Rieff on Iraqi Shiites

David Rieff"s excellent firsthand report from Iraq on the Shiite movements there in the New York Times magazine is now available online (free registration required).

This report seems to me among the more realistic and informed assessments of the situation yet to appear in the Western press. Rieff has done an excellent job of eliciting the views of the major players (Bashir Najafi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Shiites on the street), and conveying the underlying resentments against occupation that are burning slowly beneath the surface.

One reader suggested that it was the Sunni insurgency that brought the US around to seeking an indigenous government, not the Shiites. This is a fair point, but obviously as of Nov. 15 Mr. Bremer believed that the situation could be addressed by stage-managed elections based on appointed "councils." It was Sistani that challenged this procedure and insisted on open, general elections.

Dutch Embassy Destroyed by Rocket; 4 Policemen gunned down in Mosul

According to wire services, Baghdad was shaken by several explosions late Friday night, including two rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad that set it ablaze briefly before the fire was extinguished. No one was harmed, since the building was unoccupied. US officials put Baghdad on a major alert. Holland has 1200 troops in southern Iraq as part of the US-led military coalition. It had pulled out its embassy staff last October, citing poor security.

Guerrillas in Mosul sprayed gunfire at four Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint, killing three and wounding a fourth. Over 600 Iraqi policemen have been killed since mid-April.

South of Kirkuk, guerrillas fired on a checkpoint of the Iraqi Civil Defense Forces in a place called Salman Beg. The Iraqi police returned fire, claiming to have killed one of the six attackers and to have wounded another.

Debate Begins on Constitutional Provisions in Iraq

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a fine piece today discussing debates in Iraq over the Fundamental Law that will govern the country until a constitution is crafted.

She points out that several members of the Interim Governing Council reject the idea of a 3-man rotating presidency, in part on the grounds that it may institutionalize ethnic divisions and will be inefficient (Bosnia is cited as an example of how it can go bad).

She also reveals that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Abdu'l-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic revolution in Iraq, have prepared their own team of census and electoral experts to make the case to the United Nations Commission being sent by Kofi Annan that free and open elections are possible.

[Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Adnan Pachachi of the IGC says that the UN Commission's recommendations will not be binding on the governing council. Pachachi is angry about the extent of Shiite power and the influence of Sistani, as are many Sunnis.]

The Fundamental Law will have a bill of rights, and will try to ensure representation in parliament of women (some percentage of seats will be set aside for female candidates, as in Pakistan). But it will also specify Islamic law as a principal source of Iraqi law, which worries some observers. (This provision was insisted on by Sistani and seems to be supported by Paul Bremer.)

MI6 to be Called before Parliament on Weapons Estimates

The London Times reports that "Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, will appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ms Ann Taylor, the former Labour Cabinet minister, to give further evidence on why he believed that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons was reliable and accurate. It was MI6 that provided the bulk of the intelligence for the Downing Street dossier that underpinned Mr Blair’s decision to go to war."

That is, despite the whitewash carried out by the Hutton Commission, Tony Blair's government will not entirely avoid an inquiry into where in the world it got the idea that Saddam Hussein was a major threat to the UK and had WMD ready to launch "within 45 minutes."

Note that parliamentarians of his own party are carrying out the inquiry, which is a good model for Republicans in the US Congress. The intelligence failures with regard to Iraq were a bi-partisan affair (though only the Bush administration magnified them by making war policy based on them), and Republicans who care about the credibility and security of the US should want to know as much as anyone what went wrong and how to fix it.

A reader helpfully comments:

"It's a committee of Blair placemen meeting in secret and reporting in secret directly to Blair. He then has the power to redact any part of their findings he doesn't like, ask them to do it again, or chuck it in the bin. Not exactly a democratic model for America to follow (but one they'd probably like to)." Oh, well.

The Islamic Party: Neither US nor IGC Suited to Organizing General Elections

Az-Zaman reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party (the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood) has expressed support for the Nov. 15 agreement between the US and the Interim Governing Council, saying that elections based on provincial councils would produce a government capable of restoring Iraqi sovereignty. Party leader Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a member of the Interim Governing Council, argues that the IGC and the Americans are incapable at this point of presiding over direct elections.

Abdul Hamid rejected the idea that has been floated by Ahmad Chalabi and others, of simply expanding the IGC by appointment and turning the governance of the country over to it. He rejected any method of selecting the new government that did not depend on some sort of elections such as would reflect the will of the Iraqis. The party stated its complete faith in the principle of direct elections so as to produce a new legitimacy in Iraqi politics, but seems willing to wait until 2005 to hold these direct elections.

Abdul Hamid, as a fundamentalist Sunni, appears to fear that direct and open elections held in May might produce a government dominated by Shiite hard liners.

Demonstrations in Halbaniya

Hundreds demonstrated peacefully in the Sunni Arab town of Halbaniya on Friday against US tactics, and against the curfew imposed on the city by the US authorities. (-Ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Who is Hasan Ghul?

The Kurdish peshmergas apprehended an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda trying to sneak into Iraq recently, and the US hailed the capture as significant. Ghul was said to have been working directly under Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of the planners of September 11. But the London-based moderate Saudi newspaper al-Hayat raised the question today of who he really is. They called an Egyptian expert on the al-Gihad al-Islami organization of Ayman al-Zawahir, and he said the only senior al-Gihad/ al-Qaeda figure named Hasan had been killed in the Afghanistan war. Hani al-Siba'i speculated that "Hasan Ghul" may just be the name on a passport that the fugitive managed to get hold of. I did a quick Nexis search and did not come up with entries for this name before the capture. So, who exactly was captured?

There seemed to me to be a contradiction in the statements during the past couple of days of Gen. John Abizaid and those of Gen. Rick Sanchez about al-Qaeda in Iraq. Abizaid seemed to play this factor down, Sanchez to play it up.

Abizaid expressed security concerns not only about Afghanistan (where he denied that the Taliban are resurgent) and Iraq, but also about US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which have a domestic problem with radical Muslim extremists. (The problem in Pakistan, by the way, was in part created by the Reagan administration during its alliance with dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan).

What I don't understand is why, if you are cataloguing security risks to the US in the region, you would not add in the militant Israeli settler movement in the West Bank, which produces more hatred toward the United States in the Muslim world than any other single factor. If some foreign country had grabbed part of Virginia and was pouring settlers into it, kicking out Americans, and declaring it no longer US soil, don't you think Americans in Maine and California would be upset about that, and resentful toward the foreign invader?

Is Kerry's Inconsistency on Iraq a Liability?

Mother Jones,, rather unaccountably relying on Max Boot, raises the question of whether Kerry's changing Iraq position will hurt him in the campaign. Kerry voted for the congressional authorization of the war, but then voted against Bush's request for $87 billion more after the war ($20 bn. for Iraq reconstruction).

So far Iraq isn't a big factor in the campaign, and unless things go badly wrong, it may not emerge as such. So it isn't clear that Kerry's position will be relevant one way or another. But the journalists' fixation on "consistency" is anyway not usually shared by the public. After all, Kerry's positions have been pretty typical of most Americans--initial support for the Iraq war, then profound dismay at the Bush adminstration's handling of the aftermath, then sticker shock at the $87 bn. request (which won't be the last).

Bahr al-Ulum: Federalism can work with 18 Provinces

In a recent interview in al-Siyasah, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum implicitly opposed the Iraqi Kurds' demands for a consolidated Kurdish state:

"(Bilal) Do you think federalism is good for Iraq?"

"(Bahr-al-Ulum) First of all we do not accept the division of Iraq or any situation that leads to the division of Iraq. We stress the unity of the homeland and its territorial integrity. We must spare this country anything that might lead to its division or fragmentation. But I believe that we must make a step towards the creation of 18 governorates enjoying some self-rule and not relying on a central government or a regional federation. This could help citizens serve their interests and objectives. But we should not work for a strong federation that might cause problems." (via BBC world monitoring via Lexis Nexis.)

Bahr al- Ulum, a Shiite clergyman close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and a member of the Interim Governing Council, has thus rejected the idea of "regional federations" of the sort the Kurds advocate. Most Shiite Arabs are opposed to the Kurdish plan, favoring a relatively strong central government, which they plan to control. The Shiite demonstrations of January 20 included among their demands the rejection of the Kurdish demand for an ethnic canton and a very loose federalism. Bahr al-Ulum appears flexible on the second issue, but not on the first, and he probably is a good guide to mainstream Shiite views.

For contemporary views on Iraqi politics among Kurds in the north, Tom Hundley's Chicago Tribune piece is well worth looking at.

Hilfiker on Army Strong-Arm Tactics in Sunni Heartland

Dr. David Hilfiker of the Christian Peacemaker Team has written an important account, presented by Tom Engelhardt, of the tactics employed by Col. Nate Sassaman in dealing with Sunni Arab Iraqis. Sassaman is alleged to have said several things about Iraqi Muslims that verge on racism, and his tactics, such as imprisoning the entire village of Abu Hishma with razor wire (probably borrowed from the Israelis), have brought notoriety to the United States in Iraq.

Hilfiker doesn't say so, but the Sassaman approach is vehemently contested by the US Marines, who stress winning hearts and minds, and probably were on the verge of making important breakthroughs in places like Fallujah when they were withdrawn and replaced by the army.

John LeCarre on Iraq Intelligence Failure

From Laura Miller's recent interview in Salon.com with the famed spy novelist David Cornwell and former British foreign service officer:

"I think it's perfectly true that after the Cold War ended and the secret war against terror and the business of spying on terror got going, as always the new war was being fought with the weapons of the old one and it didn't work. It's terribly difficult to spy on a multinational organization that doesn't oblige you by using all the toys you can catch them out with: telephones, cellphones, radio, codes that you can break. It doesn't have a command and control structure that you can penetrate . . .

That's one side of it. The technological revolution in intelligence left people with the notion that the human side of intelligence was of secondary importance. I think that's always been a great nonsense. It was a great nonsense in the Cold War too, even if we did manage to break their codes. I think the CIA and the Brits or whoever else would much rather have had access to Gorbachev's private secretary than to Gorbachev's telegrams. Human sources -- you can ask them questions, they can reply . . .

Your intelligence budget for the CIA alone is, I think, $30 billion a year. The result is a huge proliferation of junk. The art of refining that and turning it into a lucid statement you can write on a postcard and put in front of a busy politician really is very, very difficult stuff. The intelligence business is threatened by exactly the same bad people that your business is threatened by . . . In the intelligence world, with so much money around, there are tremendously sophisticated peddlers who are just making stuff up, feeding information to the empty areas of your head and taking huge sums of money for it and disappearing into the smoke. And I think some of the intelligence services fell for some of that stuff."

10 Members of Iraqi Civil Defense Force wounded in Blast

Guerrillas in the northeastern town of Baquba donated a big bomb, targeting a patrol of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force, and wounding 10 of them, according to Reuters.

10,000 Shiites Protest in Nasiriyah, seek Resignation of Provincial Council

Az-Zaman newspaper reports that Muqtada al-Sadr's organization staged a demonstration of 10,000 in the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah on Wednesday. They were joined by the Fudala' Party, also adherents of the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr, but who follow Muhammad Yaqubi rather than Muqtada, Sadiq's son. Elements from the Sadrist militia, the Army of the Mahdi, also rallied.

They demanded that the appointed provincial council of Dhi Qar province resign, including the governor, Sabri Hamed Badr al-Rumaidh, and be replaced by a popularly elected provincial grovernment. They also wanted the officials and bureaucrats appointed by the current provincial council to be sacked.

AP reported that they chanted, "No to Israel! No to imperialism! No to America!" Nasiriyah, a city of about half a million inhabitants, is 350 kilometers (215 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Az-Zaman says that there had been an earlier demonstration (presumably the one on Tuesday January 20, held in a number of Shiite towns).

AP says that Coalition authorities are denying that al-Rumaidh has resigned, saying only that he has withdrawn from view.

This demonstration clearly is part of pre-election politics. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called for open national elections. The US says it wants to use the appointed provincial councils to select an electoral college. Muqtada's followers are hedging their bets. Even if the US sticks to its guns and uses the provincial councils as the electorate, they seem to be saying, they want the provincial councils themselves to have been freely elected beforehand.

Similar demonstrations showing dissatisfaction by Shiites with their Coalition-appointed provincial or municipal councils have broken out in recent weeks in Kut and Amara, two other major southern Shiite towns.

Pachachi Envisages Triumvirate as Iraqi Executive

AFP/al-Zaman report that Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian interim president of the Iraqi Governing Council, envisages that the new transitional Iraqi government due to be installed July 1 will have a three-man executive. He said that the transitional parliament will elect the three presidents. He also insisted that the three-man executive would have real powers and would not just be window dressing. The three would appoint the prime minister, and would approve cabinet appointments along with the parliament, and would have the power to sign or veto legislation. He envisaged legislation originating with government ministries and then being ratified by parliament and by the 3 presidents. Another spokesman said that the 3 would not necessarily reflect Iraq's major ethnic groups.

This system is completely unworkable and highly undemocratic. The parliament should be the body that chooses the prime minister. The parliament should be the body that thinks up laws and passes them. Pachachi's scheme seriously blurs the separation of powers, which is a key element in democracy. The 3-man presidency would potentially always be over-ruling the prime minister. Iran after the Revolution initially had both a president and a prime minister, and they fought so viciously and produced so much gridlock that eventually the office of prime minister was abolished.

Pachachi and his backers (possibly the Americans) clearly want to use the 3-man presidency as a brake on Shiite dominance of parliament and the likely Shiite prime minister.

I think such an "executive" would be unable to decide on anything, just as the Interim Governing Council has had trouble making tough decisions. Pachachi and his aides are saying it would prevent the concentration of power in the hands of one man. Uh, Adnan, that's what an independent legislature and judiciary are supposed to be for.

Hutton Inquiry Whitewashes Blair Government's Exaggerations

Seumas Milne of the Guardian argues that the report by Lord Hutton on the David Kelly affair is biased in favor of the government of Tony Blair.

This affair is extremely complex. Let me see if I can get it basically right, in a concise way. David Kelly, a microbiologist, had worked for the British ministry of defense and served as a UN arms inspector in Iraq.

It is probably unrelated to the story that in the course of his inspections he met a US servicewoman, Sgt. Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American. She is alleged to have been an undercover US intelligence officer, but denies it. She, incidentally, had become a member of the Baha'i Faith when whe was a teen in the US. She converted Kelly to the religion, which was founded in Baghdad in 1863 by the Iranian notable Baha'u'llah. The Baha'i faith's principles include the unity of the world religions, the unity of humankind, and the desirability of a federal world government. (Truth in advertising: This author joined the religion in 1972 but was forced out of the community in 1996 by fundamentalist elements in the leadership, who try to impose censorship and conformity on vocal intellectuals.) Actually, I think that any serious person from the West who spent a lot of time in the Middle East would find Baha'i, with its scriptures' liberal theology and acceptance of both the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic heritages quite attractive. (The more fundamentalist side of the religion is usually hidden from outsiders and new believers, and is probably more pronounced in the US than in the UK anyway.)

Kelly returned to his home in Oxford. He was convinced that Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons, and appears to have advised the British government of this belief.

But then beginning in the fall of 2002, he had three conversations with Andrew Gilligan, a BBC defense reporter, from which the reporter took away the impression that Kelly thought the case for Iraqi WMD was being exaggerated by the Blair government. One issue was whether Blair's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, had intervened in the wording of a British security report on Iraq to make it seem more alarming than did the original phraseology. The reporter then went public with the charge that the Blairites had deliberately exaggerated or in the quaint British phrase "sexed up" the evidence for Saddam's weapons capability. This was on May 22, 2003.

The Blair government strenuously denied any such intentional tampering with the facts, and put enormous pressure on the reporter and the BBC to retract.

On July 4, Kelly came in from the cold and let the Blair government know that he was one of Gilligan's sources, but denied being the sole source or of alleging all the misconduct that Gilligan did. Blair officials were relieved that Kelly was a relative outsider who wouldn't have had intimate knowledge of cabinet meetings, e.g.; they also knew that Kelly was himself a hardliner on Iraqi WMD, and that it was likely Gilligan had exaggerated Kelly's critique. They made a deliberate decision to out Kelly. Kelly had a security clearance and wasn't supposed to be talking to journalists, and the Blairites considered prosecuting him under under Draconian British law. He was outed on July 10, 2003. Campbell was particularly hard on Kelly, and resigned later that summer.

Kelly was then found dead in the woods on July 18, 2003, having swallowed a lot of pills and with a wrist slit. (Mai Pederson said in the Sunday Mail this past Sunday that Kelly had always complained of difficulty swallowing pills and refused to take Tylenol, and she flatly disbelieved that he would or could have committed suicide in this manner. He had once confided in another friend that if there were an Iraq war, he feared he would be found dead in the woods [though it may have been Saddam's agents he feared.] The British authorities have treated his death as a suicide.)

After his death there were attempts to discredit Kelly on the grounds of his being a Baha'i, with the tabloid press misconstruing the religion as a "cult." The Baha'i faith is a perfectly respectable religion, to which have belonged US poet laureate Robert Hayden, jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, painter Mark Toby, and thousands of other Americans and Britishers. I think there is an authoritarian dark side to the administration of the religion, which practices shunning, but then the same thing is true of the Amish. It doesn't mean they are disreputable. This charge against Kelly was just a smear. The Baha'i angle may have been irrelevant, anyway. The rank and file of Baha'is tend to be peaceniks and most probably disliked the Iraq War. But the leadership is often very conservative and interested in patronage from governments, and it forbade Baha'is to demonstrate against the war, even as individuals, in winter of 2003. Kelly was a relatively new Baha'i and did not even live in a big community, and is unlikely to have been aware of community politics on the issue.

Blair denies having been involved in the decision to out Kelly, but he appears to have chaired the meeting where the decision was made, so either he is lying or he doesn't pay much attention to what is going on around him. About half the British public think he is lying. There is a lot of evidence by now that especially in fall of 2002 the Blair government did in fact exaggerate the intelligence on Iraqi WMD, changing the wording of intelligence estimates so as to make them appear more conclusive than they were (see Milne's piece, above). So the substance of Gilligan's report actually seems unexceptionable, though whether what was done could be characterized as a "sexing up" of the documents may still be in dispute. I suppose what is at issue is whether Blair & Co. were acting in good faith or being dishonest, and their high dudgeon comes in part from a conviction that they were acting in good faith and just "tightening up" the language of the security reports, which they actually believed were dire. But that is a pretty low bar. For all we know even Cheney believes the incredible things that come out of his mouth regarding Iraq. I take it that the phrase "sexing up" has connotations of dishonesty or insincerity. If Gilligan did anything wrong at all, it was to venture into the territory of intentions, which is admittedly an ethical issue for journalists (how can you know an official's private intentions? Shouldn't you avoid imputing intentions?)

In the weird world of commissions, the fault in this affair has mainly been laid on the BBC, the chairman of which has just had to resign. This outcome seems a real shame, since the BBC was among the better sources of news coverage on the Iraq war, and this scandal will be used by some government officials impatient with the Beeb's famous autonomy to rein it in and make it a house organ for the party in power.

Kelly's death is still a bit of a mystery. Whoever outed him really should be made to resign, since it was most improper, but given the tenor of the Hutton report that is unlikely to happen. Ironically, Kelly, like most of the weapons inspectors, probably wasn't suspicious enough of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD or the ways in which the US and British governments spun it.

Bomb at Baghdad Hotel kills 3; In other attacks, 6 US Troops Killed, 2 CNN Employees, 4 Iraqi Policemen; 6 US troops Wounded

There was so much violence of so many types in so many places in Iraq on Tuesday that it took me some time just to track it all down and summarize it. Kudos to CNN for among the clearest summaries. It made me depressed that 6 of our guys bought the farm.

CNN reports that guerrillas detonated a truck bomb in front of the Shahin Hotel in the ritzy Karada district of Baghdad just before midnight Tuesday. Much of the hotel was occupied by Iraq's interim minister for labor, Sami Azara al-Majun, and his staff. He and other officials were safe, but between one and 3 bystanders were killed.

Tuesday had earlier witnessed 5 attacks that killed 6 US soldiers and 2 CNN employees, along with 4 Iraqi policemen and a civilian.

Guerillas detonated a roadside bomb near Iskandariyah at 8 pm Iraqi time, killing 3 soldiers from the Combined Joint Task Force 7. Another three were wounded.

At 1 pm in Khaldiyah, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb and killed another three US soldiers along with an Iraqi civilian. The explosion wounded 3 US troops and 4 Iraqis.

A CNN crew was ambushed near Baghdad on Tuesday, with the driver of their vehicle and their translator being killed. A cameraman in another vehicle was slightly wounded.

Guerrillas in the holy Shiite city of Karbala drove up to the Polish military HQ and opened fire, killing one Iraqi policeman and wounding two others.

Guerrillas in Ramadi, in the Sunni heartland, killed 3 Iraqi policemen Tuesday outside their police station.

US troops operating in the Sunni Arab region arrested several suspected members of the Jaysh Muhammad, a guerrilla cell operating there (sounds like Sunni fundamentalists).

Members claiming to be from a Muslim party occupied a Red Crescent office in a ritzy Baghdad neighborhood Tuesday, injuring one of the Red Crescent staffers. Iraqi police came to the scene.

Informed Comment up for Koufax Award

2003 Koufax Award Finalists Best Expert Blog has been announced, with this column as a finalist. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported the site so warmly!

Humanitarian Grounds for Iraq War?

Re: Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a
Humanitarian Intervention", 26 January 2004, Keynote essay to Human Rights Watch, "World Report 2004."

My reply, from a discussion list:

I deeply disagree with the way the Bush administration pursued the war
against Iraq. The hyping of unfounded 'intelligence,' the backroom deals
with corrupt or authoritarian expatriates, the spying on the UNSC
ambassadors and then the discarding of them, the disregard for the United
Nations Charter, the undermining of international law and the law of
occupation--all of these steps and policies made our world so much more
shoddy and dangerous and mistrustful.

That said, I simply must disagree with HRW and Mr. Roth that there were no
humanitarian grounds for such a war. I believe that what Saddam was doing
to the Marsh Arabs from the mid-1990s could legitimately qualify as a
genocide. Likewise, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. Although the
latter was carried out some years ago, the former had been recent and
ongoing. Moreover, there is not in most legal systems any statute of
limitations on murder, so I am not sure why there should be one on
genocide or mass murder.

In short, I believe that the United Nations Security Council was obliged
to remove Saddam Hussein from power on the basis of egregious violations
of the UN Convention on Genocide

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html#CAG.

The proper way for the Bush administration to have proceeded was to apply
to the UNSC under Article 8 of the convention.

"Article 8
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United
Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they
consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide
or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3."

In so saying, I do not mean to give the Bush administration a pass on its
behavior, since vigilanteism is not the same as lawful prosecution. Bush
lynched Saddam, when in fact his regime should have been put on trial and
removed by the Security Council.

I do not believe most Iraqis would agree with HRW on this one, and they
are the ones who had to live with that regime.

Sachedina Interview by Cobban: Sistani is Trying to Bring in the UN

Helena Cobban's interview with Shiite thinker Abdulaziz Sachedina of the University of Virginia is a must-read contribution. Sachedina has recently been to Iran and moved among the Shiites. Interestingly, he seems to think that there is more support for Muqtada al-Sadr than for Sistani except in Basra. From a distance, I would say that Sistani has more general, but vaguer authority, whereas the devotees of Muqtada are really devoted. Sachedina doesn't think Sistani has read Gandhi or knows his philosophy, but allows that some of his followers may have. He believes that Sistani wanted to get the UN involved in the Iraqi elections, and that was one of the real goals of his recent activism. I concur entirely.

Bush: Saddam posed grave threat to US

Bush maintains that despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."

This allegation simply is not true, however much a monster Saddam may be.

Let's look at the issue Harpers style:

US population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million
US per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: 700
US nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0
US tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0
Number of foreign troops and civilians US military has killed since 1968: approx. 2 million
Number of foreign troops and civilians Iraqi military has killed since 1968: approx. 250,000

Breaking News: Kerry Wins New Hampshire

Caught Kerry's victory speech on CNN. With 73% of precincts reporting, he still has 38% of the vote, a 12-point lead over Dean. The race for third place is still tight, with Clark at 13% to Edwards's 12%. [As you know, that is about where it ended, save that Kerry got 39%.]

Kerry's sudden reemergence is remarkable, but on the face of it, it isn't so strange that a long-serving Massachusetts senator should win New Hampshire, nor that a former governor of Vermont should have also done well there. Iowa and New Hampshire are famously not bellwethers for the rest of the country, and are more a Darwinian mechanism for weeding out the weak and unsuited than an indication of who will win the party's nomination.

On February 3, Edwards will probably take South Carolina (with Sharpton doing double digits there too), and Edwards could do well in Oklahoma and maybe Missouri, as well (though Gephardt's endorsement is expected to help Kerry there). If Kerry can finish second in South Carolina, it would be very significant for him. But it will be tough; Clark could do well there, more because he is from Arkansas than because he is a former general.

You'd expect Kerry to take Delaware. Arizona, New Mexico, and North Dakota are probably up for grabs. But the basic fact about next Tuesday is that it probably just won't settle anything, and will keep alive candidacies rather than ending them. I'd say Clark has to win at least one to remain viable, and obviously Edwards has to carry South Carolina and maybe one other to look credible going forward.

A few days later, Michigan and Washington state have their votes, and they are big states that matter, where the victories will tell us something. One thing Michigan will tell us, as the Detroit Free Press has pointed out, is whether Kerry or some other candidate can get out and win the African-American vote. African-Americans are some 12.9% of Americans, but almost all of them vote Democrat. If we say the country is about evenly divided between voters for Democratic candidates and voters for Republican ones, obviously the 52% of the country that votes Democrat in presidential races is about a quarter African-American. This is a problem, since the poor and the young vote in lower numbers than the wealthy and the senior. African-Americans are very disproportionately poor and young. So one key to a Democratic victory is having a candidate about whom African-Americans can get excited, who will actually draw them to the polls (having an honest state election system that ensures their votes are actually counted also helps).

And, I have a theory about Kerry. A key element of his appeal is that he is a Vet. It may help him that he is a prominent Vet who has worked for the interests of veterans (unlike Bush, who wanted to cut veterans' benefits and who waited out Vietnam with a country club assignment in the Texas air national guards [which he tried to get out of, as well]). And being a Vet who is pro-veteran is the one thing that might enable a candidate to appeal to both African-Americans and white Southerners. Because both have a strong military tradition, and both have served in the US military during the past 40 years in numbers disproportionate to their percentages of the general population. It is probably not a primary consideration, but it may be a factor--especially at a time when the families of servicemen and servicewomen, reservists and national guards are upset and worried about Bush's Iraq policy.


Kerry made one Middle East reference in his speech, saying he was going to support US independence from petroleum so that no American young person would have to serve militarily in the Middle East. He implied that the Iraq war was about securing petroleum supplies or about keeping them inexpensive, or something. My advice to Senator Kerry is to drop this particular grace note. There is no near-term replacement for petroleum that is nearly in the same price range or which doesn't have very bad implications for the environment. Coal produces acid rain. Wind generators kill lots of birds and give human beings migraines. Solar is expensive and photovoltaic cells for large-scale production require a lot of exotic metals that are toxic (including cadmium and selenium) and the cells will be hard to recycle [solar is anyway really, really expensive]. Nuclear produces pesky radioactive isotopes that are hard to store safely, can fairly easily be used to make dirty bombs or enriched to become nuclear bombs, and last for thousands of years.

Petroleum costs around $25-$30 per barrel, and is likely to go on doing so for decades. (Those who argue for an imminent shortage ignore the likelihood of further big finds--it is like the old 'Limits to Growth' fallacy of the early 70s that predicted all kinds of metals would be rare and extremely expensive by now, but ignored the simple fact that when metals get more expensive, more of them tend to be mined.) Every other fuel source is 'way more expensive or more damaging to the environment. So, who wants to pay twice as much for their monthly heating and energy bills? Or have their skin corroded by acid when it rains? Moreover, petroleum is plentiful and lots of countries are happy to pump it for the current price, and it is not necessary to do things like invade and occupy Iraq to have inexpensive petroleum. Saddam's petroleum was making its way to the US. No producer could afford to boycott the US long; that way lies bankruptcy. The main problem of OPEC and other petroleum producers in the mid-1990s was that there was an oil glut. Prices dropped to near $10 a barrel for a while in the Clinton era.

So, the promise is unrealistic and the premise is flawed. If Cheney took us to war about petroleum, it was not for our general economic benefit but to open investment and money-making opportunities for US petroleum corporations--opportunities that they could have gained more easily by exploring Pakistan and India more intensively. And, if the US were willing to put the money into insulating and increasing fuel efficiency, it could cut its petroleum consumption by a third easily, which would be good for the environment and economically would benefit the country over the subsequent decade or two (the Europeans pulled this off after the oil price shocks of the 70s). However, the American public does not want to hear about conservation and this is a project that should only be undertaken in the second term of a president, not on the campaign trail.

If Kerry wants to bring this issue up, the right way to do it is to say that international cooperation on security in the Persian Gulf would be a better guarantee of energy security for the country than unilateral American military action.

[Dear Environmentalists: I am one of you; I have been reading and thinking about the environment for 40 years. I helped organize trash pick-up along the road for the first Earth Day. I am not saying that no alternative sources of energy should be used or encouraged. Indeed, I am all for throwing money at research and development, and encouraging environmentally safer energy sources. Better fuel cells would be all to the good. But they would increase gas mileage in automobiles to 60 miles a gallon, not abolish petroleum. I am saying that independence from petroleum is a chimera as long as it and natural gas are 10 times cheaper than solar power. Even if Kerry got two terms, he would not be able to move the country anywhere near independence from foreign petroleum and it is therefore a bad idea for him to suggest that he could. I am talking about real-world economics and political good faith here.]

Breaking News: Same as Headline Below

Still watching CNN. With 30% of precincts reporting, Kerry has a very impressive lead over Dean still. Kerry is getting in the high 30s, Dean only in the 20s. Blitzer began by saying CNN exit polls were showing a tight race, but unless it is the upper middle class precincts that haven't reported yet, I don't see how it can be that close. Maybe former Dean supporters who switched to Kerry at the last minute just couldn't bear to admit it to the reporters (maybe they were with their Dean-supporting friends at the time).

CNN hints around that New Hampshire has a strong class divide, with a lot of blue collar workers and a lot of upper middle class liberals. Then it reported that the "moderates" are favoring Kerry, the "liberals" Dean. I wonder if we can conclude that the working class is voting for Kerry and the upper middle class for Dean. American news reporting is so nervous about class. I wish they would just come out with it.

Edwards has opened up a small 1-point lead over Clark. It may not be statistically significant, but if it holds a third-place finish for Dean could mean a lot going into South Carolina next week. Clark's earlier high poll numbers in New Hampshire now look like a fluke.

Breaking News: Kerry Leads, Dean close second, Edwards and Clark tied for Third

I'm watching CNN. With just 13% of precincts reporting, Kerry has the lead over Dean in New Hampshire. The exit polls seem to show that the race is much closer than Kerry supporters had hoped. Edwards and Clark both have 13% of the vote each.

If Kerry and Dean come in very close, it does look as though this is a 4-man race for the next month at least. Clark had earlier done much better in the polls, and one wonders if he can survive a fourth-place finish if Edwards overtakes him.

As Carville noted, this is fun. Maybe on May 31 Iraqis will be seeing whether the Dawa candidate or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is doing better in the voting for parliament . . . But at the moment something much more boring and less democratic is being planned for them in Washington.

Bombs Rock Baghdad on Monday

Powerful explosions rocked downtown Baghdad at 10:35 pm local time on Monday, as a rocket also landed in a parking lot near the American headquarters. It is where Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer and his aides park, but no casualties were reported. Sirens went off and US officials at the Coalition compound were told to take cover.

A man getting off a bus in Baghdad stepped on and detonated a roadside bomb. He was killed, and three other passengers were wounded.

Later on Monday, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb in West Baghdad neighborhood, wounding a civilian and inflicting damage on three vehicles.

Guerrillas in the Sunni Arab areas west of Baghdad launched two attacks on Iraqi police, killing 7 of them.

Near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, guerrillas blew up bombs outside the Spanish garrison, but, again, no damage was reported.

In the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, two small rockets exploded at the US military base there, but no reports of damage.

Kerry, Edwards surge in New Hampshire; Health Care beats Iraq as Concern

Only 10 percent of the voters in New Hampshire think Iraq is the most pressing issue in the campaign. I was surprised to find that 22 percent put health care as an issue first, as opposed to 16 percent who focused on the economy.

The Washington Post reports of the voters in the New Hampshire primary, "Health care (22 percent) topped the list of issues considered critical by voters in a recent University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll, ahead of both the economy (16 percent) and the war in Iraq (10 percent). "

It seems to me that what is really important in the recent poll figures on the New Hampshire primary is not the absolute numbers or the relative placing, but the graph of movement. I find the tracking numbers at zogby.com over the past week telling. Kerry went from 23% a week ago to 31% on Monday. That's an enormous surge, with him ending at 130 percent of where he began. Unsurprisingly, Kerry's Web Page has a section on health care entitled "Affordable Health Care for Every American." Health care is an area where the 'free market' is clearly not working, but is rather producing 22% inflation that is extremely worrisome to employers and employees. And, of course, the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance of any sort are second class citizens facing penury or death if anything goes wrong. The problem is not, as Bush implies, malpractice suits which account for about 2% of the cost of health care. And, maybe this is an area where the electorate wants something done, and where a Massachusetts liberal can be trusted to do it.

Dean went from 25 to 28 in the same period. Good, but the rate of surge is far less.

Clark actually fell from 16 percent to 13 percent over the week, a bad sign for him. Edwards nearly doubled his numbers from 7 percent to 12 percent. If the Edwards surge continues on Tuesday, and the Clark decline steepens, Edwards could actually tie or beat Clark, setting up a very interesting race among two Southerners for South Carolina.

I saw Jerry Brown, former California governor and current mayor of Oakland on O'Reilly* when I was channel surfing, saying that it could be a 4-way race for a while. Brown may well be right about that.
------------

*P.c. readers should please not send me emails complaining about my watching O'Reilly. Life is hard and I have to get my laughs somehow.

Annan Will Send UN Election Team to Iraq

Kofi Annan will send an election commission to Iraq, the Washington Post reports. This United Nations commission was the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and initially the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by Paul Bremer was said to be "deeply offended" by the Iraqi attempt to involve the UN in the electoral process.

Annan has already said in the past that he thought holding open elections was impossible before July 1. But Sistani is convinced that an open-minded commission from the UN would discover on examining the situation on the ground in Iraq that popular elections are possible, after all.

As I mentioned last week, the British military authorities in Basra have come to the latter conclusion, as well, and have not been shy about saying so, even though this conclusion differs from the position of the civilian government of Tony Blair. (The British military felt badly used in Bosnia by the civilians, and many resent the lack of equipment they have to suffer with in Iraq, and they therefore tend to speak out with what seems to me striking candor.)

Sistani's success in involving the UN has guaranteed that, whatever the outcome, Iraqi elections will not be merely a US project, but will have substantial input from the world body. Since this input will help bolster their legitimacy in Iraq and the Arab world, I think it can only be a good thing.