Bin Ladin Back in Control?



Al-Quds al-`Arabi, a London newspaper, is reporting that Bin Ladin is firmly back in control of al-Qa'ida and that the organization is digging in for a guerilla war against the US presence in Afghanistan.

No Security Council Resolution?



The Los Angeles Times reported today that the Bush administration will likely not seek a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing war against Iraq. The report said that Bush fears a veto by Russia or China. Most US European allies, and even some in the Middle East, such as Kuwait, have said such a resolution would be necessary before they could agree to support such a US move.



Earlier reports had speculated that the US could get a favorable Security Council resolution, since China usually abstains on such matters and Russia needs US economic aid and good will. Of course, France is also opposed to an Iraq war. If it is true that Bush has given up on the security council, it means that the US is really isolated on this issue.



The depth of the opposition to such a war in the Arab world has probably been underestimated by the administration all along, and the degree of influence the Arab League states have with France, Russia and China is also not negligible.

Iraq and al-Qaida (Again)



The attempts to tie Baathist Iraq to al-Qaida continue among the hawks in Washington, and they continue to be without logical or evidentiary foundation.



Al-Qaida wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It hates him. Bin Ladin was angry at the Saudi government in 1990 for not doing in Kuwait what was done in Afghanistan and allowing the Islamic International to deal with Saddam instead of inviting the infidel Americans to tread sacred Arabian soil. Saddam views al-Qaida as a dire threat to Baath Party, secular Arab nationalist dominance of the Middle East.



Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that myths among Brazilian Indians had their own logic, and one of the key principles was "contiguity." That is, mythic symbols evoke things in nature that appear to be next to one another.



The current spate of attempts to link Iraq to al-Qaida is characterized by this mythology of contiguity.



The way it goes is this. The only group in al-Qaida with any Iraq links at all is a small Kurdish terrorist organization called Ansar al-Islam, which is able to operate in Kurdistan only because the United States has kicked the Baath Party out of that part of Iraq. There are no Ansar al-Islam cells in Arab Iraq, under Baathist rule. Some Kurds linked to Ansar al-Islam were in Afghanistan with al-Qaida. It is the looser political and social controls under the American fostered free Kurdish north that allows Ansar to operate.



Ansar al-Islam has conducted operations against the forces of the traditional Kurdish tribal leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani who account between them for the loyalties of virtually all Kurds in northern Iraq. In a particularly gruesome politics of theater, Ansar al-Islam recently desecrated the tombs and shrines of Naqshbandi Sufi leaders (mystical Islam is overwhelmingly popular among Kurds as opposed to the fundamentalist Ansar, which like al-Qaida is influenced by puritan Wahhabi strictures against any cult of saints).



US intelligence sources allege that Saddam has given money to Ansar al-Islam to stir up trouble in Kurdistan.



The syllogism goes that since Ansar has shadowy links with al-Qaida, and Saddam has been alleged to occasionally use Ansar, therefore Saddam is up to his neck with al-Qaida. Safire, with breathtaking dishonesty, even has tried to call Ansar members caught in Afghanistan "Saddam's men." This would be like calling Phalangist rogue terrorists in Lebanon "America's men" because the US occasionally worked with them.



Rumsfeld has now also charged that a thousand members of al-Qaida fleeing Afghanistan have taken refuge in Iraq, and that this is another reason to attack Iraq. Of course, *thousands* of al-Qaida and Taliban have fled to Pakistan, which seems unable to locate the vast majority of them (including possibly Bin Ladin and Zawahiri themselves). And yet this (quite rightly) is not held against Pakistan. The idea that Iraq is deliberately harboring Islamist terrorists is absurd, since the Baathists would be afraid of them themselves. The US can't even find the al-Qaida cells in the US, but expects Iraq, which isn't very organized after ten years of international boycott, to be able to out-perform the FBI.



The irony is, of course, that the depth of past US support for the radical Islamic anti-leftist terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere far exceeds the tenuous links attributed to Saddam. Among the favorites of the CIA was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, guerilla leader and mass murderer who has now returned to Afghanistan from his sanctuary in Iran and joined al-Qaida remnants in opposition to the Karzai government. Orrin Hatch, Fred Ikle and other members of the Reagan administration flew to Beijing in January of 1986 to plead with China to intercede with its close friend Pakistan to allow the US to give Hekmatyar and other terrorists Stingers to use against the Russian boys. Pakistan gave in. One of those Stingers was found last November outside Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia, and it had apparently been fired by an al-Qaida member at a US fighter jet without effect. Maybe, in view of the long and profound links of the Republican Party with extremist Islamic terrorists, we need a regime change in Washington.

Whatever Happened to the Iraqi Airforce (Iran-Iraq relations)



Someone asked of the 1990 pilot defections:



>1) Were these defections spontaneously carried out by Iraqi pilots,

>or were they part of an some kind of official Iraqi policy (perhaps

t>o maintain a force-in-being in a neutral country)?



Since Iraq had just fought a long and bloody war with Iran and still had lots of POWs, it is highly unlikely that either the Iraqi high command deliberately wanted to "park" the planes in Iran or that the Iranians would have been willing to be so used.



The most likely explanation is that the pilots decided to avoid being executed by superior American F-16s, and basically escaped to a place where Saddam could not order them up and where the Americans were unlikely to come after them. Some of them may have been ethnic Shi`ites (I don't know), which might make a little more sense of why they went to Iran.



>2) What eventually happened to the planes? Were they repatriated or

>did Iran keep them?



As G. says, Iran kept them. However, since they don't have training or spare parts for them, I presume this step was simply to deny them to Iraq.





>3) What light does this incident shed on Iraqi-Iranian relations with

>the United States?



Those relations have been very bad. It was reported in ash-Sharq al-Awsat recently that Saddam's son was sent to Iran secretly to ask for Iranian military and civilian help in case of a war with the U.S. The report said that the clerics in Iran rudely rebuffed this approach, though they did allow that in a post-war situation where Iraq needed relief aid, Iran was always ready to help anyone on humanitarian grounds. (This last is an insult). The clerics have publicly condemned the idea of the US going to war with Iraq, but likely in private they don't really mind it all that much.



If a post-Saddam Iraq were governed by democratic principles, the 55-60% majority of the Iraqi Shi`ites would give them power, and they have extensive ties with Iran. So Iran would be trading a hostile Sunni secularist regime as a neighbor for a Shi`ite dominated friend. Ayatollah Baqir Hakim and his son, who are Iraqi exiles in Iran, have openly discussed their continuing dialogue with the U.S. and the son says Rumsfeld assured him post-Saddam Iraq would be a democracy (which implies, Shi`ite-dominated).



The Shi`ite Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has called for a post-Saddam Iraq to incorporate extensive elements of Shi`ite practice. It is among the administration's primary allies in the planning for ousting the Baathists. I am not entirely sure why the war party in Washington thinks promoting Shi`ite revolution is such a great idea, since they have called Iran's Shi`ite theocracy part of the axis of evil. Is it 'anything but Saddam'? And there are lots of questions. Are the Kurds and Arab Sunnis (the latter the traditional elite) really going to put up with Shi`ite dominance without a fight? And, why wouldn't a democratic Shi`ite Iraq want nukes, given that Israel, Russia, Pakistan and India all have them among the neighbors, and Iran is apparently trying hard? What will all this really change?

Iraqi Terrorism and War with Iraq?



There is a double standard in Western approaches to Middle Eastern movements. On the whole and by and large, few sane observers suspected the United States government of supporting Communist movements for Machiavellian purposes during the Cold War. I am not speaking of WW II, when the US saw the major threat to be from fascism. I am talking about 1946 forward, when Communism was the main opponent. Anyone who suggested that the US helped the communists in Greece or tried to put Allende in power in Chile would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. This is because Western political actors are assumed to have principles and to adhere to them by and large under ordinary circumstances.



Iranian Shi`ites feel about hyper-Sunni movements like Wahhabism exactly as the Cold War US felt about Communism. No Shi`ite looks upon Saudi Wahhabis as allies in any way shape or form. Saudi Arabia funded Iraq's war on Iran precisely because it was so afraid of Shi`ite republicanism spreading its influence. And Shi`ite Iran never gave any support to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, despite what authors such as Bodansky have alleged. Shadowy allegations to the contrary play on an Orientalist trope of the unreliable and unprincipled Easterner, a la Forster's *Passage to India.*



I agree that the question of Iraqi support for terrorism is insufficient as a casus belli or cause for going to war. There is not good evidence for any significant Iraqi terrorist operation outside Iraq. Some operations that have been alleged, such as the supposed 1992 attempt to assassinate Bush senior in Kuwait, have been sharply questioned by investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh. Baathist stirring the pot in Kurdistan by giving some money to the ultra-fundamentalist Ansar al-Islam is not international terrorism; it is a brutal form of domestic politics. It can be dealt with by acting against Ansar al-Islam in liberated Kurdistan.



None of us likes the idea of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. However, the tradition of the United States is that we go to war only if attacked. I am very nervous about a first strike doctrine, which sounds to me more Prussian than American. A first strike doctrine might well cause wars, by making enemies trigger happy. If China knows we have a first strike doctrine, what will happen the next time there is a serious tiff over Taiwan? Might they not lash out with nuclear weapons because they fear we will do so first?



Moreover, it is not in fact clear that Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction that it can deliver to the United States, or that it would if it could. Several US enemies have had far more deadly arsenals than Iraq will ever have, and yet these were never used because regimes dislike being obliterated.



As we saw last fall, anthrax and most other biological weapons are not easy to deliver, and nor are chemical weapons. Cities are thermal pumps that throw microbes into the upper atmosphere. Aum Shinrikyo only killed 12 with its sarin attack in Tokyo, but had dreamed of killing thousands. Strains can be traced (the anthrax was the Ames strain and most likely came from Ft. Detrick), and so for Iraq to release them would invite a nuclear attack on Iraq. Moreover, in today's globalized world, any significant disease outbreak would go back to Iraq. So far, the biological weapons programs of the U.S. military in Maryland have probably contributed (unwillingly, of course, via a rogue biologist) to more American deaths than any foreign power. Perhaps we should begin by closing down Ft. Detrick before addressing hypothetical threats from Baghdad.



Iraq does not have nuclear weapons, nor does it have any means of delivering a nuclear bomb to the US, lacking ICBMs, nor is there any reason to believe that it would do so if it could, since that would invite the nuclear obliteration of Iraq by the US.



Most arguments for a US first strike on Iraq assume that Saddam would behave like al-Qaida if given the opportunity. He would not. Al-Qaida as a covert organization could strike the US and hope to survive. A state like Iraq could not do so, and Saddam certainly wants to survive and enjoy his tinpot dictatorship.



Moreover, lots of countries are bigger potential threats to the US than Iraq at the moment, China most of all. But how can we be sure that if we increase the strength of our alliance with Pakistan we might not face a threat from New Delhi, which has more proven weapons of mass destruction than does Iraq? Do the Washington hawks propose a series of wars against all the other countries in the world with WMD capabilities? If not, then why single out Iraq, which is weaker and less likely to attack the US than the others? Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter thinks the Iraqi capabilities virtually nil.



These considerations do not even begin to take into account the possibility that a US war on Iraq will throw the Middle East into even greater turmoil, detract from our ability to wage the war on al-Qaida, actually give a recruitment boost to al-Qaida and cause new massive terrorism against the US, etc., etc.



I'd like to see Saddam removed from power and the installation of a democratic Iraq. I'd rather see the Iraqis arrange for that than for it to result from an unprovoked neo-imperial war not sanctioned by the UN Security Council or by NATO.

The Guardian Blows the Whistle on the Ersatz Middle East Experts



http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,777100,00.html:



US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy



Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues



See also:



http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest



The Nation, September 2



The Men From JINSA and CSP

by Jason Vest





lmost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power.

No Iraq link to al-Qaida



Thanks to M.S. for his further comments.





There is also, however, no credible evidence of *indirect* Iraqi, Baathist

support for al-Qaida. The US has an enormous number of documents bearing

on funding for al-Qaida, gathered from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and no

money comes from Iraq. No training of al-Qaida fighters in Iraq. No

al-Qaida informant or defector has mentioned Iraq. That Baathist Iraq's

ideology is secular and nationalist and virulently anti-Islamist would not

absolutely prevent some sort of shadowy cooperation with theocratic

al-Qaida, I suppose. Such cooperation is, however, unlikely and

counter-intuitive and therefore would have to be demonstrated. It has not

been demonstrated. Since the war advocates in Washington--with their

enormous resources and access to classified intelligence--have been trying

hard to make the argument for 11 months, I presume this means it cannot be

demonstrated.





There is no evidence of Saddam Hussein being willing to talk to al-Qaida,

and some to suggest that he repeatedly refused to do so.





If the US government wants to invade Iraq, I presume it can do so. There

may be reasons for doing this, though I am unable to comprehend them,

myself (as is, apparently, the international community). However, an

al-Qaida-Iraq link is not such a reason because none exists.





Many implausible things are alleged by supposed experts that fall apart if

one begins examining the available evidence. There is no evidence that

Shiite Iran was behind Wahhabi Bin Laden, as Josef Bodansky asserted, and

this idea is frankly preposterous. Yet Bodansky is a security analyst for

the U.S. Congress and gets lots of television time. In fact, Iran nearly

went to war against the Taliban regime because of its Sunni bigotry and

mistreatment of the Hazara Shiites in Afghanistan, and al-Qaida-related

groups have conducted a campaign of assassinating Shiites in Pakistan,

including Iranian attaches in Karachi. Iran recently handed 16 al-Qaida

detainees over to Saudi Arabia.





I am simply pleading for an end to argumentation from innuendo, unsupported

allegations, and vague guilt by association on this important topic. We

are historians interested in diplomatic history, which has always been

driven by solid documentation. It is not too much to ask for such

documentation when an Iraq link with al-Qaida is implied by someone.