Needlenose

Following in the wake of stories by McClatchy News, the Washington Post reported yesterday:

Iraqi officials in the home town of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are calling for an investigation into a reported raid by the U.S. military early Friday that resulted in the death of a man identified by some Iraqi officials as a relative of the prime minister.

The raid was carried out shortly after midnight in the town of Hindiyah, 50 miles southwest of Baghdad in Karbala province. According to Iraqi officials in Karbala, a team of about 60 U.S. soldiers traveling in four helicopters descended on a sparsely populated area a few miles from the town, where the prime minister owns a villa.

. . . U.S. soldiers stormed into a house in Hindiyah searching for Ali Abdul Hussein al-Maliki, the man’s brother, Ahmad Abdul Hussein Razak al-Maliki, said in an interview Saturday.

. . . Ahmad al-Maliki, who was in the house at the time, said his brother was shot in the chest. He and his brother are first cousins of the prime minister, who is their father’s brother, he said, adding that he and his slain brother belonged to the prime minister’s security detail.

. . . Karbala’s police chief, Maj. Gen. Raid Shakir Jawdat, on Saturday escorted a Washington Post special correspondent and other journalists to the house where the reported raid took place.

In the room where Ali al-Maliki was reportedly shot, the correspondent saw a khaki uniform with a label in Arabic on the sleeve that identified its owner as a member of the Protection Force of the Council of Ministers of Iraq, the unit that protects the prime minister and other high-ranking government employees.

Ahmad al-Maliki said U.S. officials contend his brother is a leader of a “special group,” a term the U.S. military uses to describe Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

However the details of this story ultimately shake out, a situation where the U.S. hands over nominal responsibility for security in a province, but continues to make unannounced raids even in the prime minister’s home town — and the local officials seem far more interested in stoking resentment over the raid than whatever American concerns provoked it — makes Maliki look like something other than the loyal stooge/puppet he’s often portrayed as being.

But if one assumes that Sistani and al-Sadr had more to do with putting Maliki in office than Bush/Cheney did,  and that privately he shares the Shiite governing coalition’s longing for the day they can kick the U.S. out (no matter how much public shit-eating and and making nice with the occupation are required by his day job), why shouldn’t his family members be involved with illicit militias?  That might explain why the Iraqi government seems pissed off not because a Maliki family member might have been tied to such militias, but because the guy wasn’t as untouchable as his family name should have made him.

In fact, a Los Angeles Times story yesterday (which has already been widely noted by Iraq-related bloggers) profiled another guy caught in between the mutual backstabbing maneuverings of the Bushites and the Iraqi government:

A year ago, Sunni Arab fighter Abu Abed led an improbable revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq. . . . Today, Abu Abed is chain-smoking cigarettes in Amman, betrayed by his best friend, on the run from a murder investigation in his homeland.Â

. . . In the cramped Amman apartment he shares with his family, Abu Abed opens a folder with pictures of him and American officials — Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and others. He holds up the medals they awarded him, the letters commending him.

. . . Abu Abed’s defenders, including some U.S. military officers, suggest that the fighter earned enemies for upsetting Baghdad’s status quo as he brought former insurgents into an alliance with the Americans.

. . . In recent months, Abu Abed had been organizing like-minded fighters around Baghdad and northern Iraq for provincial elections in the fall. U.S. officers believe his transition to politics could have proved the last straw for the government.

“Certainly you can draw the conclusion because he was getting involved in the political process to engage Sons of Iraq leaders to form a political party, the Iraqi government actively targeted him,” said a U.S. military officer, who declined to give his name because of the subject’s sensitivity. “I don’t know that I can say it outright, but it certainly does seem that way.”

Amid the political skirmishing, the committee set up to integrate U.S.-backed Sunni fighters into the security forces and public works jobs has stalled.

. . . One Western official agreed that the government’s decision was deliberate.

“The coalition twisted Maliki’s arm on the committee,” the official said on condition of anonymity, referring to the prime minister’s decision to create the body last year. “And now he has decided, we don’t need it. As far as he is concerned, this is an American problem.”

And lest you think this is a purely sectarian thing, it’s not just the Shiite parties in Iraq that are refusing to adopt the Americans’ new pet locals:

The Sunni fighter blamed the [murder charges against him] in part on long-simmering feuds with the Iraqi Islamic Party, the exiled Sunni group that came back after the 2003 invasion to dominate the sect’s politics until groups such as Abu Abed’s emerged.

. . . Now that he is abroad, Abu Abed says, his enemies have moved quickly. An Iraqi army general, associated with the Islamic Party, ordered several raids against his properties in Baghdad, and Abu Abed’s younger brother was briefly detained by the general’s men before fleeing to Syria.

The dynamic at work here is explained vividly in an outstanding guest post at Abu Aardvark last week by “a well-placed and savvy political analyst . . . just back from Baghdad,” who observes:

The most prominent dividing line in Iraqi politics now is between the Powers that Be and the Powers that Aren’t. The PTB are the two Kurdish parties, ISCI, pieces of Da’wa, and the [Iraqi Islamic Party], who has one foot in and one foot out of the government, but is on an inexorable vector towards having both feet in. . . . The PTA are everyone else . . . [including] the Sadris, Fadhila, the Awakenings, the mishmash of secularists in Iraqiya. . . .

. . . The PTB are unified and organized as individual parties and don’t break ranks when it comes to the central government. As a coalition of groups, they have so much in common and so much to lose that they have a great deal of incentive to work together and shut everyone else out. . . .  Â

The PTA are in many respects the opposite of the PTB. . . . You can talk about undoing de-Ba’thification, you can talk about integrating the Sahwa, you can talk about provincial elections–but what the PTA want is in. . . . PTA want a piece of the massive, kick-back laden, contract-dispensing honey pot and extortion ring that is the [central government] and, increasingly, the provincial governments. And the PTB don’t want to let them in. Why would they?Â

This is the prism that I’ve used in looking at political events in Iraq, and it’s intellectually comforting to see it confirmed in such detail by someone who’s been there. Â Ultimately, it’s not ideological — it’s that there’s a lot of money at stake, and nobody wants to share. Â So any ally you pretend to work with now in order to cut others out of the pot is one you’re probably planning to stab in the back later.

Or, as I wrote just over a year ago, “The factions’ unwillingness to share Iraq’s oil loot is . . . why the post-invasion Iraqi political process has resembled a Quentin Tarantino-Michael Bay remake of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”  It’s also why the marriage between the Bushites and our supposed partners in the Iraqi government looks a lot more like George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than it does Ozzie and Harriet.

Broken Laws, Broken Lives.

Photo 1 (via Agence France Presse and Getty Images):

Photo 2 (via Reuters):

I’m sure some of you must have been eavesdropping on Barack and Hillary during their joint appearance today. Caption one, or caption both — the choice is yours. Â (And let me know if you think I have the order wrong.)

Just when you might have been thinking you could, oh, “relax” a bit and just worry about Afghanistan going to hell, there’s more bad news from Iraq today. As Alissa Rubin reports for the New York Times:

Two insurgent bomb blasts struck at pro-American Iraqi targets in Anbar province just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, and the police said at least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded.

Iraqi police officials said three American marines were among the dead in the Anbar attack, which came just as the American military command was preparing to hand control of the province, once considered the hotbed of the insurgency, over to Iraqi forces.

The bombings extended a pattern of multiple-casualty attacks in recent days that are clearly intended to kill local Iraqi leaders, in particular those who are believed to have collaborated with American forces against insurgents.

Both attacks on Thursday raised questions about assertions that Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni extremist groups had been largely vanquished.

As Rubin notes, these attacks are by the folks the Bushites and their dwindling fan club thought we might have actually defeated in Iraq, as opposed to those who we bought off or who temporarily stood down for their own reasons as part of the pretend accomplishments of the “surge.”

Those latter groups — the Sunni tribes involved in the “Bribing” “Awakening,” and the Shiites loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr — have stayed quiet in part because they are hoping to pick up some opportunities for graft political clout in Iraq’s long-delayed provincial elections… which, um, continue to be delayed.Â

How long will they continue to pursue the carrot of political legitimacy before they realize there’s a stick attached that never gets any shorter? And as their patience frays, and the U.S. ultimately has to begin bringing home the extra brigades that were sent to Iraq last year, what’s going to keep the violence from spiraling further?

And what will happen if all this unraveling occurs right in the middle of a U.S. presidential campaign?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Photo 1 (via the Associated Press):

Photo 2 (via Reuters):

What’s up with Kurdish Iraqi president Jalal Talabani and Dubya (at the White House this morning) in these pictures? Feel free to caption one or both.

Famed fossil establishment pundit David Broder wrote in the Washington Post last Sunday:

We are barely at the beginning of the long period in which most Americans will give their first serious scrutiny to the presidential candidates and decide whether Barack Obama or John McCain will get their vote.

. . . What may be crucial in the end is whether people become comfortable with the prospect of Obama as their president.

McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.

As John Amato noticed, the Post’s Chris Cillizza (in his “The Fix” blog) quickly stepped up to amplify the message, reminding everyone that Broder is “required reading for anyone who calls himself a political junkie. The Dean of the political press corps, Broder has been setting conventional wisdom in campaigns for longer than The Fix has been on earth.”

Nevertheless, the Post seems to be worried about stragglers who were out of town and didn’t check the paper over the weekend. Â And so (via Brad at Sadly, No! — I don’t go looking for this crap on my own, y’now), columnist Richard Cohen picks up the theme today, explicitly endorsing the same double standard outlined by Broder that Obama’s “reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.”

Two major op-ed pieces in three days laying out the company line that McCain can lie and double-talk as much as he wants, but only Obama’s “character” will be scrutinized. Â Did WaPo editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt give marching orders, or what?

Via Kevin Drum, I learned this evening of the latest(?) attempt to “map” the blogiverse… and, in an appalling lapse of judgment, Needlenose is included! (We appear to be an asteroid being sucked in by the gravitational pull of Eschaton, which is directly above us, but I don’t know if that’s intentional.)

So, whatever our faults and erratic orbit of late, we’re still on the map. Â I guess not everyone knows this is nowhere, after all.

Maybe it’s time to switch to a new logo? This model seems to encapsulate the Needlenose ethos…

This also raises the question of whether “Ugliest Dog in the World” is taken as a blog name.

Update: Â In the comments, pt bridgeport incisively notes that we appear to have a separated-at-birth situation on our hands…

After lying low until the FISA “compromise” passed the House today, he claims to oppose the immunity included in the bill for telecommunications companies who shared private data with the White House, but then says he’ll vote for the bill anyway when it comes up in the Senate.

I gather that he’s trying to unify the Democratic party after the occasionally bruising primaries by demonstrating that they nominated a Clinton after all… if not in name, at least in spirit.

This morning, former White House spokesliar Scott McClellan is due to testify to the House Judiciary Committee. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal offered a preview:

At a hearing Friday before the House Judiciary Committee, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan will get a chance to reprise some of the charges he made in his recently published book and in subsequent media interviews.

The hearings will also give Democrats an opportunity to dig back into the scandal over the outing of former Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame.

. . . Â Michigan Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, explained his reason for this week’s McClellan hearing this way: “In his book, Mr. McClellan suggests that senior White House officials may have obstructed justice and engaged in a cover-up regarding the Valerie Plame leak. This alleged activity could well extend beyond the scope of the offenses for which Scooter Libby has been convicted and deserves further attention.”

Although I wish Rep. Conyers luck in finding proof of criminal conduct, I’m not optimistic (and that’s even assuming the Shrub-in-Chief doesn’t pull some executive-privilege shenanigans to block McClellan’s testimony). Â As I’ve mused on occasion in the past, it seems to be ingrained in the liberal mindset to seek some kind of legal/procedural redress for the Bush-Cheney administration’s misdeeds, when they might be better off making the simpler political case regarding their lack of a moral compass. Â

The speed with the guilty pleas and forced resignation of the Nixon regime were followed by Ronald Reagan’s misrule, with only a one-term Democratic president in between — and the failure of the Iran/Contra lawbreaking to produce even that much — should make it clear that the ultimate remedy for the GOP’s gangster approach to government isn’t impeachment or prosecution; it’s convincing the American public not to elect Republicans in the first place. Â Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves fighting the same uphill battles to impeach or indict the fuckers every 8 or 12 years.

With that in mind, I think that rather than try to create the grounds for reviving special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation, the Dems on the House Judiciary Committee should use my favorite overlooked revelation from last year’s Libby trial to shed light on the Bushites’ moral bankruptcy.

McClellan’s primary involvement in the Plame leak was during the reaction to the Washington Post’s “1 by 2 by 6″ story on Sept. 28, 2003 (“a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran,  two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife”).  A follow-up story by the Post’s Mike Allen the next day was even more specific about the circumstances (“the two White House officials had cold-called at least six Washington journalists and identified Wilson’s wife”)

Strangely, no one (save for this humble blog, as longtime readers know) has attempted to nail down the exact leakers/leaking referred to by this story. Â But this section of Ari Fleischer’s trial testimony discussing events during the week of the Plame leaks seems to be a very obvious clue:

Q … Is it a fact, Mr. Fleischer, that you and Dan Bartlett, on July the 12th on the plane headed back from Africa, agreed to contact several print and television media journalists?
A Â That’s my recollection, yes.
Q  And did you decide that you would contact the New York Times and The Washington Post?
A Â That’s my recollection.
Q Â And Mr. Bartlett would contact the Sunday talk shows?
A Â I don’t recall who Mr. Bartlett contacted. [...]
Q Â … When you called [...] somebody at The Washington Post as well, that was Walter Pincus?
A Â Correct.

Pincus, of course, was leaked to about Plame in that conversation, although Fleischer claimed not to recall it. Â It seems very clear that if Pincus got what he describes as an unsolicited leak, the other reporters Fleischer/Bartlett called on July 12 did, too — and if someone on Air Force One (say, Colin Powell) overheard and went to the Post, there’s your 1x2x6 story.

So the questions to McClellan would be, after running down the evidence above:

Presumably, Scottie will say no to both questions. Â Having already hinted at a White House oddly uninterested in getting to the bottom of a leak of classified information, Democrats can then allude to McClellan’s/Bush’s statements at the time of not being able to track down anonymous “senior officials” and bring out the clincher:

“Let’s say the President had a senior staff meeting… he could have asked the Vice President if he knew anything, and the answer would have been yes. Â He could have asked the Vice President’s chief of staff [Libby]. Â He could have asked his top political adviser [Karl Rove]. Â He could have asked his communications director [Bartlett]. Â He could have asked his Secretary of State [Powell, to whom his deputy, Richard Armitage, had admitted talking to Robert Novak]….”

The point being that Bush was literally surrounded by people who leaked about Plame or knew about the leaking — but never showed the least bit of curiosity, because he was more interested in not getting caught than in finding the truth.  That’s the way Republican presidents operate, and that’s what I hope McClellan’s Democratic questioners in the House try to establish in today’s hearing.