By swopaApr 17 2005 - 3:37pm  
(Left) Insurgents? No, these guys are the police. (Right) "Uhh, are you folks sure you haven't seen any ethnic cleansing around here?"
Oops, it looks like those fears of Iraq falling even deeper into the abyss of ethnic cleansing may have been a bit premature. As Robert Worth sums it up for the New York Times today:
Anyone in Baghdad this morning could have been forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of civil war.
Three Iraqi Army battalions had surrounded the town of Madaen, just south of the capital, where Sunni kidnappers were said to be threatening to kill hundreds of Shiite hostages unless all Shiites left the town. As the national assembly met, Iraq's top political figures warned of a grave sectarian crisis. Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric issued a plea for restraint. Even the outgoing prime minister released a statement decrying the "savage, filthy, and dirty atrocities" in Madaen.
But as the army battalions arrived in Madaen, they saw streets full of people calmly sipping tea in cafés and going about their business. There were no armed Sunni mobs, no cowering Shiite victims. After hours of careful searches, the soldiers assisted by air surveillance found no evidence of any kidnappings or refugees at all.
By this afternoon, Iraqi army officials were reporting that the crisis in Madaen, which had been narrated in a stream of breathless television reports and news agency stories, was nothing but a tissue of rumors and politically motivated accusations. But not everyone has given up on the story yet, as the Associated Press demonstrates:
Iraqi security forces raided a town in central Iraq and freed some 15 Shiite families being held hostage on Sunday, an official said, after Sunni militants threatened to kill dozens of captives unless all Shiites left the area.
. . . Iraqi forces had freed about 15 Shiite families, said Haidar Khayon, an official at the Defense Ministry in Baghdad. He said five hostage-takers were captured in a skirmish with light gunfire, but no casualties were reported. Oh, but wait -- another AP article by a different author is now throwing in the towel:
Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. troops had the town of Madain surrounded Sunday after reports of Sunni militant kidnappings of as many as 100 Shiites residents, but there were growing indications the incident had been grossly exaggerated, perhaps an outgrowth of a tribal dispute or political maneuvering.
. . . An AP photographer and television cameraman who were in or near the town Sunday said large numbers of Iraqi forces had sealed it off, supported by U.S. forces who were keeping a low profile farther from the edge of Madain.
The cameraman said he toured the town Sunday morning. People were going about their business normally, shops were open and tea houses were full, he said. Residents contacted by telephone also said everything was normal in Madain.
. . . A Defense Ministry official, Haidar Khayon, said early Sunday that Iraqi forces raided the town and freed about 15 Shiite families and captured five hostage takers in a skirmish with light gunfire. He said there were no casualties.
. . . By the end of the day, however, Iraqi officials had produced no hostages and Iraqi military officials who had given information about the troubles in Madain could not be reached for further details. Cutting straight to the box score, however this rumor started -- and I suppose hope we'll find out more about that soon -- the groups that promoted or were taken in by it include both the incoming Shiite-led government and the outgoing one. Those who denied it, and thus come off looking more honest, include Moqtada al-Sadr, the even more anti-occupation Association of Muslim Scholars, and the terrorist group purportedly led by Zarqawi and affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
Great job, huh? That's not an easy trick to pull off. It'll get even better if some group decides that ethnic cleansing via hostage-taking isn't such a bad idea after all.
By swopaApr 16 2005 - 1:59pm Oops, it looks like those hopes of a turning point against the insurgency in Iraq may have been a bit premature. Here's today's roundup of chaos from the Associated Press:
Masked Sunni militants attacked a mosque in central Iraq and threatened to kill dozens of Shiite hostages unless all Shiites left town, potentially enflaming sectarian divides, while at least 17 people were killed Saturday in separate attacks nationwide after a week of increased violence in Iraq.
. . . Later Saturday, insurgents fired mortars at a U.S. Marine base near Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the military said, but no casualties were immediately reported.
Residents said dozens of fighters armed with grenade launchers and other weapons were seen moving through the city after dark and loud explosions were heard as the fighters tried to force their way into Camp Blue Diamond.
Two U.S. soldiers also were reported killed in separate attacks. One soldier from the 42nd Military Police Brigade was wounded and died when his convoy was hit Saturday by an explosive device near Taji, north of Baghdad. Another died of injuries sustained when a coalition military base was attacked Friday near Tikrit.
. . . In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of the capital, a bomb exploded inside a restaurant often used by Iraqi police, killing nine people, most of them policemen, authorities said. Twelve people were hospitalized in the blast.
A suicide car bomber also attacked a convoy on the road to the airport in Baghdad, killing at least three civilians, including one Iraqi and two foreigners, and wounding three Iraqis and three foreigners, police said. The U.S. military confirmed it was a civilian convoy but had no further details.
Insurgents killed three members of Iraq's security forces in the northern city of Kirkuk, firing from speeding vehicles on soldiers and policemen, police said. A police officer also was shot and killed in the center of Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. Here's more on the apparent hostage crisis, which could mark a very dangerous escalation into outright ethnic cleansing:
The latest crisis began Thursday when Sunni militants severely damaged a Shiite mosque in Madain with explosives, said Haitham Husseini, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country's largest Shiite group.
On Friday, about 100 masked militants drove through town, grabbing Shiite youths and old men, he said. Estimates of the number captured ranged between 35 and 70, Husseini and central government officials said.
A resident reached by telephone said militants returned early Saturday, shouting through loudspeakers that all Shiites must leave or the hostages would be killed. Later, the town appeared calm and there was no sign of insurgents. Oddly, though, the article adds this:
However, Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji, an aide to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told al-Jazeera satellite television he did not believe any abductions took place. I wonder exactly what that says about al-Sadr's loyalties in all this. Guess we'll have to check in for more information later.
By fubarApr 16 2005 - 8:42am
By swopaApr 15 2005 - 2:19pm Courtesy of praktike's personal news feed at Liberals Against Terrorism, I came across this column in the British Guardian:
Colin Powell does not need more humiliation over the manifold errors in his February 2003 presentation to the UN. But yesterday a London jury brought down another section of the case he made for war - that Iraq and Osama bin Laden were supporting and directing terrorist poison cells throughout Europe, including a London ricin ring.
Yesterday's verdicts on five defendants and the dropping of charges against four others make clear there was no ricin ring. Nor did the "ricin ring" make or have ricin. Not that the government shared that news with us. Until today, the public record for the past three fear-inducing years has been that ricin was found in the Wood Green flat occupied by some of yesterday's acquitted defendants. It wasn't. The author of the article was an expert witness in the case. As he goes on to explain:
. . . five pages in Arabic, containing amateur instructions for making ricin, cyanide and botulinum, and a list of chemicals used in explosives [were] at the heart of the case. The notes had been made by Kamel Bourgass, the sole convicted defendant. His co-defendants believed that he had copied the information from the internet. The prosecution claimed it had come from Afghanistan.
I was asked to look for the original source on the internet. This meant exploring Islamist websites that publish Bin Laden and his sympathisers, and plumbing the most prolific source of information on how to do harm: the writings of the American survivalist right and the gun lobby.
. . . All the information roads led west, not to Kabul but to California and the US midwest. The recipes for ricin now seen on the internet were invented 20 years ago by survivalist Kurt Saxon. He advertises videos and books on the internet. Before the ricin ring trial started, I phoned him in Arizona. For $110, he sent me a fistful of CDs and videos on how to make bombs, missiles, booby traps - and ricin. We handed a copy of the ricin video to the police.
When, in October, I showed that the chemical lists found in London were an exact copy of pages on an internet site in Palo Alto, California, the prosecution gave up on the Kabul and al-Qaida link claims. But it seems this information was not shared with the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who was still whipping up fear two weeks later. And the British government wasn't the only one he caught hyping the Islamic-terror threat:
The most ironic twist was an attempt to introduce an "al-Qaida manual" into the case. The manual - called the Manual of the Afghan Jihad - had been found on a raid in Manchester in 2000. It was given to the FBI to produce in the 2001 New York trial for the first attack on the World Trade Centre. But it wasn't an al-Qaida manual. The name was invented by the US Department of Justice in 2001, and the contents were rushed on to the net to aid a presentation to the Senate by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, supporting the US Patriot Act.
To show that the Jihad manual was written in the 1980s and the period of the US-supported war against the Soviet occupation was easy. The ricin recipe it contained was a direct translation from a 1988 US book called the Poisoner's Handbook, by Maxwell Hutchkinson. I'm not sure which frightens me more -- the power-hungry cynicism of these governmental charlatans, or the fact that if there is a life-and-death threat to our security, these posturing clowns will be the last to know about it.
By swopaApr 15 2005 - 8:04am Someone at Knight Ridder must have gotten awfully sick of the necrophilic politically correct fawning over John Paul II this past week, 'cause they ordered up this bracing dose of honesty yesterday:
The stately nobility of the election about to unfold at the Vatican - eagerly watched by world leaders and members of other faiths - is all the more amazing because of the centuries of corruption, greed and murder in its past.
. . . "In some past elections, people behaved very badly," the Rev. John O'Malley, a noted Catholic historian, said this week from his office at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Massachusetts. "Right up through John Paul II, popes have been trying to tie up the loose ends of the process."
One of the most bizarre loose ends was the "cadaver synod" after the election in 896 of the insanely vengeful Pope Stephen VI. He harbored so much anger at a predecessor, Pope Formosus, that he had his corpse exhumed.
Formosus' decomposing body was dressed in papal vestments, propped in a throne and put on trial for crimes against church law, including perjury. Unable to mount a defense, Formosus' ghastly remains were convicted. As punishment, the three fingers Formosus once used to bless the faithful were hacked from his right hand. His body was dragged away and thrown into the Tiber River.
Piling crime upon crime like a modern suspense novel, Stephen soon was thrown into prison himself. Formosus' friends crept into his cell and strangled him.
"Even professional historians shy away from this period because these things are so horrifying," said John-Peter Pham, a papal historian at James Madison University in Virginia and the author of the newly released "Heirs of the Fisherman."
. . . Consider poor John XVI, who thought he was the rightful pope, according to Roman nobles who pushed him onto the papal throne in 997. Unfortunately, another politically powerful pope, Gregory V, was alive elsewhere in Europe.
Gregory returned to Rome with an army and wasn't amused at finding a rival. He ordered John's eyes put out as well as his nose and ears sliced off. Then, to underline the point, John was excommunicated. Should he wish to object, his lips, teeth and tongue were removed next. And his mutilated body, still alive, was shipped to a monastery. Supposedly religious leaders still get a little carried away with the power-and-vengeance thing today, of course, as another Knight Ridder article (by Tom Lasseter in Baghdad) notes:
Eight months after the U.S. military claimed victory over the militia of firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr, his organization has grown in sophistication, won seats in the Iraqi National Assembly and on provincial councils, and continued to agitate for the expulsion of American forces from Iraq.
. . . Al Sadr's organization has developed a political arm while maintaining an armed faction that's able to threaten violence, similar in concept to the Lebanese group Hezbollah or the Irish Republican Army.
Since the end of the August uprising, al Sadr has centralized disparate groups of supporters across the country. Offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces report to a central group of committees in Baghdad, his representatives said. Those committees control everything from how Quranic classes should be conducted to media outreach.
. . . Al Sadr's men appear intent on enforcing a strict interpretation of Islamic law. His militia beat a group of students because they had a picnic at which men and women danced together at Basra University last month. In a similar incident this week, a group of male and female students at Baghdad's Rafidain College, near the entrance of Sadr City, were accosted by about 10 men wielding AK-47s and sticks.
The men admonished female students for not wearing the hijab, the traditional Muslim headscarf. Then, according to witnesses, they looked at a group of women sitting with men and yelled: "Is this an Islamic country, you bitches? Aren't you ashamed of sitting next to a man? If we come again and see you like this we will kill you and hang your bodies." And while we haven't achieved quite the same marriage of political power and violence in the name of religion here in the U.S., the slope is getting slipperier, as the New York Times reports this morning:
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.
Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith." have already taken the opportunity to have rhetorical fun with this, and I won't try to compete with them. I'll just settle for pointing out that it's part of a pattern.
By swopaApr 14 2005 - 5:19pm According to the Associated Press, that's the slogan on the billboard toward the bottom of these pictures, as U.S. soldiers detonate an unexploded car bomb in Iraq:
 
To the best of my knowledge, this is not an approved sanitation technique in most other countries, so please don't try this at home.
By swopaApr 14 2005 - 3:14pm I almost skipped this article in the Los Angeles Times yesterday on the Iraqi version of "gated communities" outside the Green Zone established by the U.S. military:
Although the U.S. military provides a safety cordon for the interim Iraqi government, the U.S. and British embassies and large contractors such as Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, many vulnerable foreign organizations do business outside its checkpoints.
When the insurgency's campaign of bombings and assassinations cast the city into a state of fear in mid-2003, it was up to the firms to provide their own security, spawning a private fortifications industry. Concrete blast walls, trucked around the capital in sections and hoisted into place by cranes, now surround many of the city's landmark buildings and lesser-known streets.
. . . Dozens of embassies outside the Green Zone have been fortified. Formerly posh hotels humbled by economic sanctions and war have remade themselves as hardened bunkers for news organizations unwilling to be hindered by the Green Zone's crowded checkpoints.
The twice-bombed Baghdad Hotel downtown, the Hamra Hotel and the Palestine-Ishtar complex — where the foreign media holed up during the war — are all fortresses today, built either privately or with U.S. funds.
. . . At about $600 per slab, even a modest "fort" costs tens of thousands of dollars to build.
Small armies must be recruited to staff the checkpoints 24 hours a day. The Hamra, which has a medium-sized compound, hired about 40 guards, all licensed by the U.S. military or the Iraqi Interior Ministry to carry automatic weapons.
. . . The hotels, companies and embassies find a ready supply of guards among the 400,000 men put out of work nearly two years ago when occupation authorities disbanded the Iraqi army. This raises an awkward dilemma. Every former Iraqi soldier who is hired as a security guard for one of these impromptu fortresses is a possible recruit taken away from the guerrilla resistance, which is good. But as the insurgency hypothetically begins losing strength, then the barricades will start being dismantled and the guards laid off ... which, potentially, could refuel the resistance.
I guess it's one of those "we'll cross that bridge when we get there" kind of situations.
By fubarApr 14 2005 - 11:55am Remember Paul O'Neill? How about Richard Clarke? The latest to join the coterie of former Bush administration officials now targeted for smear/discrediting is none other than former Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford who as we noted yesterday had not too many nice things to say about John 'Kiss-up/Kick-down' Bolton -- the U.N. Ambasaddor-designate and latest winner of the Bush Administration's Failing Upward(tm) award.
Spearheading the discrediting campaign is none other than our douchebag scumbag old friend Bob Novak: Although he [Ford] characterized himself as a faithful conservative Republican, former CIA analyst Ford worked for Democratic Sen. John Glenn for five years. Federal Election Commission filings indicate he contributed to both Democrats and Republicans, to both John Kerry and George W. Bush. Ford, as President Bush's appointee, was giving funds to Democrats Jane Harman, Charles Rangel and Daniel Inouye. Incredibly, the same line of attack is picked up by National Review: "Loyal Republican to the Core" Carl Ford Donated to Democrats
Self-professed “loyal, conservative Republican to the core” Carl Ford has not always put his money where his mouth is. Over the past five years, Ford donated more than $3,000 to a number of prominent Democrats including John Kerry and Charles Rangel, according to OpenSecrets.org.
Ford has also donated to a number of Republicans, including President Bush. The Democrat donations include:
$1,000 Charles Rangel 8/12/04
$500, Daniel Inouye, 2/18/04
$1,000 Jane Harman, 12/8/03
$250 Jane Harman, 3/7/2000
$500 John Kerry, 11/9/99 As usual, they fail to mention that Ford, in the same time period, gave $7,500 to Republican candidates and causes. Of course, if you're a lazy-ass hack journalist like Novak, you just recycle what's handed to you on a plate instead of checking the original material on your own. Had he done that, he would've found that the majority of Ford's 2003/2004 donations went to George W. Bush and National Republican Congressional Committee and that Ford's donation to John Kerry came back in 1999, not as Novak implies, in the last election cycle.
Be that as it may, it's always a sight to behold when the attack wolves set on one of their own.
By fubarApr 14 2005 - 9:47am Tom DeLay in the Washington Times: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused Democrats of shutting down the chamber's ethics committee to prevent him from being exonerated of the ethics accusations against him.
"The only way I can be cleared is through the ethics committee, so they don't want one," Mr. DeLay said yesterday in an interview with editors and reporters of The Washington Times in his office at the Capitol. : The House ethics committee chairman who presided over three rebukes of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) was bounced from the job Wednesday and replaced by a Republican congressman from Washington state.
The new chairman is Rep. Doc Hastings, the committee's second-ranking Republican. He was named by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to take the gavel from Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.).
In addition, Hastert appointed three new members to the panel, including two — Reps. Lamar S. Smith (R-Texas) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) — whose political action committees have contributed to DeLay's legal defense fund. Smith's PAC contributed $5,000 in 2001 and an additional $5,000 between July and September 2004; Cole's gave $5,000 between July and September 2004. Back at the Washington Times: Asked if he had ever crossed the line of ethical behavior, Mr. DeLay said: "'Ever' is a very strong word. Let me start out by saying, you can never find anything that I have done for personal gain. Period." : The New York Times reported Wednesday that DeLay's wife and daughter have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by DeLay's political action and campaign committees, according to a detailed review of disclosure statements filed with the Federal Election Commission and separate fund-raising records in Texas. is a very strong word. So are the words crossed, line, ethical, and behavior.
By swopaApr 13 2005 - 5:13pm has a sad story today about Iraqis who tried to be a bridge between two countries, only to find they have no safe home in either:
Alyaa said she was the first woman in her neighborhood to sign up to work with the U.S. government after Saddam Hussein fell.
She used to stand shoulder to shoulder with an American soldier in front of the U.S. military's Camp Scania in the Rashid section of Baghdad. As a translator, Alyaa, 24, talked to Iraqis who lined up at the entrance seeking compensation for dead relatives and destroyed homes.
Now, because of that work, her life is in danger and in limbo.
Alyaa, who asked that her last name be withheld out of fear for her safety, fled to Jordan with her cousin Shaimaa after insurgents killed an uncle and kidnapped Shaimaa and another cousin. Alyaa hoped to find a haven in the United States but discovered the State Department isn't resettling refugees from Iraq. She's lost her faith in the country she once loved.
"We gave them our friendship," Alyaa said during a recent interview at an Amman restaurant, wearing jeans and smoking cigarettes. "We gave them our hard work. And they don't even help us to have a new life." Is it so hard, she asked, "for America to give a visa to Iraqis to have a new life that they took from them?"
Refugee aid workers and U.S. and U.N. officials said the United States had turned away Iraqi refugees because it was trying instead to create a democratic society from which no one had to flee, and was sacrificing plenty of American lives in the process. To succeed, it needs the talents of the very people who want to leave.
"The whole purpose of being here is to create an environment of stability and security so that's not an issue," said Joanne Cummings, refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Cummings said the embassy valued people who'd put themselves at risk and it kept a close watch on them. "A close watch"? Before or after they're buried?
As the article notes in passing, the real reason the Orwell Bush administration won't grant asylum to its Iraqi translators, etc., is that as soon as those employees find out they can flee to America, we won't have any translators, etc., left in Iraq.
Also, it would be a bit embarrassing to admit that the flowering democracy we're supposedly creating in the Middle East is so unsafe that our own employees would rather get the hell out, wouldn't it? And when it comes down to being embarrassed or sending loyal and trusting people to their deaths, you know which option the Bushites will choose every time.
Everybody is talking about Dubya's Demographically Correct iPod music playlist - even Jesus' General is getting into the act. Well, if I had one of those newfangled iPod thingies, here is what I'd be playing - Resistance 1:
Blurt - My mother was a Friend of an Enemy of the People ( album)
Faith No More - We Care Alot ( album)
Grandmaster Flash - The Message ( album)
Heaven 17 - We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang ( album)
Kalahari Surfers - Don't Dance ( album)
Marianne Faithful - Broken English ( album)
MDC - Corporate Deathburger ( album)
Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning ( album)
Peter Gabriel - Biko ( album)
Public Enemy - Fight The Power ( album)
Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name ( album)
Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK ( album)
Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen ( album)
Spike Jones & His City Slickers - Der Fuehrers Face ( album)
Talking Heads - Listening Wind ( album)
Those Darn Accordions - Them Hippies Was Right ( album)
So what is it you listen to when you want to fight the power and heil in Dubya's face?
By swopaApr 12 2005 - 7:40pm Is marriage robbing Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo of his sense of humor? Let us pray not, but the signs are disturbing. Just a week and a half ago, it fell to me to point out that Dubya was not "returning to the scene of the crime -- only we might say, in this case, in advance of the bad act he aspires to" by visiting the location of the Social Security trust fund, he was casing the joint.
And just this evening, Marshall shares an update on the Sinclair Broadcasting controversy during last year's election campaign:
Perhaps you remember Jon Leiberman. He was the young DC Bureau Chief of Sinclair Broadcasting who decided to give an interview to the Baltimore Sun in which he lambasted Sinclair's planned Swift Boat smear documentary as "biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election."
. . . According to a document released today by Sinclair, the Maryland Department of Labor found that Lieberman was canned for "speaking to the press/media without permission and sharing of propriety information outside the company," which, I take it, means he was fired for good reason and thus isn't eligible [for unemployment insurance]. Amazingly, Marshall fails to see the punch line here. Anyone else who doesn't is hereby referred to the joke that begins this essay.
By fubarApr 12 2005 - 3:46pm You know it's bad when a State Department diplomat (as in someone whose job it is to be tactful and show diplomacy) shows up at a confirmation hearing and testifies under oath that the candidate is a bully unfit for the post: Carl Ford, who ran the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, called Bolton a "kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy" who cast a chill over the State Department's intelligence personnel by abusing an analyst who held up his speech because it overstated information on Cuba's weapons.
...
"I've never met anyone like him ... in terms of the way he abuses his power and authority over little people," Ford said. Sour grapes from the opposition party? Hardly: Ford, who described himself as a conservative Republican loyal to Bush, said Bolton was a bully who berated those at lower levels while placating higher-ups. Actually, I'm thinking it's a good idea sending a hothead like Bolton to a deliberative body like U.N. where the institutional inertia will piss him off enough maybe we'll get one of those 'caught on video' moments with him ripping off the headset and climbing over the table to punch out the guy from Latvia who is using his floor time to tell the world exactly where Mr. Bolton can shove his missing WMDs...
By swopaApr 12 2005 - 2:54pm The Los Angeles Times had an amusing story this morning on my favorite out-of-work temp, former Iraqi Saddam wannabe interim prime minister Iyad Allawi:
So far, Allawi has no role in the new administration. Though his slate won 40 seats in the election for the assembly, he has skipped most of the body's meetings and left the country during much of the negotiations to form a government. "Where's Allawi?" has become a common refrain among politicians, journalists and citizens who cast ballots in the Jan. 30 vote.
. . . Before the election, Allawi campaigned throughout Iraq, had posters of himself displayed everywhere and regularly appeared on TV. Nowadays, the onetime CIA-backed opposition fighter avoids the media and rarely gives interviews.
Last week he issued a brief statement announcing his resignation and congratulating the new president and vice presidents, but made no mention of his replacement, Ibrahim Jafari, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance and leader of the Islamic Dawa Party. Hmm, there seems to be a pattern here -- Talabani, the new president, "forgot" to mention Jaafari in his inaugural speech as well. Lovely to see what grown-ups we have running Iraq, isn't it? But back to the story:
U.S. officials hoped Allawi, a longtime ally of Washington, would emerge as an influential player and counter pressure from Islamists in the new government.
. . . Tension between the United Iraqi Alliance and Allawi grew last week when several assembly members publicly called for investigations into allegations of corruption and misconduct by the interim government. The lawmakers were particularly upset by claims that government ministries had hired thousands of former Baath Party members.
"We will form a committee to investigate all of the ministries of the Iyad Allawi government — every one of them," said Sheik Jalaluddin Saghir, a Shiite cleric and assembly member. I wrote a few months ago about the Baathist wedge that I felt would keep Allawi out of any substantial role in the government, and now we're seeing it in action.
As I said then, a compromise doesn't seem feasible on this issue -- too many Shiites have died at the hands of Baathists (both during Saddam Hussein's reign and since then) for them to take any chances with possible "moles," and as long as Allawi remains synonymous with government by unreconstructed Baathists, there's no middle ground for them to work together.
I've also written that the United Iraqi Alliance's apparent intention to use the militias of Shiite religious parties to replace purged Baathists in Iraq's post-Saddam army and national guard has set off a barely disguised PR campaign hyping the effectiveness of Iraqi forces trained under Allawi.
So it's no surprise, really, to see that as the UIA's Jaafari gets close to forming a goverment that will implement its de-Baathification policies, the U.S. has gotten a little panicky, as Agence France Presse explains:
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Iraq's new Shiite elite not to purge the fledgling security forces and to beware of corruption as he made a surprise visit to Baghdad on Tuesday.
. . . Washington is concerned Iraq's new leaders will "come in and clean house," with newly trained security forces, Rumsfeld told reporters on the flight from Washington to Baghdad.
"You can't do that, if you are trying to create a chain of command in the Iraqi security force and defeat a doggone insurgency," said Rumsfeld, whose country disbanded Iraq's army after the US-led invasion of March 2003.
"Anything they do in the interior and the defense ministries ought to be with an eye to the fact that Iraqis are getting killed, and they better have a good reason for doing what they are doing." adds this:
Iraq's current authorities appear to be making inroads against the insurgency and Rumsfeld said he hoped those successes would not be overlooked when it came to deciding who would stay and who would go in the next administration. Like I said, all those positive stories weren't a coincidence. I'm a little surprised, though, that Rumsfeld would lay the issue out in the open like that, since I think the U.S. is playing a losing hand. Of all the "compromises" the Americans might try to impose on the UIA, I can see the Shiites backing down on Islam/sharia in the constitution and even some permanent U.S. military presence before they submit to having a new military that is substantially composed of the same Baathists who terrorized them for decades.
Given how these forces were the primary instrument of Saddam's repression, how could their replacement not be the fundamental issue in defining a new Iraq? I wonder just how far the Americans will dare to push the Jaafari government on this.
Update: Spencer Ackerman has a great post on the subject of renewed de-Baathification (looking at it from the Sunni side). He makes a key historical point, as well as a recommendation I doubt will be accepted:
. . . the Shia and the Kurds aren't chasing at phantoms when they fear the prospect of a Baathist coup emanating from the security services: That was exactly how the Baathists came to power in the 1960s.
. . . But if they go ahead with the purge, no matter how carefully they arrange it, it will almost certainly drive the Sunnis further and further away from the political process at exactly the wrong time. What to do? My inclination is not to conduct the purge--or at least not yet. Priority one for Jaafari at this critical pre-constitutional juncture has to be securing some measure of Sunni buy-in. The 100,000-plus U.S. troops who will even by optimistic military estimates remain in Iraq through next year provide a bulwark against a Baathist seizure of power, buying Jaafari some time to bring Sunnis into the process--which should be a prerequisite for taking such a drastic and potentially alienating measure. I don't think Jaafari and the United Iraqi Alliance will see things this way -- my guess is that they'd rather risk a re-inflamed insurgency than a coup. And they may not be as sure as Spencer is that the U.S would defend potentially theocratic Shiites against a coup by secular Baathists.
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In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through. . . . But when the field is nationwide . . . then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre . . . 
