Iraq

Allawi Threatened; Attacks at Ramadi
Sadr Refuses to Attend National Congress

Guerrillas targeted police stations all around Iraq on Wednesday and early Thursday, killing and wounding tens of Iraqis. Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi threatened to assassinate caretaker Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, calling him an "American agent."

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced Wednesday that he would not agree to serve on a preparatory committee that will call a national congress of 1000 delegates in late July. Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani said that Muqtada had studied the invitation for 3 days, but had found huge problems with it. He added (al-Hayat) "There are enormous movements such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Al-Da`wa Party and the Sadrists, and each of them has only been given one seat [on the preparatory committee]. Then there are ordinary people who only represent themselves, who also have a seat . . . For this reason, we rejected the invitation."

Meanwhile, US troops began pulling out of the holy Shiite shrine city of Karbala earlier this week. Likely the US military knows very well that any Iraqi government will ask it to please leave Karbala, so it is beating them to the punch.

Religion and Ethics

7 of 9 and the Paris Orgy

Science fiction is in the real-world news big time these days. The actress Jeri Ryan, former wife (1990-1998) of currently embattled Republican senate candidate Jack Ryan of Illinois, played the Borg babe 7 of 9 in Star Trek Voyager. For the uninitiated, the plot of Star Trek Voyager is that Captain Kathryn Janeway's space vessel, Voyager, is accidentally thrown to the wrong side of the galaxy, and the crew spends seven years trying to get back to earth (Star Trek is based on the premise that somehow we will find a real-time way around Einstein's finding that things with mass cannot go faster than the speed of light; this premise is unlikely). Among the species the Federation troops battle out there is the Borg, who are cyborgs or hybrids of human and machine. They have a collective mind and lack individuality, and are dedicated to incorporating forcibly all individuals they encounter from other species into their collective. This incorporation appears to be painful and unpleasant, and to involve high-powered buzz saws. When people come out of it they are robotic, lack individuality, and have chrome various places on their bodies.

The Star Trek Voyager creative team hit on the idea of casting Jeri Ryan as a former Borg who has somewhat reverted to being human (she had been born Annika Hansen; the Borg killed her parents). She is therefore the ultimate ice princess, though in hoary science fiction tradition (the genre after all appeals disproportionately to adolescent males), she was made to wear extemely revealing spandex. Viacom (owner of UPN and Paramount Pictures), Jack Ryan, everyone wanted her in leather or spandex or something that left little to the imagination.

Incredibly, Seven of Nine could help throw the Senate to the Democrats. Jeri Ryan was married to multi-millionnaire investment banker turned teacher Jack Ryan, but filed for divorce four years ago. In her filing, she alleged

On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent [Jack Ryan] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways. ... The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. ... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and that he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system. Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.

The unsealing of this filing, which Ryan fought, has created a huge political scandal in Illinois and has given a big boost to Ryan's Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Most Republicans, who have increasingly tied their political fortunes to an alliance with the evangelical Christians, are defending Ryan, usually by implying that Jeri's charges are untrue and are part of the junk that comes out in any divorce proceeding. Ryan admits, however, to having taken her to the Paris club. Some Republicans have said snippy things like that it was she who committed adultery, not he. The Phyllis Schlaflys should give up this implicit attack on Jeri's credibility. Jeri is popular with the public, more of whom probably know her from a subsequent turn on David Kelly's series about teaching in an urban high school, "Boston Public," than through the niche Star Trek franchise. Ironically, Kelly may have modeled Jeri's BP character, a lawyer who gives up practicing in order to teach, on Jack Ryan, who left Goldman Sachs (having gotten rich when the firm went public in the late 1990s), to teach school.

Obama has taken the high road, and is refusing to attack Jack Ryan on the sex clubs issue. Many Democrats, still boiling mad over what the hypocritical Republicans did to Bill Clinton, seem intent on making an object lesson of him.

Another irony is that Ryan pulled the stunt early in the campaign of having a cameraman follow Obama around everywhere, documenting all his moves. Obama could not even speak to his wife on his cellphone in privacy. Ryan tried to create what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a "panopticon," as a way of intimidating his opponent. This move was despicable, an invasion of privacy, and a form of stalking, and should be illegal. (I think it would be in California, which has proper privacy laws). Now Jack Ryan is going to be the one followed around by cameras, into whose private life strangers are going to poke relentlessly. In that sense, the whole thing serves him right.

But I think Obama is making the right choice in letting the tabloids and the schlock television shows run with this story and keeping it out of his own campaign, which is about issues. For instance, Obama wants to give more tax breaks to companies that keep jobs in Illinois.

The lesson for the Republicans of all this is that the wages of Puritanism are hypocrisy. Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, and many other Republicans who tried to nail Clinton had also tried to nail women not their spouses and were no better than Clinton morally. In fact, no one is better morally than anyone else as a matter of ontology or being. Some deeds are better than others, and some people achieve better deeds more often than others. Some people are capable of higher ethical standards than others. But human beings are not in the nature of the case morally perfect beings. Since that is so, it is crazy for the American public to want its politicians to be saints (they aren't), and the desire merely produces hypocrisy, which in turn corrodes ideals and the moral order.

I therefore agree with Jack Ryan that the visits to those clubs should not in themselves disqualify him from public office. Why should we care where he takes his wife? Note that business travelers who stay in nice hotels are known to rent enormous amounts of porn. The travelers, the hotels, and the cable companies involved are all heavily Republican. What is the difference between watching it on celluloid and watching it at a club in Paris? Isn't this the same public that yawned at Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and complained it was only shocking to a 1950s sensibility? Are we going to get to the point where every guy who has ever been to a strip club is disqualified from public service? Are we doomed to have the French and other Europeans laugh at us hysterically yet again?

Journalists keep asking me if the US can prevent Iraq from becoming a "theocracy." Why are the Americans so worried about Iraqis insisting on strict religious standards in their politics, if in fact that is the public platform of the dominant Republican Party in the United States? I think politicians should be permitted wide lattitude in their private lives, as long as they are good at their jobs-- i.e. use their positions to empower the people, to create jobs and wealth, and improve their states or districts. Jack Kennedy did lots of things that make a married couple's visits to some clubs rather tame in comparison. No one I know holds it against him.

The troubling issue here seems to be that Jeri alleges that Jack tricked her into going to the clubs, so this was a compulsion he had that she did not share. (Star Trek fans will not forgive him for this, especially for making her weep. Everyone remembers how brittle 7 of 9 was about sex and romance, what with being a former automaton and all. Starfleet Ensign Harry Kim tried to romance her, and found he had to go very slow.). If Jack Ryan would trick her that way, he might trick the public. So if what she alleged is true (and the Borg are incapable of subterfuge, it should be remembered), that would be the key issue. On the other hand, this all happened some years ago; he clearly had some sort of sex addiction at the time, which he may have kicked by now, and addictions compel people to do things they would not otherwise do. People change.

The one counter-indication I know of is the dirty trick Jack Ryan pulled of having Obama followed around by cameramen. That sounds coercive and manipulative, and falls within his earlier pattern of enjoying forcing others to exhibit themselves (the postmodernists might call it sado-alter-exhibitionism). In essence, he treated Obama just the way he treated Jeri. That is not a good sign.

Bottom line, the question for the good people of Illinois should not be whether Ryan is kinkier than Obama, but a) whether Ryan still uses people instrumentally to get his rocks off and b) whether Ryan could accomplish something for their state that Obama cannot. Even before the club scandal broke, the increasingly Democratic-leaning Illinois voters had seemed to discount Ryan, who after all doesn't exactly have a thick portfolio to be senator. The club scandal probably finishes off his candidacy (perhaps for the wrong reasons), but he was unlikely to have won anyway.

If Bush gets reelected but does not have the Senate, the Democratic Senators will finally be in a position to establish some investigatory commissions into Bush administration actions of questionable probity. If that happens, the country will have Jeri Ryan, ex-cyborg, to thank for it.

2 US Troops Killed; Airstrike on Fallujah;
Korean Hostage Killed

The Associated Press reports that guerrillas attacked a US military convoy near Balad north of Baghdad, killing two US troops and wounding another.

After the body of a Korean hostage was found, the US air force launched yet another air attack, allegedly on a safe house for the al-Tawhid group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. AP reports, ' Fallujah residents said the strike hit a parking lot. Three people were killed and nine wounded, said Dr. Loai Ali Zeidan at Fallujah Hospital. ' An airstrike on Saturday killed 22, including some children and a woman, according to local residents. The US military maintained that the dead were radical Islamists and that the house went on exploding for a while because of the explosives stored there.

Guerrillas holding a Korean hostage killed him when the Korean government declined to withdraw its forces from Iraq (it is planning to send 3,000 more, dedicated to reconstruction and medical tasks, not to peace enforcement).

I don't think a lot of press attention should be given to the capture and killing of a single hostage, since the whole point of the captors is to generate such attention. I think the big stories on Tuesday were the killing of 2 more US troops near Balad and the airstrike on Fallujah. The beheading creates a lurid interest, but it doesn't matter to a dead person how he was killed. And, no, beheading has nothing special to do with Islam, it is just grisly and a good tool for terrorists.

The South Korean government is unlikely to back off its commitments because of this one murder. However, the killings of hostages have caused large numbers of civilian contractors to flee Iraq, according to al-Jazeerah. And, a group of Korean parliamentarians condemned their government for throwing in with what they saw as Bush's unprovoked war in Iraq. The Washington Post contrasts the lively and divisive debate over Iraq in South Korea with the way in which Italians generally closed ranks over killings of their troops and of a hostage in Iraq.

British Sailors Held by Iran

The Scotsman reports "Foreign Office fury" at Iran's capture of 8 British sailors when they strayed over to the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab. The Shatt is a mile-wide body of water created by the union of the Tigris and Euphrates, which then flows into the Persian Gulf. The border between Iran and Iraq lies precisely in the middle of the Shatt al-Arab, which has caused trouble between the two countries for a long time. Control of the Shatt was one of the motives for Saddam Hussein's 8-year war against Iran in the 1980s.

The capture of the Western sailors and the issuing of a videotape of them blindfolded hearken back to the hostage crisis of 1979-1981, when Iranian activists took US embassy personnel hostage.

It is possible that the British did stray a bit over onto the Iranian side of the Shatt. But it is likely that the hardliners in Tehran have engaged in these theatrics for domestic political purposes. The committed Shiites in Iran had been absolutely infuriated by the US troops' desecration of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in April and May, which provoked demonstrations in Tehran against the British Embassy. The problem is that the Iranian regime did nothing practical about this outrage to Shiite sensibilities, and did not want to tangle with the US army. Taking these British sailors hostage for a few days is a symbolic act of retribution by Khamenei's government that shores up his support from the Iranian hard right. It seems likely that Iran will release them before too long.

The incident may also be intended to punish the UK for pressing Iran on the issue of nuclear weapons development, most recently in concert with the European Union.

It seems to me very likely that Iran will get a nuclear weapon. Any ruling elite in the global south with bad relations with the US can look at the difference between how the Bush administration dealt with Saddam and how it has dealt with North Korea. The difference seems mainly to be that North Korea already had a couple of nukes, whereas Iraq was not anywhere close. So Khamenei would look at that and decide that his government needs a couple of nukes to avoid being overthrown by the US, especially since Bush telegraphed his intention to do just that. I don't see how it could be stopped militarily; the US is overstretched and in no position to attack and occupy Iran.

This is the point that Senator Edward M. Kennedy made on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But I would emphasize the ways in which Bush's aggressiveness have probably actually ramped up any Iranian nuclear weapons program, out of which the Iranians might have been argued under different circumstances.

Of course, when one's neighbors, such as Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India and (de facto) the United States all have nukes, that is a pretty powerful incentive to get them, in any case.

US Has Lost War for Hearts and Minds in Iraq

Guy Dinmore and Alex Barker of the Financial Times report that some military analysts believe that the US has lost the wider war for hearts and minds in Iraq, and that the complex Sunni Muslim insurgency is defeating efforts by the relatively small US military force in Iraq to defeat it. The authors refer specifically to Ahmed Hashim of the Naval War College, Rhode Island, who has advised the US military on counter-insurgency. The authors say that Hashem

' described an "Islamo-nationalist fusion", a binding together of minority Sunnis now out of power and fearing their identity to be under threat. Their infrastructure is the mosques. Tribal elements play a role, as well as Islamist extremists from outside Iraq. Insurgents are growing more proficient and their tactics and techniques more lethal. They lack military resources but they have one key element that the US does not: time. '

Dinmore and Barker add:

Andrew Krepinevich, a veteran military analyst and formerly of the Pentagon, says that the insurgency, being primarily urban, has a "lower probability of success" than rural campaigns, as in China, Vietnam and Laos. But their focus will be to defeat the will of the US, he told the FT. '

Krepinevich is making the wrong analogy. From the point of view of social history, contemporary Iraq is not like China, Vietnam and Laos. It is like Iran in the 1970s. An urban insurgency/ revolution can in fact win, and win quite decisively, as the urban crowds won out over the shah. The shah tried everything to put down the urban crowds. He had them spied on. He had them shot at. Nothing worked. The urban crowds just got bigger and bigger.

The guerrillas in Iraq are hoping to provoke big, frequent demonstrations by the urban crowd. If elections are not held in January, or if they are widely felt to be unfair or stage-managed-- and if US troops overstay their welcome, we could well see the big crowds start coming out. The big threat for the US is if dissatisfaction with the situation and with the US presence becomes generalized in both the Shiite and the Sunni communities. If Grand Ayatollah Sistani and Sunni cleric Hareth al-Dhari both call for the crowds to come out, you could have hundreds of thousands in the streets.

Big, frequent urban demonstrations, in Mosul, Baghdad, Najaf, Basra, etc., would be a trump card. The US and the UK would just have to leave. You can't take the crowds out and shoot them. If you do shoot at the demonstrators, you just grow the crowds the next time. The shah made this mistake with Black Friday (Sept. 8, 1978), when his troops fired into the crowd. It just infuriated everyone.

This worst case scenario will very possibly come to pass if 1) the US troops overstay their welcome and continue to act heavy-handedly (a repeat of April's twin sieges of Fallujah and Najaf would be fatal), if 2) the January elections are postponed or perceived as deeply flawed, and if 3) both Sunni and Shiite leaders beyond the small circle of the guerrillas call for massive demonstrations.

I'd give 50/50 odds of this kind of urban crowd revolution happening in Iraq sometime in the next two years. It would be a huge disaster if the US were tossed out of Iraq by such a phenomenon. Leaving voluntarily and in a phased manner would be far more preferable.

Neocons can't Spell

A reader asked me to comment on the controversy over whether an Iraqi intelligence agent was detailed to al-Qaeda in Kuala Lumpur to be the guy that picked people up at the airport. It was covered by the Washington Post after the allegation was made by 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy.

The al-Qaeda employee in Malaysia is named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi.

The Iraqi intelligence agent is named Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad.

Political Scientist Christopher Carney, who was brought in to look at documents by Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans so as to second-guess trained analysts at the CIA who actually know Arabic, first made the mistake of identifying the two. Carney is an Americanist at Penn State and had no business butting in.

The family name (here, nisba) of the al-Qaeda guy in Malaysia is Azzawi.

The family name of the guy in Iraqi intelligence is Ahmad.

Do you notice how they are not the same?

The personal or first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad.

The personal or first name of the Iraqi intelligence agent is Hikmat.

Do you notice how it is not the same?

So, Ahmad Azzawi is not Hikmat Ahmad. See how easy that is?

Mr. Ahmad Azzawi has a couple of middle names, to wit, Hikmat Shakir. Having a couple of middle names is common in the Arab world.

Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad just has one middle name, Shakir. This is the only place at which there is any overlap between them at all. They share a middle name. And, o.k., one of Azzawi's middle names is the same as Lt. Col. Ahmad's first name.

This would be like having someone named Mark Walter Paul Johnson who is a chauffeur for Holiday Inn.

And then you have a CIA agent named Walter Paul Mark.

Obviously, it is the same guy, right? Natch.

Azzawi is a nisbah, a form of last name having to do with a place or occupation or tribe. I'm not sure, but an `azzaw might be someone who specialized in consoling family members over the death of a loved one. It is being used as a family name.

Lt. Col. Ahmad's last name could also be used as a first name. It may well be his father's first name. Some Arab families use a system like that in Scandinavia. Thus, the father is Thor Odinsson and the son is Loki Thorsson. There isn't a stable family name in that case. In the old style, he might be Hikmat ibn Ahmad or the son of Ahmad, but a lot of people drop the ibn nowadays. Most families either have a nisba type family name or they don't. If a guy's last name is Azzawi, that would certainly be in the government records. Lt. Col. Ahmad did not have Azzawi as a family name.

The first name or personal name is called "ism". In this case, the first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad. This means "the most praised" and is an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad.

The ism or personal name of the intelligence officer is Hikmat. Hikmah in Arabic means "wisdom." Hikmat with a long 't' at the end shows Ottoman influence, which in turn suggests an upper class Sunni background.

There isn't actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Isn't it a shame that we have these key people doing important things who are either incompetent ignoramuses or dumb as posts?

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show Monday, by the way, peddling his book, which is full of similar nonsense, and at one point Stewart actually told him he thought the book was a load of crap. Stewart's Daily Show is among the best sources of news analysis on television.

6 US Servicemen Reported Dead in Iraq, 11 Iraqis

Monday's toll (still incomplete but more complete than any one article I saw in any one language):

Guerrillas sent a videotape to Associated Press with views of four US Marines lying dead in a walled compound in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The bodies appear to have been looted. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt confirmed the deaths.

Regarding these four Marines killed in Ramadi, according to the US military spokesman, "Four US Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed on the 21st of June in the Al-Anbar province conducting security and stability operations."

In Baghdad, guerrillas launched a mortar attack that killed one US soldier and wounded 7 others, according to AP.

At 9:35 am in al-Qayyara near Mosul in the north, a roadside bomb killed 5 Iraqi contractors who were apparently with a US military convoy at the time.

Also in the north, just south of Kirkuk, Arab and Turkmen militias fought a half-hour gunbattle with one another, leaving one dead on each side, at Majma` al-Nahrawan. (This according to al-Hayat. Most Arabs in that area had been settled there by Saddam Hussein in an attempt to Arabize the north, and to marginalize the Kurds and Turkmen who predominated there. Now the latter are returning to their homes and taking back their property, and 10,000 Arabs are said to have been expelled. The local police chief confirmed that the fight was over land occupied by immigrant Arabs, the original ownership of which the Turkmen claim. The incident is more evidence that the Kirkuk region, with its Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab populations, is highly volatile. Arabs and Kurds have clashed. Shiite Turkmen and Sunni Kurds have clashed. And now Arabs and Turkmen are fighting. So far only the Christians and Yazidis haven't fielded militias, and even the Christians are demanding a semi-autonomous zone in Ninevah province.

A huge gang of 50 masked Iraqi guerrillas, among the largest paramilitary forces that has operated in the Sunni areas aside from the siege of Fallujah, blew up a police station at Jurf al-Sakar, south of Baghdad. Kimmitt reported, "Approximately 50 armed insurgents wearing black masks dismounted their vehicle by the Iraqi police station in Djor Askar. . . When coalition and Iraqi security forces approached the station, they saw five vehicles matching the description of the attackers. Forces engaged and destroyed one of the vehicles and pursued another vehicle to a residence, where they found a wounded attacker, an AK-47 shotgun and blueprints of the police station."

In Samawah in the south, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a Coalition base, wounding one person, and four guerrillas were killed by return fire. Guerrillas that far south are likely to be either Mahdi Army, Marsh Arab Hizbullah, or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

A US soldier wounded at Buhriz near Baquba on Friday died and his death was reported on Monday.

Corrected 6/22 at 9:33 pm; sorry I misread the al-Anbar report as distinct from the Ramadi one and so double-counted.

Iraq War not Worth it: 52% of Americans

A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows that a majority of Americans now feels that the Iraq War was not worth it. It cost too many US lives, according to 70% of them, and 51% thought that it had not made Americans any safer. Not only has President Bush's approval rating on the war on terror fallen to 50%, but the public now prefers Kerry to handle terrorism, 48% to 47% (Bush has lost 20% on this issue since March). Three-fourths of Americans say the war has damaged America's image in the world.

A majority of Americans disapproves of Bush's job performance over-all at 51%, while 47% approve. Kerry would win the election if held now by the same margin, even factoring in the Nader vote, the poll found.

Why has Bush lost so much confidence with regard to handling the war on terror? The fall in numbers is precipitate. As late as April, he led Kerry on it by 20 points.

I wish the pollsters had asked "why?" But what makes sense is that Bush hit the trifecta: Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghuraib. His brutal siege of a whole city, with some 600 Iraqis killed is one element. His decision to go after Muqtada al-Sadr and the obvious unpreparedness of the US military and the Bush-appointed CPA for the Shiite backlash is another. The revelation of the prisoner torture at Abu Ghuraib and the obvious revulsion it produced throughout the world, including the Muslim world, is the third.

The American public is not so foolish that it cannot see that the Bush administration is infuriating the Muslim world at the US gratuitously. If people thought it had been necessary to take that risk in order to stop Saddam from having weapons of mass destruction, or in order to stop him from colluding with al-Qaeda, they might have soldiered on. But it has become increasingly clear to them that the pretexts for the war were false. And therefore all the subsequent scandals and chaos were both unnecessary and reckless.

These numbers show that Bush has lost a significant number of independents. When his approval rating had sunk to 42% not so long ago, it suggested that he had begun to lose committed Republicans.

After all, a lot of Republicans could not be at all happy to see the US Department of Defense become the major purveyor of sensational internet pornography to the world. And, many Republicans may feel as Gen. Zinni does, that it was unwise to go after Fallujah and Muqtada al-Sadr, but going after them and then backing off made the administration look feeble and invited attack. The trifecta not only hurt Bush with independents, but the way he handled it probably hurt him with hardcore Republicans.

This brings us to the issue of Bush's flip-flops. He tried to hang the charge of flip-flopping on Kerry. But Bush said he wanted heads to roll at Fallujah, and then had to bring in the Baath to run the city. Bush said he wanted Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive, and now Muqtada is set to be a prominent parliamentarian. Bush said he would bring decency to the White House, and now his DoD is purveying pictures of Arab men being made to masturbate in front of prancing servicewomen.

The American public knows flip-flops when they see them. It is Bush that is engaging in them.

Najaf Calming; Police to be Trained in Urban Warfare

Al-Hayat reports that previous disputes between Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and junior cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have now been completely resolved. One last step has been the appointment of a new prayer leader at the mosque connected to the shrine of Ali, who would be neither a follower of al-Sadr nor a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The new incumbent is Sayyid Muhammad Rida al-Ghurayfi, a seminary professor close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. In summer of 2003 the Sadrists and SCIRI had fought for control of the shrine in Najaf, and SCIRI won. In the past month, the preaching there of Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of SCIRI has caused turmoil with the Sadrists in the congregation, producing at least one major riot at the mosque. On one occasion about three weeks ago, al-Qubanji criticized Iran in his sermon for not condemning Muqtada and his militiamen for fighting at the shrine with the Americans and so desecrating it, and was not allowed to continue. Afterwards shots were fired in his direction. More recently there was a big altercation between SCIRI and Sadr supporters that prevented Friday prayers from being held at all.

An al-Sadr spokesman said Muqtada is considering a proposal that he attend the national congress slated for the end of July. An Iraqi official clarified that no one has yet been invited to the actual congress, where 1000 notables will elect 100 persons to an advisory council to advise Prime Minister Allawi. (This congress was Lakhdar Brahimi's idea--he felt it would give a wide swathe of Iraqi political society a sense of participation in the caretaker government). But there is a preparatory committee planning the congress, and Ali Sumaysim of the al-Sadr movement has been invited to serve on this committee, according to organizer Fuad Masum.

Australian Broadcasting reports that a hard core of Mahdi Army militiamen still holds the shrine of Ali in Najaf, but that the US military has decided against trying to go in and sweep them out. (Good move.) The young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his militiamen to leave Najaf, and substantial numbers have, but the US military fears that some may form sectarian groups and defy Muqtada. (This possibility is real; the Sadrists who follow Muqtada's father already have several sects or parties among them). The hard core Mahdi Army fighters have nothing but contempt for the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, seeing it as a tool of Washington. In response to continued insecurity in Najaf, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus (the one certified hero to come out of the higher ranks of US officers in Iraq) is committing to giving Najaf police training in urban warfare and to providing them with rocket propelled grenades and flack jackets.

Al-Hayat says that Shaikh Ahmad Shaibani, a spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr, gave the newspaper the following statement: "Sayyid Muqtada will not form a mobile political party, and will not join any of the parties now existing on the Iraqi scene at the present time, nor will he throw his support behind any of them." He rejected the idea of folding the Army of the Mahdi into the Iraqi army, emphasizing that "The Mahdi Army is not an organized army, but rather popular groups that resist the occupation. Its members will return to the pursuit of their daily, natural lives when the Occupation ends." He said he was prepared "to help the forces of the police and army to keep order in Najaf and other Iraqi cities." He said that "The decree dissolving the militias was stillborn" and said he thought it was unlikely that it would be implemented at the present time. Mssrs. Bremer and Allawi have attempted on more than one occasion to dissolve the militias in the country, but with no success.

US Marine Killed; 23 Iraqis Killed in Separate Attacks;
US Helicopters mistakenly Kill 5 Policemen at Samarra'

Wire services report several violent incidents on Sunday.

Anbar province: Guerrillas fighting US troops in Anbar Province, which covers Ramadi and Fallujah, killed a US Marine on Sunday. The Marines killed 4 of the guerrillas.

Baghdad: Guerrillas ambushed a convoy of American and Iraqi troops on the road to the Baghdad airport, killing two Iraqi soldiers of them and wounding 11. (The Americans had already passed when the bomb went off). In an attack launched near the central bank in downtown Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round that injured 6 police officers and killed 4 Iraqi civilians, including two bank employees, a bank guard, and a passer-by [-az-Zaman]. The attack occurred at al-Rashid Street, an area with lots of shops. Meanwhile, behind the Palestine Hotel, downtown, shots rang out and hotel security returned fire. No casualties were reported. A lot of Westerners stay at the Palestine Hotel.

Samarra': Something happened in this mixed Sunni-Shiite city north of Baghdad,but the reports are very mixed and it is hard to know what. The US military maintains that its base near Samarra' took mortar fire, and that it replied with helicopter gunships to the source, killing at least 4 Iraqi guerrillas. The Bahrain Times says that the mortar fire went into a "residential neighborhood," not a US base. Az-Zaman maintains that the US forces mistakenly targeted Iraqi police guarding the home of interim Interior Minister Faleh al-Naqib, killing 5 of them. Earlier, the US helicopter gunships had destroyed the Samarra' police station. Iraqi police told the newspaper they did not rule out friendly fire on the part of the US. I have no idea which of these stories is correct. Will advise when I can sort it all out.

Tikrit: Assassins killed Sheikh Izzuddin al-Bayati, a leader of the al-Bayat tribe and a member of the provincial governing council for Salahuddin. This killing stands in a line of assassinations of mid-level government officials in the past two weeks. Al-Bayati had been a Baath official in Najaf. His tribe has both Turkmen and Arab branches (which demonstrates once again that a "tribe" is often based on fictive kinship and is a little like a political party, which can be joined or left over time). In Tikrit, a poster was distributed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, threatening death to officials who collaborate with the occupying authorities and singling out Jasim Jabbarah, an Iraqi official in Salahuddin working with police intelligence against the insurgents.

Baquba: Guerrillas fired mortar shells into a residential neighborhood. They hit a civilian home and killed a husband and wife.

Fallujah: Residents of Fallujah continue to maintain that the US bombs fell on a popular neighborhood in Saturday's F-16 attack, not on a terrorist safe house. Rescue workers digging through the rubble report glimpsing bodies of women and children below. The Mayor of Fallujah promised residents of the neighborhood that he would cut off relations with the US over the incident. In contrast, Newsday reports that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi gave his blessings to the strike:

"We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit," Allawi said. "We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq." His comments are likely to generate anger among Iraqis, who already are suspicious of Allawi because of his close ties to the CIA and British intelligence during the more than 20 years he spent in exile.

Sy Hersh is reporting that hundreds of Israeli intelligence agents are operating in and from Iraqi Kurdistan, gathering information on Iran's nuclear program and stirring up Syrian Kurds to make trouble for Bashar al-Asad in Syria. I have talked about the likelihood of such a presence here in the past. The nexus of disinformation about the Saddam government and about terrorist activity in Iraq may lie in tales fed to Mossad by the Kurds, who in turn passed it to Washington. The Kurds have steadily and implausibly alleged a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection.

National Congress Planned; Muqtada Invited
Chalabi mediates with Kurds

Al-Hayat: On Sunday, the preparatory board met to begin planning a national congress of 1000 notables, politicians, religious leaders and tribal sheikhs to be held in July. It will involve twenty members of the old Interim Governing Council, including Sheikh Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, against whom an arrest warrant has been issued in an alleged murder case. An invitation has also been issued to the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who observers thought might well be elected to the advisory council. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi called on Muqtada to come to the congress.

Iyad Allawi had dispatched Ahmad Chalabi to mediate between him and the Kurdish leadership in the north. Despite Allawi's attempt to dissolve the militias, the Peshmerga or Kurdish militias are refusing to be put under central Baghdad control. Chalabi met with Jalal Talabani. Al-Hayat reports a rumor that the Coalition Provisional Authority had an arrest warrant issued for Chalabi.

The American attempt to destroy Chalabi politically, and to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr physically, has so far failed miserably. Allawi is clearly eager to do business with both, and to pull them into his orbit. Both are now poised to gain seats in the proto-parliament, the national advisory council, and they have made an improbable and wholly cynical alliance with one another, according to an informed Iraqi observer. The two of them could well show up in the government to be formed in January, 2005.

Thousands of Indian Shiites Protest US Policies in Iraq

Thousands of Indian Shiites came out into the streets of New Delhi Sunday to protest harsh US policies in Iraq and to demand that the United Nations take the leading role in putting the country back on its feet. They were supported by Hindu friends. The Indian Shiites were angered at the US because of its desecration of the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Indian Shiites have in recent decades been moderate and politically timid, but this issue has clearly galvanized them. Among the many stupid actions undertaken by Mssrs. Bremer and Sanchez (i.e. by Mr. Bush), having US troops fire tank shells and call in air strikes in the vicinity of the shrines of Ali and Husayn has to be right up there at the top.

The Shiite International has turned anti-US, and we will see trouble out of it.

Controversy at UC Irvine over Muslim Witness to Faith

The Orange County Register reports a controversy over graduation ceremonies at the University of California Irvine, where 11 Muslim students had been planning to wear green stoles with Islamic inscriptions over their robes. One side would say "Lord, increase my knowledge." The other would have the shahadah or Muslim confession of faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger." The Register reports that:

' Jewish students and outside groups that have gotten involved in the controversy, such as the American Jewish Congress, say the wearing of a garment with that word implies approval of terrorism and suicide bombings. "I am offended by that," said Larry Mahler, president of the UCI chapter of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. "What they are doing is ratifying the suicide bombing that killed innocent people." '

Rumors also swirled that the inscriptions involved support for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organization, the paramilitary wing of which sponsors suicide bombings against Israeli targets as a way of fighting Israeli occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

I can't say how upset I am by the gross bigotry displayed by anyone in the American Jewish Congress who would attempt to associate the Muslim confession of faith with terrorism.

The shahadah or confession of faith is a universalist statement. It begins by saying "La ilaha illa Allah." "La" means "no" in Arabic. "Ilah" is god with a small "g", a deity of the sort that is worshipped in polytheistic religions like those of ancient Greece and Babylon. It is a cognate of the ancient Hebrew "eloh," which also means "god." One of the names for God in the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible is Elohim, which literally means "the Gods." Some scholars believe that the use of this plural is an echo of the process whereby a council of gods in ancient Near Eastern religion gradually become merged into a single figure, the one God.

So "La ilaha" means that there are no gods or small deities of the polytheistic sort. The ancient Arabs worshipped star-goddesses such as al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat. These are the equivalents of Venus, Hera and Diana in classical mythology. The Muslim witness to faith denies that such deities exist.

"Illa Allah" means "except for God." So there is no deity except The Deity. This part of the shahadah is a pure expression of monotheism. Monotheism's basic characteristic is its universalism. It asserts that one, single divinity underlies all of Being. This point is why it is wrong to insist on using the word Allah in English rather than God. Allah is not a proper name. It is simply the Arabic word for "the God." A god is ilahun. The God is al-Ilahu. The close proximity of two "L's" in al-Ilah caused them to be elided together so that the word became Allah. But it just means "the God," i.e., "God." Christian Arabic-speakers also use Allah to refer to the God of the Bible.

And, the Koran also identifies Allah or "God" as the God of Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Moses, David, John the Baptist and Jesus, as well as of Muhammad. So, "there is no God but God." There is no difference in sentiment between this statement and the phrase, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." (Dt. 6:4).

The other part of the Muslim witness to faith is, "and Muhammad is His Messenger." (Muhammadun rasul Allah [or, transliterating by pronunciation: Muhammadu'rasulu'llah]. The word rasul or messenger is used interchangeably in the Koran with nabi or prophet. The Arabic nabi is cognate to the Hebrew word, which is the same. When Jesus said, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country," he certainly used the word nabi in his original phrasing. The Koran does not represent Muhammad as the only prophet or recipient of divine revelation. Even the bees receive a form of wahy or revelation from God. God has sent a prophet "to every city," it maintains. Not only are all the biblical figures prophets, but so are John the Baptist and Jesus, and even ancient Arabian prophets are accepted. In India, many Sufi Muslims were perfectly comfortable accepting Krishna and Ram as prophets. Of course, committed Muslims believe that Muhammad is the most recent messenger and the most appropriate one in which to believe, but they don't deny the validity of others such as Moses. And, in traditional Islamic law, it is perfectly all right for human beings to follow other prophets of the one God, whether they be Christians, Jews or members of some other monotheistic religion. This tolerance was implemented for the most part, though there were lapses, and some serious ones. It can be contrasted with medieval Christianity, which often expelled Jews and Muslims or forcibly converted them.

So both elements of the confession of faith in Islam are universalistic. The one God is the God of all being, and Muhammad as prophet exists within a moral universe of many prophets, and comes in a long line of true prophets, with much the same message as they had, concerning the compassion and love of the one God for his creation.

As for the phrase, "Increase my knowledge, " it is literally "increase me in knowledge and make me one of the virtuous." The phrase is from a pilgrimage prayer: Rabbi zidni 'ilman wa alhiqni bi's-salihin. The salihun or righteous in the Koran are those who do good deeds. At one point the Koran says that Jews, Christians and others who are salih or righteous need have no fear in the afterlife.

For these Muslim graduates of the University of California to implicitly sacralize the secular learning they received there by associating it with the prayer that God should increase them in "knowledge" is another universalist sentiment. Many Taliban would have denied that there was any `ilm/knowledge to be had at the University of California.

So, the bigots should back off and stop demonizing the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. In multicultural America, moreover, an atmosphere of religious tolerance is the only safeguard against pathologies like antisemitism.

[A reader wrote in to suggest that the AJC protesters confused shahadah, or "witness to faith" with shahiid or martyr. The former is an abstract noun, the latter is a person. The former is a recitation. The latter is a person killed for his or her faith. "Martyrs" or shuhada' (the plural) have in Islamic tradition most often been non-violent. The use of the term "martyr" for a suicide bomber is a very recent innovation by Islamist radicals. Traditional Islam forbids suicide and a suicide would never have been considered a "martyr" in classical Islam. Anyway, the witness to faith has nothing to do with martyrdom at all. Arabic, like other Semitic languages, including Hebrew, is based on triliteral roots. Sh*h*d has to do with witnessing. By putting the three-letter root into various morphological forms or qalibs, you can create a wide range of supple meanings. The audience for a television show are addressed by hosts as `A'izza' al-mushahidin, "dear viewers." Mushahidun or viewers are also unrelated to martyrs, much less to suicide bombers. You can't interpret a religion with 1.3 billion members that has dominated much of the Old World for 1400 years through the lens of the last 20 years in Gaza-Israeli relations. If you do, it leads you to look like a total idiot and frankly, a fascist.]

3 Wounded by Bomb at Central Bank;
22 Guerrillas Die in Fallujah Bombing

Guerrillas detonated a bomb outside Iraq's central bank in Baghdad on Sunday, wounding 2 employees and a guard.

Guerrillas blew up another bomb in a crowded market in Baghdad on Sunday, injuring at least 5.

Fighting continued near the eastern city of Baquba between US troops and guerrillas, apparently a mixed Sunni and Shiite force. On Friday, one US soldier and three Iraqis had been killed there. The precise nature of this conflict remains frustratingly vague.

The US dropped two bombs on a poor residential district of Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least 22 and wounding 9. The F-16 destroyed two houses and damaged 6 others. Most of those dead, including 3 women and 5 children, belonged to the extended family of a local farmer, Muhammad Hamadi. The US maintained that the building hit was a safe house for the al-Tawhid terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Local Iraqis in Fallujah maintained that most of those killed were innocent civilians.

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but for an Occupying Power to drop bombs on residential neighborhoods is a war crime. The three women and five children killed are not "collateral damage." They are human beings. They were killed by the United States. There are no such things as "precision strikes" in residential neighborhoods. Bombs not only throw off shrapnel themselves, they create lots of deadly flying debris, including flying glass from broken windows, that can kill and maim. Dropping bombs on an tank corps assembled in the desert and intending to do harm is one thing. Dropping bombs on a residential district is another.

We on the outside have no way of judging the various claims made in these sorts of situations. For all I know the Hamadi clan has a lot of blood on its hands and has been blowing up people. But if so, they should have been arrested by a special ops team cooperating with the Fallujah Brigade. You can't go around bombing residential buildings and killing women and children if you are to retain any respect whatsoever from the local population or, indeed, the world community. Remember that when Bush puts pressure on India or Pakistan to send troops to help in Iraq, one of the implications is that he is asking their military officers to be an active party to things like bombing residential complexes. They have publics that are already angry about the US occupation of Iraq and how it has been (mis)managed. They need to be associated with this kind of action like they need a hole in the head. That's the pragmatic argument. The legal argument against carrying out this kind of strike is that the pilots who carried it out could conceivably be charged in some tribunal somewhere in the world, as, indeed, could everyone above them who approved the order to strike.

There were manifestations of public anger over all this in Fallujah, and presumably in the rest of the Sunni heartland. It doesn't do any good to kill 15 guerrillas and their wives and children (if they were in fact guerrillas) if in so doing you create 30 more.

The case of 6 Shiite truck drives killed by a Sunni clan near Fallujah last week, which had threatened to provoke Sunni-Shiite violence, is still being mediated between Fallujah's governing council and the Shiite Establishment. Some progress appears to have been made on defusing tensions.

In a similar conflict, Kurdish militiamen kidpnapped 10 Arab truck drives (from Samarra) in Kirkuk, in revenge for the recent kidnapping of 5 Kurdish soldiers in the region who were serving in the new Iraqi military. Tensions run high between Arabs and Kurds in the Kirkuk area and the place is a tinderbox.

Pepe Escobar's interview with me on Iraq at the Asia Times is available online.

An excerpt:

ATol: Let's start with the credibility of the Iraqi caretaker government vis-a-vis the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, more than vis-a-vis the US and the UN. Virtually everyone in the Sunni triangle and also in the Shi'ite south used to refer to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) as "the imported government". Will the same happen again to this American face of an Iraqi government?

Juan Cole: Everybody knows it's an appointed government. It doesn't spring from the rule of the Iraqi people. Grand Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which he openly said that. His view in this matter will be widely shared. It's unfortunate that the Iraqi prime minister should have been a known CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] asset. I don't think that it changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a puppet council by many people. There's much more continuity between the IGC and this government than most people seem to realize. It's pretty much the same cast of characters - either with regard to people who actually sat at the council and persons who represent factions who had a seat in that council.

ATol: What are the implications of what you're saying for the Iraqi street?

JC: That nothing really has changed. These people are not getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a publicity stunt - without substance. The real question for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it's credible or not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it's not entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one can be pessimistic ...

Army down, racism up
ATol: On the dissolution of the army: Do you think this was a blunder by proconsul Paul Bremer or was it carried out on purpose?

JC: On purpose in the sense of trying to make the Iraqis dependent on the Americans? Well, what Jay Garner said to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corp], I saw it with my own eyes, is that he believed one of the reasons the army was dissolved was that the Bremer team has as one of their primary goals in Iraq the imposition of Polish-style shock therapy. They wanted to transform Iraq into a capitalist state, as quickly as possible. This was part of the general plan to make Iraq a kind of model for the region.

Read more.

One US Soldier Killed, 3 Injured along with Contractor

AP reports that guerrillas set off a roadide bomb in the Kamalaya district of Baghdad, after which snipers on rooftops fired at US troops, wounding three. The latter returned fire, inflicting some casualties on the guerrillas.

Later in the day, guerrillas fired six mortar shells into a 1st Cavalry Division camp in southern Baghdad. They killed one American soldier and injured a civilian contractor.

In Samarra', guerrillas attacked US troops with rpg's and rifles. Two of the attackers were wounded by return fire.

Clashes in Buhriz near Baqubah northeast of Baghdad between Iraqis and US soldiers have killed 13 Iraqis.

In Amara, British troops traded small arms fire with assailants from the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. The British killed two guerrillas, but took no casualties. It may well be that the violence was provoked by the attempt to arrest Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, who had been mayor of Amarah for the past year.

Destruction of Key Bridge Halts Southern Rails
Muqtada Aide Declares East Baghdad an American no-go Zone

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Guerillas blew up a key bridge just south of Baghdad Friday, halting rail traffic to four southern provinces from the capital, including Hilla, Amara, Nasiriyah, and Basra. Meanwhile, the port of Basra was unable to export any petroleum for the third day running because of pipeline sabotage.

On Thursday night into Friday morning, some Shiite forces were actually firing rockets, mainly aimed at other Shiite factions.

Shaikh Aws al-Khafaji, who is close to Muqtada al-Sadr, declared East Baghdad a no-go zone for the Americans. Addressing hundreds of worshippers at Friday prayers, al-Khafaji said, "I counsel you to take up holy war, and to apply pressure, with all severity, on the Americans. Announce that your city is a no-go zone for the American occupiers."

Another aide to Muqtada, Shaikh Jabir al-Khafaji, the Friday prayer leader in Kufa, criticized interim President Ghazi al-Yawar for shaking hands with US President George W. Bush when al-Yawar visited Washington, DC, recently.

In Najaf, the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr prevented Sadr al-Din Qubanji, local representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, from leading Friday prayers at the shrine of Imam Ali for the third week running. Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani justified the action, saying, "The Friday sermon has become politicized" and that "The seminary students have shouldered the responsibility for this issue after they consulted with the clergy." Shaibani said he had earlier been under the impression that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had ordered that the Friday prayers be held at the shrine of Ali.

On another front, an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for Sheikh Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, "Abu Hatim," with regard to the killing of the police chief in Majar al-Kabir in mid-May.

Iraqi Impotence in Every Sense

Viagra importation and use is way up in Iraq. Pharmacists say that the violence and tension has reduced Iraqi libido, so more men need help to get interested in sex. The pills are being smuggled or imported.

The psycho-biological effects of national crisis are increasingly easy to trace in this way. Consumption of internet pornography dropped off considerably in the United States in the weeks after September 11, for instance. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the fertility rate plummeted so far Russians were threatened with extinction in a couple of centuries if things continued like that.

The Iraqis seem also to be going through a crisis that depresses libido. Of course, since viagra was not imported under the Baath, we don't really have a control, and don't know if a pent-up normal demand is now being met, or if viagra use is way up in its own right. The subjective sense of the pharmacist quoted here is that it is the former.

42 Killed, 138 Wounded in 3 Thursday Bombings
Coalition Soldier Among Dead

The LA Times reports that guerrillas detonated two enormous bombs in Iraq on Thursday. A suicide bomber blew up an Iraqi army recruitment office in downtown Baghdad. He killed 35 Iraqis and injured 138, according to Baghdad health authorities. Later on Thursday, a guerrilla detonated a car bomb in Balad, just north of Baghdad. He killed six members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

A third bombing targeted a Coalition military convoy southeast of Baghdad, killing a Hungarian noncommissioned officer.

Bombings of significant magnitude are virtually daily events in Baghad. Interior Minister Fallah Hasan al-Naqib, who is from a prominent Sunni Baath family that fell out with Saddam in the late 1970s, threatened to consider the use of "Martial Law" to fight the wave of bombings. The LA Times (which misspells his name) wonders what in the world he could mean by that. Uh, martial law usually involves strict curfews, armed troops in the streets, and shooting suspected miscreants on sight. Although you might think there are already US armed troops in the streets, in fact from the accounts I have seen they don't actually do much to provide security or policing to the Iraqi public, so al-Naqib's plan would be a real change.

Oh, one other thing about martial law. Often, as in Pakistan, it substitutes military rule for civilian, and indefinitely postpones elections.

Iyad Allawi, the US/UN-appointed "prime minister," has mainly worked with ex-Baath officers trying to make coups in the past decade and a half. This talk of "martial law" is pretty scary. You have to wonder whether those elections scheduled for January will actually happen.

Bush and Cheney Stick with the Cover Story

On Thursday both President Bush and Vice President Cheney stuck with their assertions of a close tie between Saddam Hussein and Usamah Bin Laden. Cheney even had the nerve to attack the New York Times for daring to report the findings of the 9/11 commission that there was no operational involvement of Iraq in September 11 (something that even Bush had earlier admitted when pushed).

Cheney as much as admitted that he gets his news on these things from the National Review, a rightwing magazine that is not known for having real experts on the Arab world, the sort who know Arabic and have lived there, on the staff.

Bush took cover in the 1994 Sudan meetings between al-Qaeda and Iraqi secret police, which went nowhere.

These two top leaders have been successful in misleading the American public in the past by using innuendo mixed with falsehoods (Cheney said, "We know where the WMD is" and Bush alleged Niger uranium purchases that the CIA knew were false). I suppose they think that mere repetition will somehow hypnotize the public yet again.

I doubt it will work. Before, they had enormous credibility as political leaders with the press, in part because of 9/11. That has begun collapsing. And even the American public, which doesn't pay much attention to foreign news, has started figuring out that it was misled into a misadventure that could still end in catastrophe.

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had a prisoner entered into the Iraqi prison system without recording it, keeping the prisoner anonymous and unknown to the Red Cross. Apparently the prisoner ended up being forgotten in virtual solitary confinement. No doubt he was a bad guy, but it is hard to see how this procedure made anyone safer.

The episode is further fodder for widespread suspicions that Rumsfeld authorized at least in a general way the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghuraib.