasiriyah, the occupation forces said that it killed about 20 resistance members during battles with elements of the Mehdi Army to the south of Nasiriyah, which is under the control of the Italian forces. A fighter airplane for the occupation forces bombed Tuesday morning five targets, five vehicles said to be unloading ammunition, killing 20 Iraqis in the process, according to an American military spokesman. Medical sources in Nasiriyah announced that 16 Iraqis were killed and 26 others injured Sunday night and early Monday morning in clashes between the Iraqis resistance and the Italian military men in the city. The Italian Ministry of Defense announced that an Italian soldier was killed in the battles of Nasiriyah, which is the first Italian soldier to be killed in battles in Iraq . . . The coalition forces withdrew, under heavy resistance, from one of its bases in Nasiriyah, but it was taken back when the resistance withdrew after negotiation between the Italian officers and the local heads of clans.

A reader writes from Italy, quoting from Italian wire services:

(ANSA) - ROMA, 17 MAG - 2004-05-17 - 16:55:00



The base called "Libeccio" (trans: southwest wind; ndt: where they lost the young soldier), abandoned yesterday evening by the Italian military, was retaken today. There was no fighting. The militia has in fact left the city, according to Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, head of Defense (something like joint chiefs of staff).



News media yesterday made a big deal out of the fact that the Italians were NOT

returning fire since a great deal of the shooting was coming from a hospital.



Corriere della Sera noted that a library in Nassiriyah containing some 4,000 volumes was set on fire by unknown persons. They reported on some six hours of fighting ("bombing")

in Nassiriyah with help from "other coalition forces" since the Italians are equipped with fairly light weapons and only armored cars, no tanks and no helicopters. No information is available about the nature of the counterattack (secret).

Reader Comment on Torture Interrogations



Michael Pollak writes:

Dear Juan,



On Sunday you wrote:

"First, torture does not work, and there is no evidence that it worked at Abu Ghuraib."

I quite agree, and it's occurred to me that, on the face of it, Abu Ghuraib might in fact be a classic example of torture leading people to tell the interrogators what they want to hear.



Throughout the entire Fallujah crisis and still now afterwards, the army has steadfastly stuck to its story that the resistance there was almost entirely manned and organized by outside fighters. Nobody outside the US military seems to believe this, and there seems to be no evidence for it.



(As you well know, the number of foreigners captured is very small, and even most of them seem to belong to cross border tribes, who aren't really foreign.) But Joe Ryan, in his online diary of an interrogator, states in several places that he was completely convinced by his interrogations that it was all caused by foreign fighters. If he is representative, it gives the impression that this is why the army is so sure about the foreigners when all the other evidence is against it. It's not just because they want to believe it, but *because what they want to believe has was confirmed through interrogations.* Which unfortunately doesn't make it true, but rather proves these methods don't work.

- Michael Pollak

Sistani Calls for Iraq-Wide Protests



The BBC reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has again called for all military forces to be withdrawn from Najaf and Karbala, the two holiest cities for Shiites. His statement seems calculated to put pressure on both sides. He wants the US to stop being so aggressive. And he wants the Muqtada al-Sadr supporters to leave Najaf. Muqtada has apparently called for Shiites to come to Najaf from all over Iraq to make a stand against the Americans, and Sistani is trying to countermand him.



Instead, Sistani is calling for the Shiites to gather at mosques in their own provinces to protest the fighting. (Implicitly this step would equally condemn the US and the Sadrists). The BBC reports that Sistani's spokesman said:

"It's permissible... to demand the withdrawal of all military vestiges from the two cities and allow the police and tribal forces to perform their role in preserving security and order," Mr Sistani said in a rare statement released by his office in Najaf.



"The office of Ayatollah Sistani calls on citizens in all of the cities and governorates not to head to holy Najaf due to the dangerous circumstances that the holy city is passing through," the statement said.



It urged protesters to convene in mosques and provinces around the country, "to protest violations of the sanctity of the two holy cities".

50 Sadrists Killed by Americans in Karbala and Nasiriyah

Sistani's House Sprayed by Machine Gun Fire



An aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani reports that his house in Najaf was sprayed with machine gun fire (-al-Hayat). (If Sistani gets killed in the current fighting in Najaf between the US and the Mahdi Army, there will be hell to pay.) Since the US is using Sistani, heretofore the most respected Shiite religious leader, couldn't it at least keep his house from being shot up?



Heavy fighting continued on Monday in the holy city of Karbala near the shrine of Imam Husain, with the US killing about 30 fighters of the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Fighting in Nasiriyah, which the Sadrists control for the moment, was also fierce, and there was gunplay in Amara, as well, which produced most of the rest of the casualties. A wire service, probably AFP reported:

' Ali Al Khazali and his armed men huddled at the entrance of a shopping centre off Al Abbas street in the centre of Karbala, smoking cigarettes and taking turns to peer at US soldiers and tanks standing 100 metres away. “Everyone, I mean everyone, refuses to escape or surrender,” Khazali said. “The only way they (US forces) can go into Karbala is if their tanks crush our bodies.” He said that during lulls in fighting he and his men talked about what Hazrat Imam Hussein and his men lived through in this same spot about 14 centuries ago.



The Imam, a grandson of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), led a revolt against the corruption and injustice of the ruling caliph at the time. He trekked with his family and followers from the Arabian Peninsula to Karbala, where most were martyred in battle with the caliph’s men. Legend has it that Hazrat Hussein’s brother Abbas kept on fighting until all his limbs were severed.



Both men are believed to be buried under the two sacred golden-domed shrines in the centre of Karbala.



“My men are saying that every day they feel they are getting closer to the chance of winning the same honours attained by Hazrat Hussein’s followers,” said the tall, bearded Khazali.

The Umayyad Caliph who sent military forces against Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet, and had him and his family and his party slaughtered, was named Yazid. The story of Yazid killing Husain is the central theological and ritual basis of Shiite Islam. It is like the passion of the Christ for devout Christians. And just as you wouldn't want to be identified as Judas by believing Christians, so the last thing you would want if you were among Shiites would be to be seen as in some way like Yazid.



For many Iraqi Shiites, the United States has become Yazid. And that is not something a colonial power can easily recover from. It will get worse. If the US is responsible or perceived as responsible for Muqtada's death, Muqtada will achieve iconic status as a martyr, as like Imam Husain, and his legend will inspire some portion of Shiites to fight the US to the death. Nor are Muqtada's partisans afraid of martyrdom. Achieving death at the hands of the new Yazid brings them and their families honor. And, for these poor slum boys, life anyway hasn't been that great. They know death; they are not afraid of it.



It was always my nightmare that the US Army would come to fight Shiites in Karbala and Najaf near the shrines. They seemed pretty canny about the dangers until about March of this year. And then all of a sudden, they risked being Yazid. I conclude that this does not come from the US officer corps. I conclude that it comes from the desk of George W. Bush. We don't have any officers in Iraq stupid enough to want to be Yazid. But we have civilian politicians who know nothing about Iraq who gave them an order to get Muqtada at all costs. Why that was so urgent is still not obvious, but, like everything in this war, it will be revealed to be a plot.



Newsweek reports on what it is like to try to fight in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of East Baghdad, and mentions the possibility of it erupting again (which it will if anything happens to Muqtada al-Sadr).

Powell Admission Begs Question



By now most persons with a television and an interest in US affairs will have seen the bizarre scene in which Deputy Press Secretary Emily Miller, an aide to Colin Powell, attempted to pull him off camera and stop him from answering a question put by Tim Russert of Meet the Press. What is bizarre is that she actually tried to lie to Powell and convince him that Russert had finished the interview. If I were Powell, I'd try to find out for whom she is really working. When Powell told her to get out of the way and came back on camera, he made a startling admission, in bold, below.

MR. RUSSERT: Thank you very much, sir.



In February of 2003, you put your enormous personal reputation on the line before the United Nations and said that you had solid sources for the case against Saddam Hussein. It now appears that an agent called "Curve Ball" had misled the CIA by suggesting that Saddam had trucks and trains that were delivering biological chemical weapons.



How concerned are you that some of the information you shared with the world is now inaccurate and discredited?



SECRETARY POWELL: I'm very concerned. When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me. We studied it carefully. We looked at the sourcing and the case of the mobile trucks and trains. There was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate, and so I'm deeply disappointed.



But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment, of the intelligence community, but it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I'm disappointed, and I regret it.

Powell for the first time has gone beyond admitting that the intel on Iraq WMD was inaccurate to calling some of it deliberately misleading. If it was deliberately misleading, however, that implies that someone deliberately misled. That is, there are human actors with intentions. If a government official deliberately misled Powell on this matter, that is clearly a crime that should be prosecuted.



So, will the other shoe now drop? Is Powell laying the groundwork for an impeachment of Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz?

Moving to a More Secure Camp



Daniel Williams of the Washington Post wonders if Iraq can be salvaged. The article is one of the more clear-eyed I have seen:



Some quotes:

' "We could not imagine the deterioration leading to such a point. It's getting worse day after day, and no one has been able to put an end to it. Who is going to protect the next government, no matter what kind it is?" said Abdul Jalil Mohsen, a former Iraqi general and member of the Iraqi National Accord . . '



' "There's no question: A small band of people can paralyze the country," said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of the council. "They are armed and organized and this is the difficulty. The people who did this have no respect for anything of value. It's a real danger to Iraq, the Iraqis and to an agenda to achieve any kind of democracy." '



' "Just look around," said Bakran Ohan, who sells baby clothes. "Do you see any police? Any soldiers? There is a complete lack of security. It won't change from day to night on June 30." '



' [Gen.] Kimmit denied that the Italians had retreated [from Nasiriyah]. "They just moved to a more secure camp," he said. '

One thing Williams does not bring up is the degree to which much of the turmoil is the direct result of poor American decision-making. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi army. The decision to try to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. Decisions, the rationale of which most observers would have difficulty seeing. The whole Iraq enterprise has been run from the beginning as a plot, with no transparency and all kinds of ulterior motives, and that is what has sunk it.

Gay Marriage in Massachusetts and the Egyptian Boathouse



This Web Log has focused on Iraq so much in the past year that sometimes readers complain if I stray into other subjects. But it was originally created after September 11 to have a pretty wide purview, and I've talked about all sorts of things, from Pakistan elections to Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus. Sometimes the Iraq-oriented readers complain if I stray, so I suggest they skip this item.



What is on my mind is that the opposition to gay marriage in Massachusetts seems to me almost entirely religious in nature. I don't know of any organized agnostics or atheists agitating against it. The religious want to pass a Massachusetts law making gay marriage illegal. This development is disturbing for a number of reasons, but most of all because I think the religious people want to use the power of the state and Federal governments to impose their will on U.S. society. And that is a contravention of the First Amendment and of the Lemon Test put forward by the Supreme Court in 1971. Chief Justice Burger wrote,

"Every analysis in this area must begin with consideration of the cumulative criteria developed by the Court over many years. First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances or inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster and excessive government Entanglement with religion."

A law against gay marriage seems to me to fail the "secular purpose" test, and insofar as the political base for passing it is conservative churches, it would seem pretty entangled with religion, too. And that is my reply to Senator Rick Santorum and others who argue that gay marriage is equivalent to many deviant practices frowned on by society. There is a secular purpose for forbidding marriage of close relatives, since it exposes the offspring to heightened genetic danger. There is a secular purpose for forbidding pedophilia and pederasty, indeed there are many secular purposes fulfilled by such a ban (forbidding the manipulation through intimacy of the young by persons much their senior, which is unfair, and keeping the young from developing all sorts of neuroses and personality problems as a result of an inappropriate relationship for which they are unready). It is said that gay unions offend against the sanctity of marriage. Actually the secular state has no business marrying anyone if it is thereby affirming the "sanctity" of anything. That would severely contravene the Lemon test.



But I cannot think of a secular purpose that is served by banning gay marriage. All the arguments against it are religious. It is said to be unnatural. But it is not, if by that it is being argued that same-sex behavior does not occur in nature (look at our close cousins, the bonobos). The "unnatural" argument is really an appeal to religious ideas of what is "natural," i.e., what is in accord with the will of the Creator as known by His revelation. From a purely secular point of view gay marriage has many benefits for society. Sex within marriage is safer with regard to health issues than is promiscuity. Gay marriages do not produce offspring, and so they reduce population growth rates and reduce the strain on the world's limited resources (the old custom of forcing gay men to marry women and father children was pro-natalist, i.e., contributed to population growth). Etc.



The argument that past American society forbade gay marriage and so it must be constitutional won't pass muster. The American experiment with political liberty is an evolving one. Until fairly recently the Federal government forbade the practice of Native American religion, even though that clearly violates the First Amendment. Past American society often passed laws or engaged in practices inconsistent with the letter and/or the spirit of the constitution. We are getting to know the implications of the document over time, and many of those implications could not be foreseen by its framers. Thomas Jefferson would not be at all surprised by this conclusion. He wrote,

"this ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light & liberty go together. it is our glory that we first put it into motion."

The ball of liberty is not some known quantity that we control and the limits of which are immediately apparent, in this view. It has a will of its own and goes places we may not have initially intended. We just "set it in motion."*



I am sure others have made this argument about the Lemon test, but I've been too busy reading Iraqi newspapers to notice.



It is relevant to my interests because homophobia is deeply embedded in radical Islamism, and I think the intolerance that leads to terrorism must be fought across the board. The Taliban and the Khomeinist regime in Iran passed laws making gay affairs a capital crime. Yes, people were killed for being gay. For the Taliban, this harsh attitude derived in part from concerns about military discipline. Taliban society was highly gender-segregated, so the males mainly socialized with other males. Out in the field there was a lot of fooling around and sexual experimentation, but of course it reduced discipline to have two guys in the same platoon sleeping with each other. So if they were found out they were executed on the spot. The Taliban were expert at seeking out the weirdest and least reliable of the sayings attributed by the folk process to the Prophet Muhammad, and then applying them in a literal way to the law. So, they found some saying that a wall should be pushed down on homosexuals, and probably for the first time in Islamic history they implemented it.



Even in less regimented societies, like Egypt, gays have been scapegoated and even tortured. Egypt is not an Islamic state but rather a military dictatorship. It does have a strong dissident Islamist movement (think Ayman al-Zawahir, Bin Laden's number 2). It does not even formally have a law making homosexuality illegal, but prosecutors have nevertheless prosecuted gays. President Mubarak has occasionally yielded to Western pressure to lighten up on the persecution.



While persecuting gays and not letting them marry are different things, both measures stem from intolerance and a depriving of some persons of rights enjoyed by others.



Religion should not be telling governments what laws they must pass or mustn't pass, where there is no secular purpose served by the law. That is a cornerstone of the US Constitution, and the world would be much better off if everyone adopted this principle. If religious people want to engage in some practice because their religion tells them too, fine. They are free to do it. But they are not free to try to pass their religious beliefs into statute and dictate to the rest of us. That commandeering of the state for the purpose of imposing religion is what Usama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are centrally about. It leads to oppressing religious minorities and secular people and women and gays. The same impulse of religious intolerance that led to September 11 is what lies behind much opposition to gay marriage. So we have to decide if we are Americans or Taliban.





---



*I know whenever you quote Jefferson now people throw it in your face that he owned slaves. But surely the abolition of slavery was another one of those effects of setting the ball of liberty in motion, which even some of those who helped it slip its moorings might not have been able entirely to foresee or absorb. Besides, most premodern persons of the sort you might quote (including, in all likelihood, some of the apostles of Jesus and early church fathers) owned slaves. It was a horrible practice, but its pervasiveness in the past should not paralyze us from learning from the past.

Ezzedin Salim



People have been asking me about the slain president of the Interim Governing Council, Ezzedin Salim (Izz al-Din Salim). The best profile I have found is a compilation of newswire reports at a South African site. He is said to have been a founding member of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party in 1958 when he was 18 and teaching history at Basra. He fled Iraq in 1980 for Kuwait and then Tehran, when Saddam made al-Da`wa Party membership a capital crime.



I looked him up in OCLC Worldcat and found two Arabic books by him. One, published in 1982 in Tehran, was about the "Line of the Imam Khomeini" and it appears that at that point Salim had become a Khomeinist. Another, in 1990, was a general book of essays about the Shiite Islamic "rennaissance," published in Beirut. We have it but, alas, in storage, and anyway his views probably changed.



I wrote on September 30, 2003:

"Although the IGC itself is largely secular or moderate, having been appointed by the Americans, many, many Iraqis want the constitution to be based on Islamic law. Izz al-Din Salim, a former member of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party from Basra, called "unlikely" the prospect that the constitution would be based on Islamic law or shariah, according to al-Zaman. (The Basra branch of al-Da`wa is said to have rejected Khomeini's notion of the rule of the jurisprudent, and Salim may in any case now be an independent). He added that the constitution must recognize the pluralism and religious diversity of Iraq."

So, he seems to have given up his earlier enthusiasm for Khomeinism by the time he got on the Interim Governing Council.



He is the third IGC member to be assassinated, after Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and Aqilah al-Hashimi, all three of them Shiites.

President of Interim Governing Council Assassinated



A suicide car bomber assassinated the current president of the Interim Governing Council on Monday as he was waiting at a checkpoint outside the Green Zone or the HQ of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Abdel-Zahraa Othman, also known as Izzadine Saleem, had been a leader of the Shiite al-Dawa Party in the southern city of Basra. AP's Christopher Torchia writes:

"Ammar al-Saffar, a Health Ministry official, said the victims included five people in Saleem's entourage and two members of the Iraqi security forces. Fourteen Iraqis and an Egyptian were injured, he said. Two U.S. soldiers also were slightly injured in the bombing near the coalition headquarters . . . "

A shadowy group called the Arab Resistance Movement took credit. A whole group of IGC members were nearby waiting to get into the Green Zone, including Adnan Pachachi and Ahmad Chalabi. Predictably, Gen. Kimmit suggested the bombing was the work of Zarqawi. In contrast, Ahmad Chalabi hinted darkly that it was the work of ex-Baathists based in Fallujah, and that, moreover, it was the Americans' decision not to finish off the insurgents in Fallujah that allowed this bombing to happen.



No one thinks the incident will delay the "transfer of sovereignty," since all that is envisioned is the appointment of 4 high officials by the CPA and the United Nations, and since relatively little sovereignty is actually going to be transfered (something Chalabi has also been grumbling about. See the WSJ article on the way the US is establishing "commissions" that will retain control over key sectors of Iraq.



Ghazi al-Yawer, a tribal leader from the Sunni heartland, was selected to succeed Saleem. IGC member Salama al-Khufaji suggested that the bombing had been intended to foment sectarian violence.



Another bombing in Baghdad near US troops on Saturday had involved the use of sarin gas. Two US soldiers suffered slight reactions to the gas. This was probably just an old 1980s shell of the sort used against the Kurds and Iranians, and nothing suggests many of these remain or are still operative. The insurgents who used it may not even have known what it was. (It was not marked). A couple left-over stray such shells does not prove that there were WMD in Iraq in any signifcant sense. No doubt it will set off a frenzy among the latter-day Juan Ponce de Leones looking vainly for the Fountain of WMDs. It is virtually a non-story.



US aircraft bombed Karbala overnight. Now that is a story.



I can't believe I just wrote the words above. I would not be writing them if Bush had any idea whatsoever what he was doing in Iraq. Bombing Karbala. It must be being seen by Shiites as like a sci-fi Terminator sort of Yazid.



Every time I think things cannot get worse, they do.