Wolfowitz of Baghdad?

Rumors are flying around official Washington that the new US ambassador in Iraq as of July 1 will be Paul Wolfowitz. He is currently deputy Secretary of Defense, but probably could not have continued into a second Bush term. He is associated with the worst mistakes of Iraq-- concentrating in 2001 on Saddam rather than on al-Qaeda, hyping Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, insisting that Iraqis would welcome a US occupation with garlands, thinking Iraqi Shiites were "secular" and had no sensitive holy cities in that country, and backing the corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi and his militia as successors to Saddam and the Baath. He is probably already a liability to Bush in this election. There were earlier rumors that he might step down this spring.

Sending him to Baghdad as ambassador would solve a problem for Bush domestically, perhaps. But having a Likudnik* run the US embassy in Baghdad would be a complete disaster for US policy in Iraq and in the whole region. It would be proof positive to the insurgents in Iraq that the US intends to reshape the country in accordance with a Zionist agenda and make Iraqis the bitches of Ariel Sharon [Mind you, I think this conspiratorial way of thinking illegitimate, but it is already a theme in Iraqi popular political discourse]. It seems unlikely to me that Wolfowitz could get the cooperation of the Shiite clerics.

You also wonder whether Wolfowitz could be a successful ambassador, given the way he has sidelined and badmouthed the State Department. Wouldn't the foreign service officers find ways to sabotage him?

-----------

*the objection to calling Wolfowitz a Likudnik is often raised, that he believes in a Palestinian state. But even Sharon says that. Wolfowitz is probably closer to the Sharansky faction in Israeli politics (which is in coalition with Likud) than to Sharon, but he is still on the Right and would not exactly vote Labor. It is a little unlikely that the Arab street will be interested in these distinctions.

8% of Iraqi academics have Fled, 1000 Professionals Assassinated in past Year

Ahmad Janabi reports that

' More than 1000 leading Iraqi professionals and intellectuals have been assassinated since last April, among them such prominent figures as Dr Muhammad al-Rawi, the president of Baghdad University. The identity of the assailants remains a mystery and none have been caught. '

Political scientist Dhafir Salman is quoted as saying that although many Iraqi intellectuals fled the country during the sanctions regime in the 1990s, ' under the occupation the rate of emigration has increased. "Iraqi universities have lost 1315 scientists who hold MA and PhD degrees," al-Ani said. "This number constitutes eight per cent of the 15,500 Iraqi academics. "Up until now, 30% of those who were sacked as result of the [de-baathification] campaign have left Iraq." '

In my view, a lot of the assassinations have been carried out by individuals with Baath-era grudges or by radical Shiite militiamen. But some of them could just be personal grudge-settling. (I saw this phenomenon--of personal grudge-settling, not with regard to academic--in Beirut during the Civil War. When there is social chaos, neighbors with rifles who don't like another neighbor sometimes just take a pot shot at him through his kitchen window. It is a little unlikely that the shooter will be caught when there are few effective police and bigger fish to fry).

There has been a struggle during the past year over de-Baathification. Party membership was forced on a lot of capable people. Ahmad Chalabi wants to do massive de-baathification, which means even minor party members would be blackballed. This is apparently what is happening in the universities. Others have suggested only banning or conducting reprisals against the people who committed crimes or held fairly high party or military posts. My impression is that the latter policy was followed in post-war Germany, and that the Nazi high school teachers just went on teaching. Likewise professors like Martin Heidegger were not locked up or killed, even though Heidegger fired his Jewish colleagues and was certainly a fellow traveler of the Nazi regime.

There is a contrast to be made here in revolutionary situations. In 1949 when the Chinese Communists came to power, they actively tried to keep entrepreneurs and professionals in the country, and made special arrangements to allow that. In contrast, in 1979 when Khomeini carried out the clerical revolution in Iran, the hardliners chased most of the really talented professionals out of the country. Iran suffered horribly as a result.

So, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Interim Governing Council can do things the Chinese way, or the Khomeini way. It looks as though Chalabi is taking them in the Khomeini direction. It can't be good for the future of Iraq to lose nearly 10% of its academics. Some of those may have been involved in Baath Party dirty tricks, but were all? And, the campaign of assassination makes a mockery of the rhetoric about democratization.

UN Excluded from Overseeing Elections

Al-Hayat reports that the Interim Governing Council (IGC) is rejecting any role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraqi elections save that of "help and consultation). Iraqi National Congress spokesman Intifadh Qanbar said that the UN delegation was told by the IGC that elections would have to be a purely Iraqi affair,
that Iraqis would have to take the leading role in them, and that there would be no UN role in administering elections. He also said that no interference would be brooked from Iraq's neighbors.

Qanbar and the INC sharply criticized UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for having opposed the first Gulf War (which aimed at forcing Saddam back out of Kuwait), and blamed him for meeting with Saddam in 1998. He also criticized Brahimi's statement that Iraq might face a civil war. Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a cleric now in the last days of his temporary presidency of the IGC, had also complained two days ago in Kuwait that Brahimi's report on Iraq had lacked balance.

Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has rejected charges that he had misused American funds, saying that such charges derived from the CIA and that they were false.

Chalabi was supported by the CIA and the State Department around 1992 to 1996 or so, when they dropped him because he could not give an accounting of the millions of dollars they had given him to overthrow Saddam. He was then picked up by the Pentagon instead, and especially once the Bush administration came to power.

The attempt by the INC to marginalize Brahimi and the United Nations reflects Chalabi's fear that he would not be able to win a fair, UN-supervised election. One fears he plans on vote-buying and other corrupt acts to be elected or appointed to a high Iraqi governing post, possibly as Prime Minister. Although the al-Hayat story says that the IGC wants to limit the UN role, if one looks carefully this move seems to be coming mainly from Chalabi and his people.

Sistani: Elections must be Held soon

az-Zaman/Wire Services:

A spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani says that elections must be held as soon as possible, and that anything done before the people have spoken is illegitimate. He is quoted as saying that "the principal political forces are not calling for an Islamic republic." He said that Iraqis are well aware of the dangers of ethnic conflict and that they "do not call for the establishment of religious government. "

Sistani just wants a government that will respect the universally acknowledged Islamic principles. The state should respect the rights of minorities, he said.

Sistani is portrayed in some quarters as a Khomeini wannabe and as indistinguishable from Muqtada al-Sadr.

Going on what he says, though, he envisages a situation in Iraq analogous to that in Ireland for most of the 20th century. That is, the Catholic church did not rule; there was a secular parliament for that purpose. But the church effectively weighed in on legislation it thought affect it. Likewise, Sistani says he doesn't want ayatollahs actually running the government. But they should intervene with fatwas or rulings when legislation arises that affects Islamic issues.

Is the failure of the Arab Summit a Failure of Bush's Democratization Plan?


Rob Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle examines the issues around the collapse of the Arab League summit that had been planned for Tunis, asking if the "Greater Middle East" plan of the Bush administration, which pushes democratization, is having any effect.

' U.S. officials hoped that the summit would set the region on a path toward Western-style free elections and free markets. But commentators in the United States and the Middle East say the administration has instead made matters worse by appearing to shove democracy down the throats of reluctant Arab leaders.

"The Greater Middle East Initiative is going nowhere fast," said Andrew Apostolou, a Mideast analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative Washington think tank. "The problem is that Arab states are in no mood to agree to any form of externally generated freedoms, and I see no way out of this. I don't think the Bush administration has handled this well." '

I am quoted saying that I thought the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq have if anything caused severe setbacks for civil liberties and democratization in the region. Iraq's chaos is enough to scare anyone in the region into thinking maybe a little authoritarianism is better, as long as you don't have to worry about your kids being kidnapped or your mosque being blown up. The US has encouraged governments like Tunisia and Yemen to take Draconian measures because of the war on terror (it should be recognized that terrorists are mostly only conspirators before they pull off an operation, so the temptation, as in Egypt in the 1990s, is to put thousands in jail for thought crimes). The Iranian hardliners have encaged the reformers. I don't see any positive effect of Bush administration policies in the region. Positive views of the US in the region have fallen to like 10% a lot of places. The US vetoing UN SC condemnation of Sharon's government for firing helicopter gunship rockets at a paraplegic was probably the last straw for a lot of people. I doubt the Bush administration has any credibility anywhere in the region. That it is going to "reshape" anything when its HQ in Baghdad is under routine rocket attack seems to me a little unlikely.

Changing Status of Shiites in Arab World

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports on the implications of a Shiite-majority Iraqi government for Arab world politics. He points to the Shiite majority in Bahrain (though the emir there is a Sunni), and the substantial Shiite populations in Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Hendawi notes that Shiites have no legal right to practice their rituals publicly in Egypt. This fact is breathtaking. It would be as though Protestants could not open a church and worship in Italy or Ireland.

Hendawi interviewed me and others for this piece:

Excerpt:

' " As Iraq's majority Shiites emerge from a history of brutal repression under Saddam Hussein, free at last to speak their minds and practice their religious rituals in public, experts are busy assessing the impact.

''Iraq seems to me now to be creating the first officially multicultural country in the Arab world,'' said Juan R. Cole of the University of Michigan, a prominent American expert on Iraqi Shiites.

''It will be the first Arab country to have an elected Shiite majority in parliament ... if things work out as planned,'' he said.

Sunni Arabs and Kurds, however, point to what they see as sectarian behavior by some Shiite politicians. Shiites are divided among themselves and lack a unified leadership. The more secular among them worry that the clergy could turn Iraq into an Iranian-style theocracy. Iranian clerical influence is already keenly felt in the Shiite south of Iraq.

''If the empowerment goes relatively smoothly and the Shiites handle their new power and more significant role well, it can be a source of both the reassertion of Iraqi Shiism's leadership role and a source of pride for many Shiites, especially those in the Gulf,'' said John L. Esposito of Georgetown University. '

Shape of Things to Come

UPI is reporting that the Interim Governing Council is considering the form of the Iraqi government to which sovereignty will be handed on June 30.

Previous plans had called for a more representative and expanded body, of 100 or more delegates, with more representation for tribal sheikhs and clerics who had been excluded from the 25-member body currently in place.

UPI reports that, instead, the IGC current thinking is to slim down to a 3-man presidency that will in turn appoint government ministers, presumably mainly from among the current IGC members. That is, the transitional government that will oversee Iraq until elections (scheduled for January 2005) will be no more representative than the current IGC, and power will be concentrated in even fewer hands. Corrupt figures like Ahmad Chalabi may well be in the 3-man presidency.

Such a transitional government will suffer from severe illegitimacy and unpopularity. There is also a danger that people like Chalabi will jerry-rig the election process.

Arnaud de Borchgrave speculates that the three presidents will be Adnan Pachachi, Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and Massoud Barzani, and that they will appoint Chalabi prime minister. He said everyone is afraid of Chalabi because the Pentagon allowed his militia to capture Iraqi intelligence documents that implicate lots of people in taking money from Saddam.

az-Zaman says that some rumors have Chalabi competing with Iyad Alawi for the prime ministership. But it says that its sources in the CPA and the Interim Governing Council assert that Alawi will be head of the national security council or of the interior minister (i.e. domestic intelligence).

Alawi, who has deep links to ex-Baathist officers, really should be kept away from internal security.

Muqtada's Newspaper Closed, 1000 Demonstrate

AP is reporting that the Coalition Provisional Authority has closed the weekly newspaper of radical young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, al-Hawzah. It is charged with fomenting violence against US troops. The US military authorities seriously considered arresting Muqtada last October, but in the end decided that would cause more trouble than it was worth (wisely enough). They did however threaten him, and as a result he quietened down and became more conciliatory for a while. In the past two months he has become more and more vitriolic in his public statements, perhaps emboldened by the prospect of a return to Iraqi sovereignty this summer.

The newspaper has carried scurrilous stories accusing the US of being behind some of the bombings of Shiites. I know it is tempting for some analysts to suspect the US military of Machiavellian actions. But it simply is not true that the US is firing missiles into Shiite mosques. It makes no sense. The Shiites are among the few friends they have left.

About 1,000 Sadrists came out to demonstrate in front of the newspaper's offices, and one suspects that such demonstrations may well multiply as the date for the dissolution of the CPA draws near. There is a real question as to whether cracking down on the newspaper like this will make things better or worse. Since Muqtada has a tight network of mosque preachers throughout the south, he is perfectly capable of getting out his views without a newspaper, through the sermons of his lieutenants. Likewise, he gets quoted in Iran-based Arabic language television and radio broadcasts.

Although it is true that al-Hawzah has offered provocations, it is also likely the case that the US is seeking ways of taking away Muqtada's megaphone so that he doesn't do anything to ruin the hand-over of sovereignty on June 30.

Alissa Rubin of the LA Times reports that the CPA has also closed an informal court run by Muqtada in Najaf, and released prisoners who had been sentenced to being held and tortured in its basement. Muqtada's organization is said to maintain such courts and prisons all over the country.

Clarke: Difference Between Clinton and Bush

For readers who don't scroll all the way down, just wanted to draw your attention to my posting late Sunday on what Clarke means when he says fighting terrorism was a more urgent consideration for the late Clinton administration than for the early Bush one. I argue that it isn't a matter of policy, but rather of specific cabinet-level procedures instituted by Clinton and abandoned by Bush.

Mosul: Barwari Escapes Assassination; US MPs wounded, Western Security Guards Killed

Public Works Minister Nasrin Barwari narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while traveling to Mosul on Sunday, , according to AP. She is the only female minister appointed by the Interim Governing Council. She is a Kurd, and a feminist, and led the movement to prevent the abolition of civil personal status law in favor of Islamic codes last winter. Heavily Arab Mosul, where there are strong radical Islamist and Baathist currents, is inhospitable territory for her.

Reuters reports litany of mayhem in Iraq on Sunday.

In Mosul, as well, guerrillas sprayed machine gun fire at two US military police, wounding them. In a separate incident, they took out a Stryker transport vehicle, but did not cause any casualties.

Guerrillas in the city hit the car of two security guards, a Briton and a Canadian, with rpg fire, killing them. They were escorting civilian engineers to a power plant. Other guerrillas had earlier conducted a drive-by shooting against two employees of the US-run Iraqi media network.

Another guerrilla grenade attack wounded an Iraq policeman in the city center. Guerrillas fired an RPG at city hall, missed, and hit a boy's school; luckily the grenade was a dud and did not go off.

Five Iraqi civilians, including three children, were wounded when guerrillas set of a bomb near Baqubah that probably targetted an Iraqi contractor working for the Americans.

Sistani will not Launch Street Protests: Aide

az-Zaman/AFP: Refuting reports appearing Saturday in the Kuwaiti press, an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf told the press Sunday that Sistani wishes to avoid chaos and does not intend to call his supporters out for demonstrations, even if his reservations about the interim constitution are not taken into consideration.

The aide, who asked not to be identified, said of Sistani that "He is not thinking about calling for demonstrations in the country, since he does not want chaos. He supports the holding of cultural and intellectual meetings to prepare the street for the coming phase."

If Sistani's reservations about the interim constitution are not taken into account, the aide said, the grand ayatollah "will issue a letter if he does not want the United Nations and the Interim Governing Council in Iraq to recognize this basic law as it is, or to implement it."

He said that Sistani's wilingness to meet with a UN delegation would depend on their attitude to the interim constitution and its controversial clauses.

Israeli Intelligence Blasted by the Knesset over Iraq Failure

A subcommittee of the Israeli Parliament has issued a report sharply critical of Israeli intelligence failures concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It notes that Mossad thought Iraq's programs and stockpiles were a threat, which they were not, and yet seemed unaware of how much progress Libya had made on nukes.

The fact is that Israeli intelligence failures in Iraq contributed to drawing the United States into the war (pace the Knesset report). Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith, a representative of the American branch of the Likud Party, met repeatedly with Israeli generals at the Pentagon (who were not properly signed in, contrary to post-9/11 regulations), and they gave him fodder for his pre-determined insistence on ginning up a war against Iraq, reinforcing what was being said by liars like Ahmad Chalabi. They were conveying Israeli intelligence to a key American policy maker, and it was wrong.

Of course, being wrong is one thing. Deliberately being wrong is another. Although the subcommittee report refuses to consider the possibility, it seems clear that there were conspiracies within the intelligence and military services of the UK, Israel and the US intended to draw the US into war against Iraq. One sees reports in the British press of a "Rockingham Group" in the UK ministry of defense pushing for war, and of British intelligence planting anti-Iraq stories in the US press.

The report very oddly maintains that Mossad did not believe Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program, unlike the US. This allegation is flat wrong, so wrong that one suspects it must be disinformation. See the citations in my discussion last October.

It seems likely to me that there was a similar clique of conspirators inside Mossad and Israeli military intelligence. Likewise, we know that PM Ariel Sharon had organized an office analogous to Feith's Office of Special Plans, to cherry pick Iraq intelligence so as to paint the situation as much worse than it was.

The Mossad cultivates an air of competence and invincibility in the Western press, but it often has screwed up royally and has been involved in lots of hare-brained operations (encouraging Hamas in the 1970s to offset the PLO, e.g.)

The next time a US policy maker is told that something is known for sure because Israeli intelligence is sure of it, I hope to God she or he takes it all with a grain of salt. Israelis are cut off from the rest of the Middle East in most important ways. Most of them don't understand it, and most of them don't like it. They don't have really good sources for the important things. And, their intelligence estimates are often self-interested, used to promote policy rather than as a basis for it.

Not only is the Iraq debacle proof of all this (they thought Iraqis were going to pump oil to Haifa for them and would exercise a moderating influence on Hizbullah!), but their approach to the Palestinians has been such a huge failure because they are simply incompetent in dealing with other Middle Easterners. Brute force, extortion, and bribery are not a policy, they are the last refuge of a mafioso.

The Difference between Clinton and Bush: The Millennium Plot

More on the Clarke conroversy: The pundits and politicians who keep saying that Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's are the same are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the same, but the implementation was very different.

Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever had against al-Qaeda.

the plot involved several key elements:

*Los Angelese International Airport would be blown up.

*(Possibly: The Needle in Seattle would be blown up).

* The Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, a favorite of American and Israeli tourists, would be blown up. A lot of the tourism for the millennium was Christian evangelicals wanting to be in the holy land.

* Bombs would go off at Mt. Nebo, a tourist site in Jordan associated with Moses.

* The USS The Sullivans would be targeted by a dinghy bomb off Yemen.

The story of how the LAX bombing was stopped on December 14 has been told in an important series in the Seattle Times. Extra security measures were implemented by US customs agents, leading to the apprehension of an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, with a trunk full of nitroglycerin, heading for LAX (he wanted to start his journey by ferry from Port Angeles, Washington).

Ressam grew up fishing in the Mediterranean and going to discos. But like many Algerians, he was radicalized in 1991. The government had allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist party, to contest elections. FIS unexpectedly won, however. The military feared that they would never allow another election, and would declare an Islamic state. They cancelled elections. FIS went into opposition, and the most radical members formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which got money from Usama Bin Laden, then in the Sudan. Ressam seems to have been GIA.

Ressam fought in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Then he settled in France and became part of the terrorist Groupe Roubaix, which carried out attacks in that city (pop. 98,000, near Lille in the north). In spring of 1998 he flew to Afghanistan and was trained in two camps under the direction of Palestinian-Saudi Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida recruited Ressam into an Algerian al-Qaeda cell headed from London by Abu Doha al-Mukhalif. Ressam was assigned to form a forward cell in Montreal, from which he and several other Algerians plotted the attack on LAX.

What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.

Early in 2001, in contrast, Bush demoted Clarke from being a cabinet member, and much reduced his authority. Clarke wanted the high Bush officials or "principals" to meet on terrorism regularly. He couldn't get them to do it. Rice knew what al-Qaeda was, but she, like other administration officials, was disconcerted by Clarke's focus on it as an independent actor. The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them. That funny look she gave Clarke wasn't unfamiliarity, it was puzzlement that someone so high in the system should be so wrongly focused.

In summer of 2001 the chatter was much greater and more ominous than in fall of 1999. Clarke wanted to go to battle stations and have daily meetings with the "principals" (i.e. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet). He wanted to repeat the procedures that had foiled the Millennium Plot. He could not convince anyone to let him do that.

Note that an "institution" is defined in sociology as a regular way of getting certain collective work done. Clarke is saying that Clinton had institutionalized a set of governmental routines for dealing with heightened threats from terrorists. He is not saying that Clinton bequeathed a "big think" plan to Bush on terrorism. He is saying that he bequeathed the Bush administration a repertoire of effective actions by high officials.

He thinks going to such a heightened level of alert and concerted effort in 2001 might have shaken loose much earlier the information that the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in the US. As it is, the INS wasn't informed of this advent and did not start looking for them until Aug. 21, 2001, by which time it was too late. Since they made their plane reservations for September 11 under their own names, names known to the USG, a heightened level of alert might have allowed the FBI to spot them.

So it just is not true that Bush was doing exactly the same thing on terrorism that Clinton was. He didn't have a cabinet-level counter-terrorism czar; he didn't have the routine of principals' meetings on terrorism; he didn't authorize Clarke to go to 'battle stations' and heightened security alert in summer of 2001 the way Clinton had done in December, 1999.

The key to understanding Clarke's argument is to understand how exactly the Millennium Plot was foiled.

Meanwhile, the Bush slime machine has thrown up the charge that Clarke admitted that there was an al-Qaeda-Saddam connection in Sudan in the early 1990s. This is such a non-story that it is incredible to me that anyone even bothers with it.

Clarke is straightforward that he suspected an Iraq-Bin Laden link in the very early 1990s in Khartoum. He also admits that Saddam tried to have Bush senior assassinated in Kuwait in 1993. What he told Wolfowitz in spring of 2001 was that there hadn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the US in ten years. Note that he does not say "there never had been." I am personally skeptical that even the early 1990s Khartoum-Baghdad links are based on good intelligence. But Clarke is entirely consistent if you read him knowing the whole story of al-Qaeda in the 1990s. His critics still don't get it.


Appendix: The Ressam take-down:

"
A special report by Hal Bernton, Mike Carter, David Heath and James Neff · The Seattle Times - June 23 - July 7, 2002

The Coho arrived in Port Angeles in the dark, just before 6 p.m., the last boat of the day. Customs inspector Diana Dean stopped each car as it rolled off, asking the drivers a few basic questions and wishing them a good trip.

The last car in line was a green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates.

"Where are you going?" "Sattal."

"Why are you going to Seattle?" "Visit."

"Where do you live?" "Montreal."

"Who are you going to see in Seattle?" "No, hotel."

The driver was fidgeting, jittery, sweating. His hands disappeared from sight as he began rummaging around the car's console. That made Dean nervous.

She handed him a customs declaration to fill out, a subtle way of stalling while she took a closer look. He filled out the form and handed it back. By this time, Dean observed, he was acting "hinky."

She asked him to turn the car off, pop open the trunk and step outside. Noris [Ahmed Ressam's alias was Antione Noris] was slow to respond but complied.

At this point, the other customs inspectors were finished and waiting to go home. They came over to help process the last car of the day. Dean told them this might be a "load vehicle" — code for one used for smuggling. Inspector Mark Johnson took over the interrogation.

"Habla español?" he asked.

"Parlez-vous français?" the man replied, handing over his ID. Not a passport or driver's license, but his Costco card.

"So you like to shop in bulk? You know, the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?" Johnson joked. He escorted Noris to a table, where he asked him to empty his pockets.

Inspector Mike Chapman searched the suitcase in the trunk. As he was doing that, inspector Danny Clem reached in and unscrewed the fastener on the spare-tire compartment. He opened the panel, looked inside and called out to Johnson.

Johnson, grabbing Noris by the shoulders, led him over to the trunk. At a hefty 240 pounds, Johnson had no trouble maneuvering the slim Noris. They peered in and saw no spare tire. In its place were several green bags that appeared to filled with white powder, as well as four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid. A drug dealer, perhaps?

Johnson felt Noris shudder. He escorted Noris back to the table and patted him down for weapons. Inside Noris' camel's-hair coat was a bulge. As Johnson was slipping off the coat to take a closer look, he was suddenly left holding an empty garment. Noris was fleeing.

By the time it sank in, Noris was nearly a block away. Johnson and Chapman took off on foot, yelling, "Stop! Police!"

With his head start, Noris escaped. The inspectors couldn't find him. Then Chapman noticed movement under a pickup parked in front of a shoe store. He squatted down, saw Noris, drew his gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up.

Noris stood up, arms raised, and looked at Chapman, just 20 feet away with his gun drawn. Then he turned and ran. "Stop! Police!"

Johnson joined Chapman on Noris' tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver's door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him. "

Sistani Aide Denounces Interim Constitution

Reuters is reporting that Kuwaiti papers on Saturday discussed the Friday sermon of Muhammad Baqir al-Muhri, a lieutenant of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in that country. Al-Muhri (Mohri) threatened that if key passages of the interim constitution are not amended, Sistani would call for massive street demonstrations against it.

I looked up some Kuwaiti newspapers on line and could not find this report in Arabic, checking both the Saturday and Sunday editions. I think it should be remembered that al-Muhri cannot possibly be in close contact with Sistani, and that there is a tendency for junior clerics to say they are speaking for Sistani when they are not. Earlier reports had said that Sistani does not want to instigate street demonstrations, lest the country fall into chaos.

Iraqi Oil Exports delayed from both North and South

AFP reports delays in Iraq oil exports in both the north and the south of the country.

Although exports are up to pre-war levels, it should be remembered that the 2.8 million barrels a day typical of the pre-war period were very low in comparison to Iraq's capacity, and that they don't generate enough for the government to run the country properly.

Meanwhile, Jubilee Iraq reckons that the country is saddled with $300 bn. in debt and reparations from the Saddam period, a crushing burden that could delay the country's re-development if there is not substantial debt forgiveness.

Death Toll from Two days of Attacks in Iraq is 21


AP reports that guerrillas fired rockets into the municipal building in Mosul on Saturday, killing two civilians and wounding 14, including 2 policement. In central Baghdad, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb, which wounded 5 Iraqis. In the south, a brigand shot the driver of a truck supplying Japanese troops; the motive was to steal the truck and its cargo.

Early Sunday, guerrillas detonated a bomb near Baqubah that wounded 5 persons.

US Marine, 13 Iraqis, Killed in Fighting on Friday

AFP reports that 13 Iraqis and a US Marine were killed in separate incidents on Friday. Marines engaged in an extensive firefight with guerrillas in Fallujah, in which 4 Iraqis were killed and 7 wounded, and in which guerrillas killed one US Marine. One of the Iraqis killed was a cameraman for ABC News.

An Iraqi cameraman working for the US television network ABC was killed on Friday by a bullet to the forehead when US troops fired in the direction of journalists during clashes in the flashpoint town of Fallujah, doctors and witnesses said. ' Also on Friday, four Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) personnel were killed and four wounded in heavy fighting with insurgents in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, a US military spokesperson said. ' Three guerrillas appear to have been killed at Tikrit.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that most of the Arab population in the northern city of Mosul are still loyal to the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein.

Shiite, Sunni Clerics in Iraq Condemn Israel, US;
Muqtada: 9/11 Divine Retribution on US

AFP reports that both Shiite and Sunni Muslim preachers on Friday continued to protest against the assassination of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, "burning Israeli flags and accusing the United States of remaining silent over the killing." (On Friday, the US vetoed an attempt by a majority of the UN Security Council nations to condemn Israel for the murder of Yassin.)

In the holy city of Najaf just south of Baghdad, Shiites held a street protest outside the Imam Ali mosque, as called for by Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, the local representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He said that they should march to honor the martyrdom of Yassin.

They chanted, "Death to Israel, death to America! Your blood, Sheikh Yassin, will liberate Palestine!"

SCIRI is a putative ally of the United States, promoted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which has a seat on the US-appointed Interim Governing Council.

The more radical (!) young cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, also referred to the assassination in his Friday sermon in Kufa, next door to Najaf: "The attack on Sheikh Yassin is an attack on Islam and America is responsible for this aggression by remaining silent."

WorldNet reports that
al-Sadr railed against the U.S. presence in Iraq, urging the worshippers to "seek the spread of freedom and democracy in the way that satisfies God." They have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner - and the proof of this is the fall of the American Twin Towers." Referring to the attacks that killed 3000 innocent Americans, he said, "As we say, 'The rain starts with a drop.'"

Al-Sadr termed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the "biggest terrorist of all" for taking out Yassin, a leader of an organization that has massacred innocent Israeli children, women and students with suicide bombings. He added that Sharon "has committed this dirty crime and killed one of the greatest of Islamic mujahedeen . . . This was once again a dirty crime against Islam."

He said the US was an accomplice in the assassination, according to CNN. Then he "led worshippers in chants: "No, no Israel! No, no to the Jews! No, no America! No, no to terrorism!"

AFP adds that also in al-Kazimiyah mosque in Baghdad, hundreds of Sadrists demonstrated, "marching out of the shrine while carrying a symbolic coffin for Yassin wrapped with a Palestinian flag."

' "No, no to Israel. No, no to occupation," shouted the protestors, many carrying portraits of Yassin and Sadr. When they reached Sadr’s nearby offices, a group of youngsters burned two Israeli flags before trampling them, an AFP correspondent said.

'
Muqtada's conviction that September 11 was a divine judgment against a godless United States is eerily similar to the views of American evangelist Jerry Falwell.

With regard to the Sunnis, AFP reports ' At Baghdad's conservative Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiyah, Sheikh Ahmed Hassan Taha al-Samarrai, told worshippers at Abu Haneefa Mosque that Yassin was "the beating heart of the struggle in Palestine." "Despite the fact that the late Sheikh Yassin was a disabled old man who could not move ... he made the Crusaders -- the US administration -- and its masters (the Jews) feel anxious." At the Umm al-Tubul mosque in southeast Baghdad, Sunni Sheikh Abdel Sattar al-Janabi, said: "The Jews who killed Sheikh Yassin in Palestine are the same group who are killing the Iraqis." "We shall not be afraid from them. No faithful can be afraid from his enemy if his heart was filled with faith," he said. Protests have been held in Iraq on a near-daily basis to denounce Israel's assassination of the Palestinian Islamic leader Monday. Members of Iraq's US-appointed interim Governing Council had expressed fears that the killing of Yassin, who was respected around the Arab world, would fuel violence in their own war-torn country. '

As I argued on Tuesday, Sharon's murder of Shaikh Yassin has stirred up Islamist forces against the US in Iraq in a wholly unnecessary way. The fighting in Fallujah that took so many lives Friday appears to have begun with Sunni insurgents doing operations in memory of Yassin. It is incredible to me that Bush is still willing to meet with Sharon in Washington on April 15, and has protected Sharon from a UNSC condemnation.

Muqtada, Sistani's Rep, Condemn Interim Constitution

Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, in Arabic 1608 gmt 26 Mar 04 via BBC Monitoring, reports that Muqtada al-Sadr also demanded in his sermon that if the Governing Council does not repeal the interim constitution or law of state administration, it should dissolve itself. He called the temporary constitution a "terrorist law." He also charged the Governing Council with treason because it allowed US Secretary of State Colin Powell to visit recently.

Muqtada al-Sadr said, ' The Governing Council should dissolve itself or remain away from the tyrannical US demands. It should also renounce this unjust, terrorist document, or what they refer to as the constitution or the law. They should keep the Iraqi army in Iraqi hands. That would be a move in the interest of the Iraqi people, who suffered a great deal. The United States has called for closing the border. Then, we wonder, from where did this person called Powell come in? What approvals did he get to enter, and what passport did he use? So enough violations against the Iraqi people. O zealous Iraqi people: How do you approve of the entry of such terrorist persons? O council, if he entered the country at your approval, then you have betrayed the Iraqi people. If you were not aware of that in advance of Powell's visit , then the disaster is bigger. '

Meanwhile, an Iraqi expatriate Iran-based radio station, Voice of the Mujahidin, in Arabic 0700 gmt 26 Mar 04 (via BBC world monitoring) reported that a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had told the German wire service DPA that he ' ' will boycott the UN team, which is due to visit Iraq soon to help in the formation of an Iraqi interim government if the United Nations does not declare a clear stand concerning the controversial State Administration Law interim constitution . The media spokesman said that the interim constitution will only acquire legitimacy after its ratification in the elected national assembly. He added that this law puts obstacles to reaching and drafting a permanent constitution that would maintain the unity and rights of all the Iraqis in all their different sects. He added that the religious authority, which previously demanded the need for the UN Security Council to issue a resolution to set a date for holding general elections in the country, fears that the occupation authority would add the interim constitution to the expected UN resolution in order that it acquires the international legitimacy and becomes binding on the Iraqi people. '

In Karbala, Shaikh Nur al-Din al-Safi said in his Friday sermon from the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Husayn that the interim constitution is "invalid," according to AFP/ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Safi is Sistani's representative in that city. He said that Sistani has not just expressed reservations about the interim constitution, he "has rejected it."

AFP adds that Safi went on, ' "Despite the respect that Seyyed Sistani has for Brahimi, Seyyed Sistani does not wish to be a party to any meeting or consultation with the UN team. We want the United Nations to respect its promises and the will of the Iraqi people who gave their opinion very clearly." '

Firm Shiite opposition to the interim constitution could well derail the current US plans for elections in January of 2005, and could cause a lot of trouble in the coming months. The Kurds like the interim constitution just as it is, and would probably fight to keep it.

Basra: Women Coerced to Veil, Shops Attacked

David Delanian writes more on the role of Shiite militias in imposing a mini-theocracy in the southern port city of Basra.

' Menacing groups of men have been stopping cars at the university gates and haranguing women whose heads are uncovered, accusing them of violating Islamic law. Male students have accosted them as they walked to class. As al Asadi spoke to a reporter in a courtyard, a scruffy-looking man handed out fliers that likened uncovered women to prostitutes and murderers. "I fear them," she said simply. '

Rosen: The Violence is Relentless; Clerics Speak of Jihad against Infidel Americans

Freelance journalist Nir Rosen, who has been living in the real Iraq unembedded, lets loose with what the Sunni heartland of Iraq is actually like under US occupation. It is, clearly, a hellhole that has all the stability of a pressure cooker with the lid on tight and no release valve.

Excerpts:

"The violence is relentless. Explosions from bombs, rocket propelled grenades and artillery as well as guns firing can be heard all day and night, but their locations are usually impossible to determine, even if you are foolish enough to search for them after dark, when gangs and wild dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the occupiers. The pace of the violence is normal and mundane, so nobody cares . . .

Mosques are attacked every night and clerics killed, leading to retaliations against the opposite sect. Mosques now have armies of young volunteers wielding Kalashnikovs guarding them. Soon neighborhood mosques will unite to form neighborhood armies, to fight rival mosques or rival neighborhoods. (Even many journalists now travel with armed bodyguards; in at least one incident they returned fire, making them combatants) . . .

Though clerics from both sects are assassinated weekly, the culprits are unknown and the leaders exhort their flock to be patient, blaming the "Anglo American Zionist conspiracy." After the March 2 explosions in Karbala and Baghdad, where I saw piles of body parts, scalps, hands, and fly-covered pieces of flesh, the fury was directed at the Americans. Immediately after the three suicide bombs struck in Baghdad, spraying blood even on the mosque's ceiling, the loudspeakers urged people to be calm and accused the Americans and Jews of attacking them. Shi'ite mosques sell CDs of the riot in Kadhim, when thousands of Shi'ite men attacked American military medical vehicles that came to help, and then chased them to the base, throwing shoes, stones and epithets, waving flags and taunting the reviled occupiers. The American retreat into the base was a great victory for the shocked Shi'ites.

Though Shi'ite and Sunni leaders hastened to mouth professions of unity following the attacks in Karbala and Kadhimiya, they hate each other. Sunni and Shi'ite newspapers have grown more brazen in their attacks against each other. The only things they agree on are the need for an Islamic government (though they disagree on what it will look like) and their insistence that the Jews and Americans are to blame for all their woes. The Sunnis are scared, they fear the impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq if anything resembling a democratic election takes place. Sunnis view Shi'ites the way white South Africans viewed blacks, and now feel disenfranchised, seeing the barbaric heathens threatening to rule their country. Many Sunnis cling to the fiction that they are in fact the majority, and the Shi'ites are all Iranians . . .

But Sunni Arabs don't scare Shi'ites anymore. The threat is America now. Only America can thwart the long-suppressed Shi'ite hope to control Iraq and establish a theocracy. Their expectations are high. Now is their time to inherit Iraq and only America stands in the way. . . [R]adical clerics such as Muqtada Sadr speak of a jihad against the infidel Americans who have come to kill the Mahdi (Shi'ite messiah). Radical Sunnis and members of the resistance hate the compromising Sistani but respect Muqtada for his defiance. In every mosque and religious center in the country one can purchase the DVDs, CDs, tapes and literature of the Islamic revolution that rejects "American democracy" and "American freedom." In Shi'ite stores you can buy books about Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and in Sunni stores you can buy radical Sunni magazines published in Saudi Arabia.

Sunni and Shi'ite leaders were quick to condemn the new interim constitution for its secularism. They were united in calling the Quran their only constitution . . .

Meanwhile over ten thousand Iraqi men are being held prisoner, and most of them are innocent. Iraqi security guards as well as American soldiers hate the explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, because they, like the rest of us who live in the area, are subject to its olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb and they must close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week, when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days though they were not carrying a bomb. Unlike the murderous accuracy of the Israeli security forces, who at least speak Arabic, the American security forces are a blunt instrument. They arrest hundreds at once, hoping somebody will know something. One morning in the village of Albu Hishma, the local US commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened."

Against the Three-State "Solution" in Iraq

My review of 2 books on Iraq, Toby Dodge's Inventing Iraq and Anderson and Stansfield's The Future of Iraq, which appeared in The Nation last week, is now online.

Excerpts:

" . . . The League of Nations announced a British Mandate in Iraq at San Remo in the spring of 1920.

Some 100,000 disappointed Iraqis, led by Shiite and Sunni clerics, tribal chieftains and small-town notables, united in a massive anti-British revolt. The British brutally put it down from the air, slaughtering 9,000 Iraqis, both insurgents and civilians, and employing poison gas for the first time in Iraq . . .

In Inventing Iraq, Dodge analyzes what he describes as the failure of British nation-building in the 1920s. He identifies two camps in the British civil administration of the country. One camp--what I call the J.R.R. Tolkien strain of British colonialism--consisted of romantics like Dobbs, who saw the countryside, its "gentry" and the tribes as the repository of all that was noble, and who distrusted the cities and their Westernizing effendis. The other group celebrated the virtues of the rational individual and sought to establish connections between such people and the state. On the whole, the devotees of romantic ruralism won out, seeking to rule Iraq through the tribal sheiks. Dodge, ever attentive to ironies, points out that the British thereby profoundly changed the position of the supposedly "untainted" sheiks and made them conduits of colonial administration . . .

The British used their power to recognize sheiks as a way of rewarding the cooperative, and of punishing those unwilling or unable to keep their clans in line. Where administrators perceived a clan as unruly, they decertified them as tribes and seized their lands, giving them to others. The British were faced then, as the Americans are now, with ruling a huge territory on the cheap because of the disillusionment of the postwar public. To compensate for lack of troops, they relied on air power, conducting bombing raids from the sky against tribes that rebelled or refused to pay taxes. The airplane also allowed a close surveillance of the population in a manner that the supposedly despotic predecessors of the British, the Ottomans, could never have dreamed of achieving. This aspect of British rule in Iraq has long been understood by, among others, the eminent historian of Iraq Peter Sluglett. In his 1976 study, Britain in Iraq, Sluglett quotes Member of Parliament Leopold Amery as saying, "If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively through his kingdom, it is entirely due to the British airplanes."

Yet, as Dodge points out, the airplane quickly demonstrated its limits, in large part because it depended on raw power and fear rather than on legitimate authority. The British used night bombing and incendiary explosives to destroy villages around Samawah in 1923 as a means of forcing the population to surrender its rifles and submit. While the destruction of six villages and the killing of 100 men, women and children terrified the peasants, they simply dispersed from the area and took their rifles with them. The Royal Air Force high command considered following the fleeing Iraqis, but concluded that further bombing would only be a slaughter. According to Dodge, the high command feared that the British public would discover exactly how they were ruling Iraq. His points about the political limits of air power are well taken, but it should be remembered that after 1923 the number of bombing raids actually increased. At that point, Squadron Leader Arthur Harris (who is not mentioned in Dodge's index) invented the heavy bombing techniques he later practiced in Hamburg and Dresden . . .

Unfortunately, Anderson and Stansfield do not survey the full range of implications of their proposal [for a partition of Iraq]. No major indigenous Iraqi political party or actor favors partition. Even the Kurds want a loose federalism. Turkey has threatened to go to war to prevent the emergence of an oil-rich independent Kurdistan, which its leaders fear might entice the Turkish Kurds of eastern Anatolia into a separatism that would fragment Turkey. The Iranians less truculently maintain a similar view, because of sensitivities about their own Kurdish minority.

It is not even clear that an independent Kurdistan in the rugged north is economically viable, assuming that the rest of Iraq does not quietly yield to them Kirkuk's petroleum wellheads or, indeed, the city of Kirkuk itself, which does not have a Kurdish majority. Those wellheads are, in any case, old and being depleted, and the future of Iraqi petroleum lies in the south. An independent Kurdistan could well be doomed as a poor, landlocked country with declining oil revenues.

Likewise, the Saudis are terrified of an Arab Shiite state in southern Iraq, given that they have a significant Shiite majority in their nearby Eastern Province. This province, al-Hasa, is where the Saudi petroleum is, and the Shiites provide many of the workers on the oil rigs. The Wahhabi Saudis, hyper-Sunnis, largely despise Shiites and do not want theirs becoming uppity. A partition opposed to the death by Iraq's three wealthiest and most powerful neighbors seems destined to fail. Moreover, it probably would not be good for Iraqis to be reduced to a set of small, weak and in some cases poor countries. Nor is it clear that Iraqi democracy would be served by partition, as Anderson and Stansfield argue. The corporate solidarity along religious and ethnic lines visible in Sunni Arab Falluja or in Shiite Basra, which sometimes turns coercive or violent, is a less promising basis for democracy than a federal Iraq where parties will over time prosper best if they can find ways of appealing across ethnic boundaries.

The real danger facing working-class Iraqis, the vast majority of the country, is not that they will be forced to coexist with those who pray differently or speak different first languages. The most pressing threat is that the Bush Administration's economic shock therapy and other policies will create a new, small clique of robber barons who monopolize most of the country's resources. That is where we came in.

[Read the whole review at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&c=1&s=cole. ]

3 US Troops Killed, 9 Iraqis, 1 Jordanian Killed

al-Hayat: It was announced on Thursday in Baghdad that three American troops and nine Iraqis were killed, along with a Jordanian driver, in separate attacks. In Kirkuk, a fire broke out in an oil well after the explosion of a bomb.

There was a two-hour-long firefight between Marines and guerrillas in Ramadi Wednesday night/ Thursday morning, which left 6 Iraqis dead.

The Washington Post explains:

' On Thursday, a roadside bomb killed a soldier with the 1st Infantry Division and wounded two others around 8:25 a.m. near Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of the capital . . .. In the afternoon, insurgents attacked a military convoy near Fallujah using a roadside bomb, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and guns. One Marine was killed and two were wounded in the attack at 3:48 p.m. . In addition, at around 2 p.m. Wednesday, insurgents attacked a military convoy north of Taji, a northern suburb of Baghdad. One soldier was killed and three were wounded. '

Stalemate between Sistani and Governor Sfouk in Karbala

Aamer Madhani reports on the stalemate in Karbala between the American-appointed provincial governing council and Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The CPA administrator there, John Berry, had consulted with tribal leaders and called for volunteers in January, when he expanded the membership to 40 from 17. Deborah Amos of NPR had done the best reporting in English on the crisis up to this point. The failure of the Americans to consult with the clerics in a holy city like Karbala seems frankly strange, and it must have been meant as a snub. Sistani and his deputy, Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, took it as such. Sistani called on the council members to resign, and a fair number obeyed him. There is still no resolution. Sistani is insisting that there be elections, a