Massacre of Spanish Secret Agents

Guerrillas ambushed two vehicles carrying Spanish intelligence operatives in Latifiya, a Sunni town just south of Baghdad on Saturday, killing 7 and wounding another. They used rocket propelled grenades and machine guns. Crowds of young men gathered to celebrate, kicking the bodies and chanting slogans in favor of Saddam Hussein. Four of the agents were due to go home, and were riding with their replacements. The incident is sure to kick off another round of debate in Spain about the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq. A majority of the Spanish public opposes involvement in Iraq, and the opposition Socialists are sure to campaign on a withdrawal of the 1200 or so troops, which are mainly in the Najaf region. Another Spanish intelligence officer was assassinated earlier this year, and one wonders whether the ex-Baath still have sources inside the National Intelligence Center operations in Iraq.

Also, in Tikrit guerrillas ambushed and killed two Japanese diplomats whose car was approaching the city. Likewise, the Japanese public is deeply opposed to the sending of Japanese troops to Iraq, a plan championed by PM Junichiro Koizumi, a rightwinger who wants to begin erasing the taboo around Japanese militarism.

Sistani Position on New Elections

The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani affirmed Saturday in Najaf that he had reservations about the Nov. 15 plan for caucus type elections. Replying to questions from a newspaper, he said (trans. J. Cole):

"First of all, the preparation of the Iraqi State (Basic) Law for the transitional period is being accomplished by the Interim Governing Council with the Occupation Authority. This process lacks legitimacy. Rather the [Basic Law] must be presented to the [elected] representatives of the Iraqi people for their approval.

Second, the instrumentality envisaged in this plan for the election of the members of the transitional legislature does not guarantee the formation of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to another process that would so guarantee, that is, to elections. In this way, the parliament would spring from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a just manner and would prevent any diminution of Islamic law." He added, "Perhaps it would be possible to hold the elections on the basis of the ration cards and some other supplementary information."

Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri, the representative in Najaf of Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, called for an Islamic constitution for Iraq, and said he was sure that Iraq's Shiite leadership was aware of the sensitivity of this historic phase.

72 US troops killed in Hostilities in November

72 US soldiers were killed by hostile fire in Iraq during November, the highest of any month since the major fighting started last March. And for the Coalition troops as a whole, the number is 107! I was taken aback by the size of the number. I can remember when the death toll seemed to be one of our guys every other day, which was terrible, but that was 15 a month. This is more than two a day. The Coalition deaths per year at this rate would be 1284! This is not to mention the literally thousands of wounded. Although Gen. Sanchez says that daily attacks are down to 22 a day from a high of 50 a day, the attacks that do occur must be more deadly, to explain these numbers. The 22 a day number appears to be attacks only on Americans, so that the massacre of the Spanish secret agents would not even count. From the point of view of US officers commanding 130,000 troops in Iraq, even 700 Americans down a year would not appear to pose a big military challenge. But I just don't think the folks back home are going to be willing to put up with a number like 72 a month. My heart just goes out to those 72 American families. The failure of the Bush administration to level with us all on why exactly we are there and what exactly we are supposed to be accomplishing is all the more galling in the light of these fallen compatriots.

Sunni walks out of Tourism Conference

AFP reports that Adnan Doulami, the religious director for Sunni Muslims walked out on a tourism conference on Saturday. He was protesting the remarks of Hussein al-Shami, director of Shiite pious endowments. Al-Shami attacked Wahhabis for denigrating shrines and saints, insisting that the shrines of the Shiite Imams are bestowers of wisdom. Sunnis in Iraq are apparently not used to Shiites openly speaking their minds like that.

Two Us Troops Killed; US kills Sisters

Guerrillas in Mosul killed a soldier with mortar fire that hit the 101st Airborne Division HQ on Friday. On Thursday, a US soldier had been shot to death inside a military base in Ramadi.

The CPA is strongly denying a wire service story (earlier mentioned here) that US soldiers in Baquba shot dead two girls, Fatima and Azra, 15 and 12, on Thursday; the wire services said that they were collecting wood from a field in the middle of the day. The CPA says that the soldiers came into conflict with armed men, and then later found the two girls' bodies in the woods, suggesting that it was guerrillas who killed them.

Bush to Sistani: Good to Have you Working with Us

It turns out that President George W. Bush did meet on Thursday with four members of the Iraqi Interim Governing Council. All 24 had been invited to a Thanksgiving Day event at the Baghdad Airport, but they were not told the nature of the event. So, only four showed up. One was Mouwafak al-Rubaie, a Shiite member from Basra and an ex-al-Da`wa Party member, who is a follower of Sistani. In al-Hayat, al-Rubaie is quoted as saying that Bush:

"asked us to convey a detailed letter to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, informing him of Bush's appreciation and personal respect for him. In it, he affirmed that 'we share with one another a basic goal, which is to make the Iraqi people happy, to return liberty to it, and to build democracy and achieve economic prosperity for it."

Al-Rubaie said that Sistani was unhappy that two thirds of parliament would be appointed by local city councils that were themselves largely unelected, and which therefore lacked legitimacy and do not really represent the Iraqi people.

Another Shiite IGC member, the female physician, Raja' al-Khuza`i, told al-Sharq al-Awsat that in his letter Bush had agreed that elections must ultimately be held, but said that the June hand-over date must be respected (implying that full elections as opposed to caucuses could not take place by then). She quoted Bush as saying, "It is your country. You are responsible for it. You must work hard to respect the [Nov. 15 transition] Agreement."

Al-Khuza`i also described the remarks of IGC president Jalal Talabani to Bush. Talabani said that direct elections would take so long that the June deadline would be missed. He also dismissed the idea of using ration cards, saying that many Iraqis possessed multiple such cards, whereas others have none.

Mouwafak al-Rubaie told al-Sharq al-Awsat that local elections on a one person one vote basis might be a good idea. He was echoed by Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, an official of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, who said local elections were a good idea because "the goal is the participation of the greatest possible number of Iraqis in the process, in order to endow it with the greatest possible degree of legitimacy."

An independent Sunni Arab nationalist on the IGC, Nasir Chadurchi, said that he did not think the Iraqi people were ready for a popular vote. Talabani's spokesman agreed with him, also pointing to the lack of security as an impediment. He did think it might be good to elect more muncipal councils, which now mainly consist of US appointees.

Al-Hayat quotes Imad Shabib, a member of the political bureau of the "National Accord" (ex-Baathist officers), saying that a census to establish electoral rolls would take at least 14 months. He said that the problem with using the food aid rolls prepared for the UN food program was that they excluded the Kurds in the north, as well as the Iraqis who were living abroad in 1997.

More on SA-14 Missiles

BruceR has further technical analysis of the SAM missile attacks on the DHL cargo plane on Nov. 22. Apparently the guerrillas thought they were hitting a military plane! He also translates the French Paris Match article on the incident.

Bush Sneaks in and Out of Baghdad

W. must have envisaged his triumphal first trip to Baghdad very differently. Last spring, before the war, he was told by Ahmad Chalabi via Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, that the Iraqi people would welcome him this November with garlands and dancing in the street. They would regard him as the great liberator, a second Roosevelt or Truman. The US military, having easily defeated the Baath army and wiped up its remnants, would have departed. Only a US division, about 20,000 men, would remain, at a former Baath army base and out of sight of most Iraqis. Engineers and decontamination units, Feith told him, would be busy destroying chemical and biological stockpiles, and dismantling the advanced nuclear weapons program, carefully securing the stockpiles of Niger yellowcake uranium. Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress would be ensconced, running the country and dictating policy to the Baath military (minus its senior officers) and the Baath ministries (minus their ministers and deputy ministers). The educated, secular Iraqi Shiites would be busy stamping out priest-ridden superstition and covertly helping to undermine both the Iranian hardline ayatollahs and the radical Hizbullah militia in South Lebanon. The captured Baath generals would have given up Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, identifying the caves they were hiding in with Iraqi help, in Waziristan. Chalabi would already have recognized Israel and bullied the Palestinians into acquiescing in the loss of the rest of their land, so that Arafat's followers had been reduced to shuffling with their eyes fixed on the ground before their White betters. Air Force One would land in full daylight at Baghdad International Airport. W. would emerge from the plane, waving and smiling, his cowboy boots glinting in the desert sun. He would pass in review of the Iraqi military with its new generals, which might do some goose stepping for him just for show, the now reformed lads smiling warmly under their freshly waxed moustaches. A grateful and obedient country, pacified and acquiescent in Chalabi's presidency for life ("a clear move toward democracy after the brutal dicatatorship of Saddam"), would shout out "Bi'r-ruh, bi'l-dunya, nufdika ya Dubya" (With our spirits and our world, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O W.!).*

Instead, the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of his life if the news of his visit had leaked. He did not even get time to eat a meal with the troops. He was there for two hours. He did not dare meet with ordinary Iraqis, with the people he had conquered (liberated).

Offstage, the real Iraq carried on. Guerrillas attacked a military convoy on the main highway to the west of Baghdad, near Abu Ghraib. The wire services said, that an AP cameraman filmed "two abandoned military trucks with their cabs burning fiercely as dozens of townspeople looted tires and other vehicle parts." Guerrillas in Mosul shot an Iraqi police sergeant to death.

Sistani's Fatwa to the Americans

In the meantime, Bush's team at the Coalition Provisional Authority were scrambling to respond to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's critique of their plans for Iraq. Sistani dislikes the plan to base voting on caucuses hand-picked by Iraqis who were in turn hand-picked by the US. Why, the ayatollah wants to know, can't you just let the Iraqi people vote for a government? There are rolls of all Iraqis who received food aid from the UN, and all Iraqis did. You could use them as voter rolls, as well. Why can't you specify beforehand that the new Iraqi government will not do anything contrary to Islam?

Jalal Talabani, the Sunni Kurdish president of the Interim Governing Council, met with Sistani. He had just ratified Bremer's plan last week, but now had gone over to the Shiite ayatollah's. "The agreement can evolve. ... I will take his views to the council and we, God willing, hope to ratify them." Al-Hayat reported him saying that "The Ayatollah expressed one reservation . . . he wants to take into account the opinion of the Iraqi people. He therefore holds it important to hold [general] elections for both the national assembly and the municipal councils."

Shiites on the IGC waxed lyrical. Mouwafak al-Rabii [al-Rubaie] told the Associated Press, "Al-Sistani is our safety valve, and a compass that directs our march. The remarks attributed to him are very important and vital. They serve the interests of the Iraqi people, and I agree with them." Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a "moderate" Shiite cleric on the IGC, told the Financial Times, "We will not accept a secular state," and he added that "Mr Sistani also believed sovereignty should be vested in a transitional assembly rather than a transitional government."

In contrast, the NYT reported that the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds on the IGC are petrified at Sistani's plan, because it will establish a tyranny of the Shiite majority.

Al-Hayat says tthat key CPA officials have been thrown into bewilderment and have admitted that the whole plan may have to be rethought. The Washington Post suggested that Bremer's team is so desperate to get out of Iraq and turn running the country over to someone that they might just take dictation from the Grand Ayatollah. '"Elections are now a possibility," said a senior U.S. official close to Iraq's political transition. "We're scrambling to find a solution." '

Presumably the thinking of this official is that the US already has a lot of the Sunni Arabs against it, and if the Shiites turn anti-American because the US disrespected the Grand Ayatollah's fatwa, the situation will be irretrievable. Sistani is expected to issue a written ruling momentarily. Mr. Bremer is no doubt waiting for it with bated breath.

The Guardian had reported Mr. Bremer's initial vow in Iraq last July 1, "We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." Many Arab observers found the diction insufferably arrogant at the time.

2 US troops wounded in Mosul; Italian Embassy in Baghdad Hit by Rockets

Guerrillas fired a rocket or mortar round into the second floor of the Italian embassy in Baghdad on Wednesday. The attack caused structural damage, but no casualties were reported. Two weeks ago, guerrillas killed 19 Italians in suicide bombings at their police HQ in Nasiriya in the South. The Italian public is deeply opposed to Italian troops remaining in Iraq, and many opposition politicians have pressured PM Silvio Berlusconi to withdraw.

It also turned out that UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw had been secretly in Baghdad Monday night when rockets were fired and exploded near his hotel.

It was also revealed Wednesday that 2 US soldiers in Mosul were wounded when guerrillas threw grenades and fired on their Humvee. US return fire killed one of the assailants. The guerrillas had also managed to kill a boy and wound 4 other Iraqis in a car following the Humvee.

Guerrillas near the Tigris also fired on US troops, but failed to inflict any casualties.

Sistani Raises Objections to Latest Coalition Plan

According to al-Hayat, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a member of the Interim Governing Council, met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Tuesday, and then held a news conference in Najaf on Wednesday. He revealed that Sistani has substantial reservations about the plan worked out by Paul Bremer and the IGC for moving to some form of elected transitional government. Sistani asked that its provisions be reviewed. Al-Hakim warned of "real difficulties if the reservations are not taken into account."

Apparently Sistani had earlier not been given the full details of the transition plan, and when he saw the Arabic texts of them, he hit the roof. Al-Hakim said that Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, Sistani's colleague in Najaf, had the same reservations. "The agreement gives no role to the Iraqi people. It must therefore be revisited."

Sistani is complaining that the caucus elections envisaged by the US will not be democratic. He also complained that there is no guarantee that the Basic Law that will substitute for a constitution until one is hammered out will contain a clause that no legislation can be passed that is contrary to Islamic law. (Such a clause is an Islamist Trojan Horse, since once it is enacted, Sistani would get to decide when to invoke it.) The NYT says he complained in general about the lack of any specified role for Islam in the proposed arrangements. Al-Hakim reported Sistani saying, that "there is no emphasis on the role of Islam and the identity of the Muslim people. There should have been a stipulation which prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq."

Khamenei: 'America Sinking into Quagmire" "

Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a radio address that: 'The American nation should know that Iraq is America's quagmire and America is sinking deeper into it by staying longer in Iraq . . . The Americans are so desperate that they are bombing an occupied country...this (Middle East) region does not tolerate occupation . . . 'The Americans should know that any imposed government, constitution and elections would face resistance from the people in Iraq. In free elections the majority of the Iraqi people will choose those who will not allow the Americans to stay one more day in Iraq. The Americans, who entered Iraq in the name of human rights, have oppressed the Iraqis so much that they punched the Americans in the face. The Americans' claim about bringing democracy to the region is a disgraceful lie.'' (Reuters).

I have to admit that the line about the US being reduced to bombing a country it had already militarily occupied was a pretty good zinger. Iranian politics is rough and tumble, and these battle hardened old ayatollahs have the sharp elbow moves choreographed as well as any WWF wrestler. The scarey thing is that Khamenei could turn up the heat on the US in Iraq pretty easily, and it is hard to see what the Bush administration could do about it. It is not as if they have the spare troops to attack and occupy Iran as well (despite Billy Kristol's disturbed daydreams).

Iraq War damaging US War on Terror

Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder points out that many counter-terrorism analysts are convinced that the real war on terror is being hurt by the drain of resources to the Iraq war.

Norwegian troops in Iraq fear for safety

Norwegian troops appear to be surprised to find that they are not actually in a peacekeeping role in Iraq, but rather are in a combat role. They nevertheless don't get the combat pay their colleagues receive in Afghanistan.

The Norwegian press reports: "Military Officers' Association have received several letters from Norwegian soldiers who feel threatened, even on the base. All military camps in the region where the Norwegians are stationed have been attacked. Only the Norwegian camp has been spared, according to Forsvarets Forum.. The Norwegian troops think they may well be targetted, as well.

My guess is that a lot of the little contingents supplied by the Coalition of the Willing may well be withdrawn in March (it will be represented as a normal cycling out after a tour). They did not know they were getting drawn in to a long-term shooting war, and they mostly wouldn't have wanted to be.

If such withdrawals occur, it will stress the US troops in theater even more.

Marshall: Cheney had Garner Fire Warrick

Josh Marshall has excellent analysis of Jay Garner's BBC interview on the failing of the US in handling post-war Iraq. He confirms what I had suspected, which is that Dick Cheney had State Department Iraq expert Tom Warrick fired from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance because Cheney wanted to just turn Iraq over to fraudster Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Warrick had not been willing to kowtow to the INC and so became persona non grata with Cheney and his PNAC allies in the Pentagon. Marshall comments that Chalabi "played this town like a fiddle." But it is also true that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith managed to hijack Iraq policy from the rest of the country, and Chalabi's success was mainly in getting their ear.

Cheney and the others said they wanted to see democracy in Iraq! What they wanted was to install their corrupt stooge in power. There really isn't a lot of difference between the Cheney vision of the Iraq war and Ariel Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which had been for the sake of installing Bashir Gemayyel permanently in power. (That did not work out, either).

There probably is enough in all this to launch an impeachment move against Cheney if the Democrats had the mean-spiritedness of their opponents.

More on Why Partitioning Iraq is a Very Bad Idea

Jack Straw alluded to the dangers of a break-up of Iraq in a news conference in Baghdad on Wednesday, and said the only way to forestall such scenarios was to transfer sovereignty back to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible. (al-Sharq al-Awsat).

Journalist Nir Rosen, writing from Baghdad, replies to Gelb's suggestion that Iraq be divided along ethnic lines in the Asia Times:

"International law prohibits an occupying power from altering the structure of the occupied country, let alone dividing it up. This perhaps is not a good argument because international law was ignored throughout this conflict and continues to be flouted as the occupying powers impose their economic philosophies on Iraq . . . Gelb views Sunnis as the "bad guys" American foreign policy always seems to need and seeks to punish them further until they behave, a course of action sure to fulfill his prophecy and indeed make all Sunnis the enemy. What "ambitions" is he referring to? Shouldn't Sunnis be encouraged to participate in the new Iraq? Shouldn't they feel it is theirs as well? Most of the resistance in Iraq is spontaneous and a reaction to the occupation, not part of some Sunni conspiracy. Iraq's Shi'ites are as eager to see American troops leave as the Sunnis are. Even moderate Shi'ite clerics have recently called for an immediate American withdrawal . . . "

And veteran journalist Helena Cobban argues against it in her Just World News, "For several reasons. The first and most serious one is that the US has no right simply to split up Iraq into three states or make any other such serious changes in the country's administration. No right whatsoever. The Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross is the body which, under a series of international treaties, is the international depository for the body of "laws of war" called "international humanitarian law" (IHL). Therefore, the ICRC's commentaries on various aspects of IHL-- including the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, etc.-- are considered authoritative. In a useful factsheet on the rights and duties of an occupying power, the ICRC notes:
The Occupying Power cannot change the status of the territory it occupies. Though it becomes the de facto administrator of that territory, the Occupying Power must maintain and preserve the economic and social structures and respect the customs. It can amend the laws and regulations in force in the territory only to the extent needed to enable it to meet its obligations under the Fourth Convention, and to maintain orderly government and ensure its own security.

Bombs in downtown Baghdad; Two Iraqi Police Wounded

Guerrillas fired mortars at US troops in Tikrit early on Tuesday but failed to inflict any casualties. In response, US troops wounded one assailant and knocked out another.

Guerrillas injured two Iraqi policemen with a rocket-propelled grenade attack near a Baghdad gasoline station.

They also fired rockets at the US HQ, and bombs were heard going off in downtown Baghdad. At the US HQ, loudspeakers announced, "Attack. Take cover. This is not a test." No one was injured. (Reuters)

General John Abizaid announced that attacks on US troops were down 50% from highs earlier in November (i.e. they have fallen from 30-35 to 15-17 per day throughout the country). This drop may in part derive from Operation Iron Hammer and other determined military operations in the past couple of weeks. But it may also be that the end of Ramadan and the arrival of Eid al-Fitr (breaking the fast, a joyous holiday) has drawn even the guerrillas into an endless round of socializing. Contrary to what many Pentagon spokesmen and journalists seem to think, Ramadan and other Islamic holy days aren't actually very good times to try to mobilize people for secular activities.

10 US soldiers wounded each day

Even the fall in attacks does not obscure the bad news for Ken Dilanian of Knight Ridder. He notes that hostile fire had wounded 2,076 US soldiers as of Nov. 24, including 1,200 hurt after May 1. He says, "Although that number is small compared, say, with Vietnam, it's growing at roughly 10 a day, meaning thousands more could be injured before the U.S. occupation of Iraq ends. He notes that the Pentagon does not regularly announce woundings and that the wounded get little airtime on US television. He tells the story of Gunn, who was driving a Humvee when it hit a roadside bomb: ' "Everything was just smoky. I looked at myself - I was still smoking. There was blood all over the place, and I just thought, you know, just, I thought I was going to die." One friend in the Humvee was already dead from the blast of the jerry-built 90 mm mortar round, and one would die later. Those two joined the ranks of the 421 U.S. soldiers who've been killed in action since the Iraq war started. '

SA-14 used in Attack on DHL Plane

A videotape of guerrillas' attack on the DHL plane at Baghdad airport was given to a French reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur. It was seen by AFP, which reports that it clearly shows the use of an SA-14 Gremlin missile launcher, not an old SA-7 as the US military reported. (The US military was either misinformed or was deliberately attempting to forestall a panic, since it is very bad news for aviators that the guerrillas have anything more than SA-7s). Planes small enough to do so had been having to perform tight spiral landings as it was.

AFP reports, "The shoulder-launched missile is seen shooting up into the sky after being fired by one of the cell and then homing in on the Airbus-300 freighter. The vapor trail makes a sharp U-turn as the missile homes in on the infrared or radio signals from the scheduled Baghdad to Dubai courier flight. , , After a break, the video resumes with footage of the stricken airliner diving back down to Baghdad airport, in clearly amateur footage shot through electricity lines."

SA-14s belong to a family of Russian-designed shoulder-launched missiles called Strela ("Arrow"). SA-7s, or the first Strela, were manufactured in several countries, including Pakistan. The SA-14, called Strela 3, weighs 35 pounds and has a range of 2,000 yards when used against an approaching jet. (Thanks to Tom Collier).

When I first heard this story very early Saturday morning EST, I speculated that something beyond an SA-7 must have been used, and was criticized for doing so by one blogger who is an expert in military technology. I don't claim any expertise in that field, but I do claim several conversations with people who know about it and they have been worried for a while about SA-14 and SA-16 attacks.

Sistani's Fatwa trumped Bremer

Rajiv Chandrasekharan has a wonderful article in the Washington Post on the way Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's fatwa of June 28 stymied US civil administrator Paul Bremer. .

This was the substance of my remarks on Nightline on Monday night, as well.

Sistani insisted that drafters of a new Iraqi constitution be elected. Bremer wanted to appoint them. Bremer apparently thought right up through October that some way could be found to get around Sistani's ruling. One idea he had was to have other, more pliant pro-US clerics come out with a competing ruling. Another was to send them to Sistani to try to convince him to change his mind.

Just so the CPA knows, here is how Shiite Islam of the Usuli school (which predominates in Iraq) works. Ideally, every Shiite should follow the most learned and the most upright jurisprudent in his rulings on how Islam is to be practiced. He rules only on subsidiary matters about which the laity might have some questions, not about fundamentals like the 5 daily prayers. Typically the most respected and most learned of the ayatollahs at Najaf is considered the marja` al-taqlid or "Object of Emulation." Laypeople without a seminary training must obey his rulings implicitly. The laity also get some say about which Object of Emulation they want to follow (in this respect Shiism is less like Catholicism than like the Baptists, where congregations hire their preacher. But it is more like Catholicism in having a hierarchy.)

The system has become quite hierarchical. At the lowest level, a seminary graduate is a mujtahid or jurisprudent, able to derive the law from the sacred texts with the tools of juridical reasoning he learns at seminary. Muqtada al-Sadr is said to be on the verge of attaining this level. Mere mujtahids in theory really can only interpret the law for themselves. The next rank is Hujjatu'l-Islam or Proof of Islam. The next highest rank is Ayatollah. Then the really senior ayatollahs are Grand Ayatollahs.

Sistani is a Grand Ayatollah. Someone like Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, who serves on the Interim Governing Council, is much junior to him. He is just an ayatollah or maybe even a Hujjatu'l-Islam. Typically the clerics with large followings are Grand Ayatollahs, and they are Objects of Emulation.

Anyway, Bremer's hope that he could have people like Bahr al-Ulum overrule Sistani would be like hoping a bishop could overrule the Pope. Even 5 bishops could not. And then Bremer's hope that he could put pressure on Sistani to change his mind was also in vain. A jurisprudent is bound by his juridical reasoning as long as he doesn't see new evidence or come up with a new argument. It would be seen as completely corrupt to change a ruling merely on pragmatic grounds, and at the behest of the Americans or of more junior jurists! A Grand Ayatollah gives, rather than taking, marching orders.

IGC Can't Let Go


Some members of the Interim Governing Council, which was set to be dissolved in June on the election of a new transitional government, are now saying they don't want the IGC dissolved. They hope for it to stick around as a sort of Senate. Apparently the Shiites, like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, are leading the charge on this. I take it as a sign that the IGC members know they have little hope of getting elected by the ordinary Iraqis. Many of them were long-time expatriates with few grass roots. I've all along said that the Sadrists could elect far more members of parliament than could the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Despite Doug Feith's attempt to paint the IGC as "representative," in fact it wasn't elected by anyone. It was appointed by Paul Bremer. Sistani has already said that as an appointed body it lacks legitimacy. He won't be happy about it trying to remain in power.

Banning al-Arabiya

The real reason that al-Arabiya satellite television is being banned in Iraq is not that it showed videotapes of Saddam, but that it is a prime source of videotape of damage done to US troops by the guerrillas. Rumsfeld is desperate to stop such footage getting out, and cannot easily move against the Western camera crews. Rumsfeld has charged that the guerrillas tip off al-Arabiya before an attack, allowing its cameramen to get really good footage (which then gets spread all over the air waves).

Halliburton accused of Gouging

According to AFP, three Democratic leaders in Congress are charging Halliburton with gouging US taxpayers by charging $2.65 per gallon to transport gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq. Local Iraqi concerns do it for just under a dollar, and even the Pentagon folks (they of the $100 hammers) do it for for about $1.12 a gallon.

This is small potatoes. The three should look into that cozy contract Halliburton won to supply "emergency" services to the Pentagon. It transpires that the launching of a war is always going to be an emergency, and every time one is launched it equals billions of dollars for Halliburton. But in fact, the civilian subcontractors often refused to show up in Iraq in May-August, and they were the ones who were supposed to supply our troops with air conditioned quonset huts. Instead the poor guys "looked like hoboes and lived like pigs." You can't actually force civilians into a war zone.

The "emergency contract" should be cancelled and the Pentagon should go back to building quonset huts and feeding the troops themselves. They can be ordered into a war zone, after all.

If Halliburton wrote into its bid to supply "emergency" services to the Department of Defense that it would charge $2.65 a gallon for gasoline that it transports, that would be perfectly legal as long as their over-all bid was lower than the other competing companies.

Let me tell you the story of the summer I worked for the Department of Transportation with an engineer restoring a historic bridge. The company with the low bid, which got the contract, charged suspiciously high rates to supply concrete. Turns out their restoration technique used extraordinary amounts of concrete. My boss decided he had to break the contract once he found all this out. It was a sort of legal fraud. Probably the government had to pay off the company to make it go away.

al-Hakim: US Troops a Humiliation: Only a UN Resolution Can Authorize Them

AFP reports that the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and member of the Interim Governing Council, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the presence of US troops in Iraq must be authorized by a United Nations resolution and by a referendum of the Iraqi people.

He said on Monday, "The presence of any foreign force in Iraq is an exceptional state of affairs, there is a diminution of the sovereignty and dignity of the people of Iraq . . . The presence of these forces should be under UN resolution and with the agreement of the Iraqi side and they should take into account the opinions of the Iraqi people about the presence of these forces and the duration of their deployment."

Al-Hakim himself probably does not have the standing to turn these suggestions into a demand that the US would find hard to sidestep. But if fatwas to this effect were issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the US might well be forced to seek a UN resolution and a popular referendum in Iraq to justify continued American military presence.

And this is what the allies of the US in Iraq are saying!

Muqtada: The Only Real Solution is Immediate US Withdrawal

John Daniszewski of the LA Times has an interview with Muqtada al-Sadr about the new plans for a transitional government. Like French President Jacques Chirac, Muqtada thinks it is too little and too far off.

'Sadr dismissed the proposed hand-over of power by July 1 as inadequate, and rejected any role for what he called the "vicious trinity" of the United States, Britain and Israel in Iraq's future. "Whatever is related to occupation must be considered as 'occupation,' and must be refused by any rational and peace-loving person," he said, sitting cross-legged on cushions in a reception room near a residence he uses in this central Iraq city. The only real solution, he said, was for U.S. forces to withdraw immediately.' . . .

'Similarly, he rejected the proposed seven-month timetable for setting up the new government, saying, "Leadership and the presidency must be transferred immediately. No one has the right to interfere."'

Although the author implies that Muqtada has the ability to thwart the new plan if he chooses, I am not sure that is true. His cadres would rally against it, but his sympathizers seem unwilling to take on the US in any large numbers. Again, it is Grand Ayatollah Sistani who could scuttle the plan.

Why Breaking up Iraq is a Very, Very Bad Idea

Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council for Foreign Affairs and a former NYT editor and columnist, argues in today's NYT that the US should reconcile itself to Iraq splitting into three countries. I don't entirely understand why he is pushing this agenda, and can't see anyone it would help, but the idea is frankly dangerous. All we need is to have the Iraqi nationalists convinced we intend to break up their country. That will produce more blown-up US troops, God forbid.

Here are the reasons this is a bad idea.

The splitting up of Iraq into three countries would be unacceptable to all the neighbors. Turkish officials have repeatedly said that they would go to war to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state, so Mr. Gelb's suggestion seems likely to cause quite a lot of trouble. Saudi Arabia's oil is in a traditionally Shiite area, al-Hasa, and Riyadh is extremely nervous about the possibility of the emergence of an Arab Shiite state in south Iraq, to which the Ahsa'is may well wish to accede, leaving Saudi Arabia penniless. Even Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has warned against those plotting to break up Iraq. These three neighboring states are sufficiently powerful to stop any move toward a break-up of Iraq, and all have signalled that they would do so, by force if necessary. Mr. Gelb, we'd like to have fewer wars in the region, not more, please.

Moreover, I do not know of any significant social or political force in Iraq that wants the country broken up into three independent states. The Shiite parties mostly descend from al-Da`wa al-Islamiyah (The Islamic Call), which has had a subtext of Iraqi nationalism since its founding around 1958. In the 1960s and 1970s, it is said that up to ten percent of al-Da`wa members were Sunni. In 1995, al-Da`wa broke with Ahmad Chalabi's INC precisely because Chalabi acceded to Kurdish plans for a loose federation, whereas al-Da`wa wants a strong central Iraqi state (run by Shiites according to Islamic law). The way in which the Shiite Arabs reached out to the Turcoman Shiites recently shows the sort of national linkages that are emerging (even though the Turcoman would be considered ghulat or theological extremists by mainstream Twelver Arabs).

Although Iraqi Kurds may want loose federalism, they know that independence would provoke Turkish intervention. Moreover, independence is not all it is cracked up to be. Ask the Slovaks, who are sinking into agrarian poverty while Prague gets back on its feet. My understanding is that the Kirkuk oil fields may well be depleted soon, and the future of Iraqi petroleum production lies in the south. If that is true, for the Iraqi Kurds to secede into a landlocked declining economy would be political and economic suicide.

Likewise, the Sunni Arab triangle is simply not a viable state (and would lack petroleum income). Basically, people in Falluja and Ramadi would be seceding to become a second Jordan, only smaller and poorer.

Iraqi nationalism has won. It is likely that both internal and external actors will work to keep the country together. The Middle East suffers from having small countries imposed by Western colonialism, such that the petroleum wealth is in tiny principalities and the human capital in huge but poor countries like Egypt. The region doesn't need any more small poor countries with populations of 4 million each.

The alternative is to build into the new Iraq guarantees against a tyranny of the Shiite majority. Have a bicameral legislature that over-represents the Sunnis slightly. Have a bill of rights. Have elected provincial governors and legislatures with their own local purview that the central state cannot over-rule, and make them key to any amendments to the constitution. In other words, learn something from a success story: the US constitution.

How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East

Robert Fisk's essay, "How we denied democracy to the ME," coming in response to Bush's new policy statement, is worth reading. I think it is certainly the case that in the Cold War the US and Britain often did things to destroy democracy in the Middle East and to support various forms of dictatorship, because in so doing they hoped to defeat Communism. The problem with Fisk's op-ed is that it stops at pointing to Anglo-British hypocrisy. What would his policy be in the region, and how would he spur democratization?