*Humanitarian disaster may loom in Basra if something isn't done quickly. The city has fallen to British forces and some of the population has turned on Baath enforcers, killing them. But despite their evident joy at being liberated, the people of the city are thirsty. They do not have access to clean water, and will be tempted to drink badly polluted river water; the river "is where sewage is dumped" according to the UNICEF spokesman. The 100,000 children under the age of five are now exposed to the risks of dehydration, diarrhea, and possible death. All this is despite the British having delivered thousands of bottles of drinking water to southern Iraq from Kuwait. Looting has broken out on a vast scale, with the poor carrying away everything that isn't nailed down from the nicer hotels and other businesses. There has been a run on the Central Bank, but not of the traditional kind--people are just carrying away its holdings. That this sort of thing should be happening a day after the city fell is perhaps not surprising, but if it is still going on later this week it will take a lot of the sheen off the victory. And, the Americans should beware of letting Baghdad fall into a similar state. WHO is warning that Iraqi hospitals are so overburdened that there is now an increased danger of disease outbreaks.



*Reuters is reporting that 3,000 Iranian clergymen and seminary students demonstrated in Qom on Tuesday to protest the presence of US troops in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. They chanted "Death to America" and "Death to warmongers" and set fire to a coffin draped with US and British flags. Conservative Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami (no relation of the president's) is quoted as saying, “The occupation of those cities by infidels is condemned and is an attack against Shiites in the world. America and Britain, by ignoring all the international rules, are acting like Hitler,” Classes were all cancelled at the seminaries for the demonstration (though note that 3,000 is not a big turn out--there are tens of thousands of seminary students in Qom). Ominously, they asked permission from Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei to go to the shrine cities to protect them from the infidels. Iran is so far cooperating with the US demand that no one be allowed to cross over to Iraq from Iran while the war is going on. But after the war is over, the pilgrimage trade of Iranians to the shrine cities will start up again, and this traffic is going to present severe problems to US troops if they insist on remaining at these holy sites. For the US to rule Iraq means it is ruling the Shiite shrine cities, and this is going to cause trouble. It could cause a very great deal of trouble.



*Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri blasted the US Tuesday for reverting to the Law of the Jungle in attacking Iraq without UN sanction and for heaping abuse on the world body. Note that Indonesia only gained something like real democracy about three years ago, and that Mrs. Megawati was known as a friend of the US and a moderate. Paul Wolfowitz, who used to be US ambassador to Indonesia, seems to have been hoping for its current state to be a model for a liberalizing Muslim world. But note that there have been absolutely huge anti-war demonstrations in Jakarta (300,000 strong according to press reports), and now the president is denouncing us. The Bush administration just never "got it" about the UN. It was worth waiting a little bit to get that Security Council majority. The US has lost major good will and legitimacy by proceeding in the teeth of world opinion. It did not have to be this way. And, note that the US is having to loudly tell India, "Do as I say and not as I do." The Indians say that they could use the same arguments Bush put forward about Iraq to justify a preemptive strike on Pakistan, which they regard as a sponsor of terrorism in Kashmir and as a military regime addicted to weapons of mass destruction. The US does not have any moral authority left in lecturing the Indians on restraint.



*Likewise, the Pakistani fundamentalist parties have parlayed their anti-American rhetoric and rallies into increased popularity even with secular voters. One effect of the US military operations of the past year and a half has been to empower the teachers of the Taliban in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Taliban of Afghanistan have regrouped and made several strikes at the Karzai government lately. When Afghanistan has elections, if it does, who do you think is going to win in Paktia Province?

*For anyone who hasn't been near news this morning, the US military has taken several key sites in downtown Baghdad in a dramatic show of force. Taking and pacifying a city of 5 million will take some time, but apparently the Iraqi military has collapsed to the point where the US can just walk into any major government building it likes. They are talking of 15,000 staying downtown to do whatever it takes "to change the government." This thrust comes only a day after the British Desert Rats moved similarly into Basra, meeting only sporadic resistance (three British troops died in the resistance). We finally got to see grainy videophone images of Basra Shiites celebrating yesterday, something that I, at least, expected rather earlier in the war. US troops also secured the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, killing 400 Republican Guards. Lt. Col. Bill Bennett said that the city was "like a carnival" in the aftermath, with thousands of cheering, smiling residents. Asharq al-Awsat reports from Karbala that the US troops carefully avoided firing on the shrines of Imam Husayn and of Abbas, even though the Fedayee Saddam fired on them from those sites.



*In the Shiite city of Samawah, the US at last report had still not established control, but a Shiite rebellion broke out, taking control of the secret police headquarters. Also in the town of Rifa`i there was a peaceful Shiite uprising , with local people belonging to the tribes of ash-Shuwaylat and ar-Rikab taking control of the city when the main Baathist officials had fled. The US had been cultivating tribal leaders and had expected such uprisings earlier, but better late than never. For some reason neither of these popular movements was being reported in the main Western media that I followed on Sunday.



* When I talked about the war to a University of Michigan classroom the night it was scheduled to begin, I was asked whether this war might not be rather different from Afghanistan in involving larger US losses and risking Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction. I admitted those possibilities, but suggested that US superiority is such that I would be very surprised if we were still fighting on April 15. I pointed out that Iraqi assets were limited, including 2200 tanks, 2000 artillery pieces, and a similar number of armored vehicles; and that without air cover, they were doomed to see all of them attrited over a fairly short period of time, at which point they would lack the wherewithal to resist a coalition advance. For everyone's sake, I hope I was right. As I write these words, it looks as though it is all over but the mopping up and the taking of Kirkuk and Mosul in the north.



*What I worry about in the aftermath, especially in the Sunni urban areas in the middle of the country, is suicide bombings and other nonconventional harrying of our troops by Fedayee Saddam and by jihadi volunteers. It seems unlikely that such operations could be militarily important, but they could be politically important and must be guarded against. Worse, it is a long term potential problem if, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pledged today, a US military administration of Iraq will last for longer than 6 months. US officials are cocky about all this, according to Time, saying that if terrorists come to Iraq it will be easier to kill them there than anywhere else. Maybe right now. But if 18 months from now the poor Shiites in al-Thawrah township are really infuriated about US govt policies in Iraq and feel they have been stiffed, and if the Lebanese Hizbullah can infiltrate them and stir them up against the US, I don't actually think it will be easy for the Pentagon to deal with the sort of resulting urban guerrilla threats that could emerge. If the Bush administration has any sense, it will get out of direct administration of Iraq before such a scenario could unfold.



*Another more immediate problem is the establishment of public order. There are reports of extensive looting in Basra, and Baghdad could well fall into such a state as well. Troops are not police, and poor people in such situations will often see if they can steal their way into the middle class. We need to avoid a Panama-city type situation (such as developed when the US captured Noriega) to avoid a PR black eye. It should be remembered that the US overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan has not led to notable law and order in that country. In fact recent reports are of a "crime wave" that is preventing international aid organizations from operating there. Since many Afghans are one UN food shipment away from starvation, that is a dire situation. The US has obligations to Afghanistan not only by dint of its pledges but also by international law (the 4th Geneva Accords), and they are quite frankly not being met. I remember Wolfowitz coming on television during the Afghanistan war and making all those pledges about the country's future, which he has not followed through on, and so I have to be a little skeptical that he is really going to succeed in turning Iraq into paradise. Not to mention that both the rise of the jihadis in Afghanistan and the building up of Saddam by the US in the 1980s were in some part his responsibility in the first place. How ironic, that his far rightwing agenda should now be so strongly benefiting from having to fix its own past egregious mistakes.



*There are reports that the coalition has flown Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi to southern Iraq, along with about 1,000 INC fighters. These latter are expected to help clean up the lingering resistance in the south from Saddam partisans and to form the nucleus of a new Iraqi national army. Presumably they can also be called on to begin providing some security in the Shiite cities of the south.

*Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are giving Jordan three months of its oil supplies free to make up for the interruption of its petroleum imports from Iraq. Jordan is being economically hurt by the Iraq war, and its people are boiling over with rage about it. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have just made an extremely important contribution to the US war effort, in helping Jordan avoid economic problems that would otherwise threaten its security. This sort of thing is the reason for which the neocons like Richard Perle, who dream of ousting Saudi Arabia from the good graces of Washington, will probably fail. The Saudis may not be letting us fire Tomahawks over their heads, but they are pumping 9 million barrels a day instead of 7 million barrels a day, to make up for the Iraq oil that is now off the market and avoid huge price rises that would hurt Western economies. And now they are helping Jordan in this way.



*Colin Powell in an interview with al-Hayat of London said he doubted the US would blockade Baghdad, a city of 5 million, as a way of conquering it. He also said he hoped that soon it would be apparent to everyone in the Arab world that Saddam was a tyrant undeserving of their admiration. The al-Hayat interviewer suggested that no one in the Arab world admired Saddam, but that they didn't exactly admire US policies [i.e. giving Israeli PM Ariel Sharon a blank check to occupy and collectively punish the Palestinians] either. Powell said that the US was going to make an effort to change all that. He also gave post-war Afghanistan as an example of how the US respects the wishes of the people and respects Islam, saying that Hamid Karzai was freely chosen by the Loya Jirga.



Well, look, Colin Powell is a good man, and I admire him, but he has lately started engaging in a good deal of propaganda that diminishes his stature. Hamid Karzai was shoe-horned into power by the US and everyone knows it. And, the Karzai model is not even the one that the US currently has in mind for Iraq! The American secretaries-general of the various Iraqi ministries are already in Kuwait.



As for the Bush administration doing anything even handed on the Arab-Israeli front, don't hold your breath. 1) Bush appointed Elliot Abrams as the point man on that issue on the National Security Council; Abrams is probably to the *right* of Sharon and has fired all the high-level NSC staffers who know anything serious about Arab-Israeli stuff and might buck the direction he takes. (Abrams was convicted of perjuring himself during Iran-Contra and should not be holding high office anyway). 2) Bush is not going to do anything on the Arab-Israeli front before the '04 election because it would be politically risky. And 3) Bush is highly unlikely ever to buck Sharon (why he has suddenly become "whipped" on this issue is beyond me. So, Powell's assurances on this score are empty. I don't see the Arab and Muslim rage toward the US subsiding any time soon, and I certainly don't see the Bush administration assuaging it. In fact, I very much fear that the combination of the Iraq war, drift to fundamentalism in South Asia, and Sharon's frankly fascist policies in the Occupied Territories are likely to produce more anti-American terrorism and more American ripostes, so that the whole thing ratchets out of control.



*Sharon has taken advantage of the focus on the Iraq war to continue to violate the 4th Geneva Convention in the West Bank by engaging in collective punishment. See The Palestine Monitor for examples of what I mean.



*I am assured that Abd al-Majid Khu'i is in fact in Najaf. He is well spoken of as a moderate and an excellent liason for the US to the Iraqi Shiites, though some fear that his American connections will eventually make him unpopular in Iraq. That remains to be seen.

*With news of the advance of the US Third Army to the edges of Baghdad and the fall of the airport, it is easy to forget how much of Iraq the Anglo-British forces do not control. The British have just crossed the Shatt al-Basra waterway and have established a beachhead in southern Basra proper for the first time, about 4 miles from the city center. They still face shelling and sniping from about 1,000 Iraqi Republican Guardsmen and Fedayee Saddam irregulars. Their gradual inching forward into the city has been cited as a possible model for the US advance on Baghdad. It is hard to find out what exactly is going on in Hindiya, Karbala, Hillah or Kut, but one has the sense that as they advanced to Baghdad the American forces had to leave substantial smaller forces in its rear to contain (but not necessarily to take) southern Shiite cities. The Iraqi strategy of trying to pin down most invading troops in this way has failed, since substantial forces were nevertheless free to advance on the capital. But it is being said that Gen. Tommy Franks now has a choice to make between pushing forward with a relatively week front line or waiting for reinforcements.



*Asharq al-Awsat says that Hujjat al-Islam Abd al-Majid al-Khu'i, a prominent Shiite clergyman long resident in London at the Khu'i Foundation, has shown up in Najaf, provoking concern among hardliners in Iran. They felt that his appearance in the city was a sign of American backing, since he is known as a moderate. In contrast, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is stuck in Tehran and has not been able to have his Badr Brigade play a role in the liberation of the country. Al-Hakim is close to conservative/radical Ayatolloh Ali Khamenei, the supreme jurisprudent in Iran. Al-Khu'i was booed when he spoke in Iran last winter and said that one realistically had to deal with the Americans. Another report said that after so many years of house arrest, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf seemed dazed and unable yet to take on the responsibilities of his office, although he was being besieged by local Shiites for advice. The disputed fatwa of Sistani asking Shiites not to interfere with the US troops was confirmed by the Khu'i Foundation . . .



*Last fall Iranian president Khatami presented a bill to parliament that would allow for free parliamentary elections, abolishing the process whereby candidates are screened out by clerical hardliners for not being sufficiently "Islamic." The parliament passed the bill into law, but now it is being challenged, predictably enough, by the clerical hardliners. They are afraid it will let 'counter-revolutionary' elements into parliament. So far, every time the reformers have tried to open up the system, the hardliners have closed it back down. But the hardliners had better start being careful . . . Bush administration hawks have them in their sights. They are already beating war drums, claiming Iran is planning to send paramilitary squads into Iraq to kill US soldiers, and that it is actively pursuing nuclear weapons. I agree that the hardline ayatollahs should be gotten rid of, but I think it would be better if the Iranians themselves accomplished this. If it comes from the outside, it will lack legitimacy. Anyone remember the shah? Meanwhile Khatami has warned that the Iraq war will contribute to more terrorism.

Well, the latest reports still are saying that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf issued a fatwa or legal ruling today that urges Shiites not to interfere with the US troops as they take control of Iraq.



The confusion was caused by al-Jazeera, which carried a denial. It is not impossible that the confusion is deliberate on the part of Sistani's staff. Sistani has been under enormous pressure from the Baath regime for over a decade. An assassination attempt was launched on him by the Baath in 1996. His colleague, Grand Ayatollah Sadr, was assassinated in 1999, provoking widespread unrest in Shiite areas. In September of 2002 Sistani was forced to issue a fatwa calling on Shiites to oppose the US.



Brig. General Vincent Brooks had said at CENTCOM in Qatar that the new fatwa marks a turning point in the war.



US forces in Najaf are said to be negotiating with Sistani about the administration of the city for the time being. An ugly confrontation between GIs and local Shiites afraid they would move on the shrine of Imam Ali was narrowly averted. It still amazes me that I could see scenes like that on television almost in real time. The troops wisely backed off.

*The Shiite expatriate group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in Tehran, has condemned the Baath regime of Iraq for putting its soldiers into the mosque complex at the shrine of Imam `Ali in Najaf. This was a ploy to trick the US into shelling the shrine, in a bid to turn the Iraqi Shiites and others around the world against the US. The US military is not falling for it, and neither are the Iraqi Shiites. But, the Iraqi propaganda apparatus is attempting to give the Muslim world the false idea that the US has in fact shelled the shrine. Actually, it just hit the Baath party headquarters, which had been built nearby.



*Jim Hoaglund in the Washington Post is reporting that the CIA had spread tens of millions of dollars among the Iraqi tribes in hopes of getting them to revolt against Saddam and join the Americans. CIA director George Tenet had such representations from them. But in the end, the vast majority of them seem to have just pocketed the money and stayed quiet. Anthony Shadid reports that one reason for which the Basra and other urban Shiites haven't rebelled is that the $15 a month they were being paid by the regime to serve as spies was their main hope for an income in the 1990s and early zeroes. The UN sanctions helped drive the economy into penury, and Saddam made use of the fact to buy the population's loyalty. Likewise, the large number of spies and Fedayee Saddam keep the population afraid of the regime. News is getting to Baghdad from Basra about who is loyal, and reprisals can be ordered. Of course, the likelihood is that most Shiites just don't want their country invaded by a foreign power. The US troops seem to be getting an unusually warm welcome in Najaf, though.



*At a rally of tens of thousands in Quetta, Pakistan, leaders of the fundamentalist MMA coalition condemned the United States for its war in Iraq. This stance gives them street popularity and costs them nothing, since they aren't doing anything practical. They are just holding rallies and giving angry speeches. But, their visibility on the issue could help them in the next parliamentary elections. They've already gone from being a perennial joke in Pakistani parliamentary politics to being a force to reckon with. Many are close in ideology to the Taliban and their growing popularity is dangerous for the US.



*Tony Blair is urging that Iraqis rule Iraq after the war. The US at the moment is committed to an open-ended American (read: Defense Department) administration of the country. Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner will run Iraq, and Rummy wants his buddy James Woolsey in the "cabinet" of the American Government of Iraq (well, that's the diction--we spoke of the "British Government of India). Woolsey out and out lied about supposed links between Saddam and 9/11. He has also characterized this phase of history as World War IV, a war between the US and the Muslim world. Yeah, he'd be real popular in post-war Iraq. I hope he testified to Congress about his fantasies of Saddam and 9/11, and that someday someone will nail him for perjury. The aid NGO's are all complaining that they can't work with the US military in helping rebuild Iraq--as a matter of principle or statute. They want reconstruction to be given to US AID, which is under the State Department. One congressional committee has already taken steps to ensure that that happens. But they will have to be bold and fast to out-maneuver Rumsfeld, who seems to fancy himself the Clive of Iraq.

*US troops have entered the southern reaches of the Shiite holy city of Najaf and are receiving a relatively warm reception from the 560,000 largely Shiite locals. They have been engaged in a fierce battle with Republican Guards for the city, which is on a key strategic route linking the south of Iraq with Baghdad. It is revered by approximately 100 million Shiites throughout the world, including neighboring Iran, as the site of the golden-domed tomb of Imam `Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, who for Shiites is the St. Peter of Islam--the successor to the Prophet. (See my article at the History News Network, below or by googling it). Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post reported that Col. Ben Hodges said, ' "We've hit them very hard the last two days, wherever they're firing at us, from homes, from schools. But the one place I've absolutely told them they cannot fire is into the mosque" at the Ali tomb, Hodges said. "I believe they were shocked that we would shoot that close and hit that hard. But look, the gold dome is still standing." ' Give than man a medal. If the tomb had been hit, it had the potential for stirring up enormous anti-American feeling in Iran, Lebanon, Bahrain, etc. Scheherezade Faramarzi reported such concerns in Iran for AP. Her interviewees there thought that there would be enormous anger in Iran, especially in traditionalist places like Qom and Mashhad (the latter has its own shrine), if Ali's tomb were damaged.



US officers said they thought Najaf was now "contained." That locals would be glad to see the Americans is plausible. Najaf rose up against Saddam in spring of 1991 and threw off Baath rule briefly. But then the Baathists came in with tanks and helicopter gunships and put them down brutally. My Iraqi Shiite friends speak of 40,000 dead in Najaf alone, nearly 10% of the population, and although that may be an exaggeration, the number killed was in any case monstrous. Likewise, about 100 Shiite clergymen were killed or made to disappear. The Grand Ayatollah in Najaf, Ali Sistani, was subject to an assassination attempt by the Baath in 1996 and since then has been cautious. He was forced to issue a fatwa last September forbidding cooperation with the Americans, but everyone thinks it was coerced. US officers say the Najaf clergymen are still on the fence. If they come over to the US, that will be a very important cultural and political victory.



*A major push on the other Shiite shrine city, Karbala, has now begun. Damaging its shrines or causing substantial casualties among its civilian population would hold the same dangers for the US as had Najaf. In other news, the British say they have taken the western third of Basra, Iraq's second largest city.



*AP says about 100 Iraqis from a tribal background are now fighting alongside the Anglo-American forces. That's a development the US should seek to expand. The problem with the war so far is that it isn't creating *Iraqi* heroes, outside Kurdistan. But such heroes, forged in the war against the Baath, would potentially be very important in running the country after the war.



*Asharq al-Awsat says 50,000 marched against the war in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city, and that some were demanding that the door be opened to holy war against the United States. The scary thing is that the biggest recent anti-war demonstration, on Sunday, was in Jakarta, Indonesia. Egyptians don't have a democracy and are stuck with the quasi-military Mubarak government. But if unrest continues to brew over this issue in Indonesia, an anti-American government could come to power in Indonesia eventually, and Islamists could become powerful. They aren't, now, and Indonesia's experiment in open society has certainly been damaged by the US war in Iraq. People like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz think they can have their cake [war in Iraq, support for Sharon in Israel] and eat it too [spread of liberalism and democracy in the Muslim world]. But it is possible that these two goals are incompatible with one another. Isaiah Berlin warned us about incompatible ideals. The chickenhawks in Washington are imbued with a utopianism (at least in their rhetoric) of which he would have disapproved.