Needlenose

One implication of Allawi’s selection is that the US won’t have to deal with a hypothetical request to pull its soldiers out of Iraq. Given Sistani’s tolerant approach to the American presence

New York Times link in P589In writing my long post about Iyad Allawi last night, arguing that the only relevant question about Allawi was what Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani thought of him, I left out something I’d intended to mention … namely, what Sistani did think about the Allawi selection, according to news reports. (Oops!) I realized this when skimming OxBlog and seeing resident Iraq cockeyed optimist David Adesnik say Allawi “apparently has Sistani’s support” — which caused me to jerk my head back and think, “What is he smoking?!”

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but as far as what Adesnik is reading, I’ll assume it was this passage in the New York Times on Saturday:

A senior American official . . . said that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s most powerful Shiite leader, had communicated his approval of Dr. Alawi to the United States government through intermediaries.

Unfortunately, even assuming the U.S. official is telling the truth, you have to watch those “intermediaries” sometimes. One of the great blunders of the improvised U.S occupation came last November, when Americans wrongly believed Sistani had endorsed a complicated pseudo-election scheme to create an interim government, thanks to the word of an “intermediary” who was either mistaken or simply lying.

Even worse, there’s this contradicting passage from the British Financial Times:

A senior White House official later confirmed US support for Mr Allawi, only two days after officials had named a former nuclear scientist as the most likely candidate.

Crucial to the legitimacy of the prime minister will be the approval of Ayatollah al-Sistani, the leading cleric of the Shia majority. Mr Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord did not enjoy good relations with the Shia clergy. The senior US official said the ayatollah had been informed. “He has not replied. He has not objected.”

That kind of agreement-by-silence isn’t promising. It’s the same way that Sistani allowed the signing of an interim constitution in early March, only to criticize it immediately and declare parts of it unacceptable a few weeks later.

The key here is the difference between Sistani actually approving of something, versus merely allowing it to happen. His “tacit approval” or silence generally translates into, “Okay, you go ahead and make that mistake, if you really want to.” Which doesn’t mean that he approves of what you did, just that he doesn’t think it’ll get in his way in the long run — and if he wants to pick a fight over it, he’ll do it on his schedule. Within the next week or two, we should have a clearer idea of Sistani’s schedule for handling the Allawi-led interim government.

From War Trophies, a bad idea:

[Army Regulation] AR 608-4 prohibits soldiers from possessing the following items as war trophies:
…
(5) Weapons defined as “firearms” by the National Firearms Act.
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(14) Any weapon, by whatever name called, which propels or expels a gas or gas-producing material, either by means of an explosive or compressed air.
…
The following categories of weapons, regardless of the degree of serviceability (serviceable or welded-up), fall within the purview of the National Firearms Act, and are not authorized to be retained as war trophy firearms:
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e. Any other weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive, a pistol or revolver having a barrel with a smooth bore designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell, weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more, less than 18 inches in length, from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire.

Via Salon:

President Bush keeps in his White House offices a trophy of one his high points in the Iraq war, the pistol that Saddam Hussein held when soldiers pulled him from his underground hideaway.

Military specialists mounted the sidearm, and soldiers who helped in the deposed Iraqi president’s capture presented it to the president, the White House said Sunday. The president keeps the gun in a small study adjoining the Oval Office.

John Kerry does not get nearly enough credit (yet) for his iconic question to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? However powerful these words were, they were not meant to heal the rift between opposing poles in a divided country. They were meant to slice through the fog of vituperation and bring home a singular harsh point of view, the presumption of guilt built into the question (much like asking someone ‘When did you stop beating your wife?‘).

It took many years, but Maya Lin’s elegant =http://www.nps.gov/viveVietnam Veteran’s Memorial[/url] eventually showed the power of silence. That by stripping away the icons and arguments of war, its imagery and words, a divided country could be brought together on the one indisputable fact that many people died. By placing their names on a blank wall, Lin created an empty vessel into which each side could pour their own stories. That is how the best mediators work, by stripping away the arguments petty and large and starting with the simplest point of agreement (that ‘58,245 men and women [...] were killed in Vietnam or remain missing in action‘).

The =http://www.wwiimemorial.comWW-II Monument[/url] being dedicated this Memorial Day follows a similar theme–its Field of Stars quietly honoring those who died during battle. However, WW-II was not as divisive as Vietnam and the quiet memorial is surrounded by an excess of triumphalist iconography (like The Eisenhower Quote or the Baldacchino Sculpture [url=http://www.wwiimemorial.com/default.asp?page=pictures.asp&subpage=photos]images[/url]). It’s obviously a design-by-committee effort and nobody much cares to question these things anymore.

Now that it’s our turn and we find ourselves yet again divided over war policy (with Kerry’s words echoing in our ears). There have been several preemptive efforts to strip away the polemic, to boil down the issue to its singular indisputable fact — that people have died in the course of this war.

Ted Koppel used the technique in the April 30th episode of Nightline, reading the names of the fallen with no music or fancy graphics. On Sunday, Andy Rooney dedicated an 11-minute segment of 60-minutes to a quiet pictorial (set to solemn-sounding music, natch). Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury =http://www.ucomics.com/doonesbury/2004/05/30attempted a similar feat[/url] on the comics pages.

Bringing home the fact that this is not a finished war, Koppel faced secondary controversy for his effort. Unfortunately, Rooney comes with a little too much excess baggage, and Trudeau is, well, Trudeau, so their efforts are unlikely to be seen as honest attempts at healing the rift.

As I sit here on this Memorial Day, thinking ahead to a few years down the line and what shape or form the inevitable Iraq War Memorial might take, I can’t help but think that it will have to capture the spirit of the Nightline, Rooney, and Doonesbury pieces, with its sharp edges sanded down and smoothed through time. A few years from now, it will be these stripped down images that stay in our minds when thinking back to the Iraq war instead of a recycling of the harsh sentiments voiced by a young John Kerry.

It just might take a very long time to get there…

Swopa’s been putting in a journeyman’s effort on matters of Iraqi sovereignty. However, if you want the Cliff Note’s version of it all, check out =http://www.ucomics.com/boondocks/2004/05/31 this issue [/url] of The Boondocks comic strip.

The downside, as Ackerman also explains, is that “any interim prime minister would surely face the accusation of being an occupation stooge. With Allawi, the charge is likely to have serious currency.”Curious about the new, highly temporary Prime Minister of Iraq? Spencer Ackerman in Iraq’d captures his selection concisely:

There could be no better introduction to the premiership of Iyad Allawi than the confusion and intrigue surrounding its announcement. Early yesterday, the Governing Council declared it was unanimously backing Allawi, one of its own, for the post of interim Iraqi prime minister. . . . According to the Washington Post, right after the Council resolved to back Allawi, L. Paul Bremer burst in the room to offer U.S. support. The missing piece was the United Nations, which was completely outmaneuvered by the U.S.-Governing Council announcement.

As Joshua Marshall has documented, devious Orwell Bush administration officials went so far as to paint the UN representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, as having dictated the decision to the Iraqis. The New York Times catches the culprits red-handed:

The announcement of Dr. Alawi’s selection appeared to surprise several at the United Nations. “When we first heard the news today, we thought that the Iraqi Governing Council had hijacked the process,” said a senior United Nations official . . .

A senior State Department official in Washington, as well as a senior American official in Baghdad, said Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy asked by the United States to choose an interim government for Iraq, had indeed selected Dr. Alawi. The State Department official suggested that the Iraqi council had merely ratified the selection after the fact in order to make it seem that the council was the kingmaker.

What did the U.S. hope to accomplish through such scheming? As Spencer Ackerman explains, “With Allawi at the helm, the U.S.’s calculation that a new Iraqi government won’t ask coalition soldiers to leave the country just got a lot more solid.” See, this is all about our government’s attempt to hand over “full sovereignty” (or at least something that looks like it) as promised on June 30th, but still keep control of when and how we extricate ourselves from the quicksand. The New York Times reports that this same issue is behind a deadlock over who will assume the mostly ceremonial (but highly visible) role of Iraq’s president:

On one side of the deadlock are the United Nations envoy, Lakdar Brahimi, and the chief American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, who are backing the former foreign minister, Adnan Pachachi. Leaders of the Iraqi Governing Council support a rival, Sheik Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar. Both men are Sunnis.

. . . American officials say they are backing Mr. Pachachi in large part because they believe he would adhere to the interim constitution that was hammered out earlier this year and is meant to guide the new government until elections are held.

Billmon sees the end result of all this U.S pressure as being “the emergence of a Sunni-dominated government that represents a melding of the pre-Saddam Baath Party and the military dictatorship that preceded it, albeit with a new pro-USA flair” — but I think he, like the Bushites, is overlooking the simple fact that neither they, the UN, nor the hucksters on the Governing Council have the final say on the interim government.

As I wrote a few days ago, that privilege belongs to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior religious figure for Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslim population. The U.S. tried to finesse their way around Sistani before six months ago, only to have their backsides handed to them unceremoniously — and that’s likely to happen again here.

The only choice the U.S. really has at this point is to appoint an interim government that Sistani trusts to do everything he wants … or try to sidestep him and have him reject the whole scam outright. As Liz Sly reports in the Chicago Tribune, his underlings are already preparing the Iraqi public for this step:

In the mosques of Baghdad on Friday, even moderate Shiite clerics preached against accepting the legitimacy of any new Iraqi government.

“The Americans claim that there is going to be full sovereignty in Iraq but practically speaking, it will be incomplete sovereignty,” said Sheik Sayed Mohammed al-Haideri, who is affiliated with the top Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. “The Iraqi people must reject this diluted form of sovereignty.”

A broad “educational” campaign like this is exactly where Sistani left off two months ago, before being interrupted by the attempted rebellion led by rival cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. So, what you need to know about Iyad Allawi is that you don’t need to know anything about him — he’s irrelevant. He’s just the name on the deck chair the U.S. is rearranging on its Iraqi version of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg named Ayatollah Sistani.

In an article about the ongoing collapse of law and order in Iraq, the Washington Post leads with this anecdote:

The report of his death found Abdulsemi Janabi in a meeting. His cell phone chirped, and through her sobs his wife told him that a radio station had just reported that his head had been found in one part of Baghdad, his body in another.

Janabi, a dean at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, assured his wife that he remained in one piece, safe and sound. He was on campus, sitting opposite a group of angry Shiite students demanding a prayer room and an office. In that moment, Janabi decided to take their demands more seriously.

Was the broadcast really an ominous negotiating tactic, or just a case of mistaken identity? If you figure out the answer, you might want to pass it along to Moqtada al-Sadr — as the New York Times reports today, as a negotiated ceasefire in Najaf edges toward total collapse, he’s found himself on the business end of a similar “mistake”:

Today, people in the streets of Najaf were handed mysterious fliers with Mr. Sadr’s picture that said: “Moktada was followed by the Iraqi police for this ties to the slaying of Khoei, and due to violent actions he was killed during an attempt to arrest him.” Another flier was distributed that had a photo of an Iraqi police officer and the following words: “The Ministry of Justice tried to arrest Mr. Sadr, but he and his followers resisted fiercely, which drove the Iraqi police to defend themselves.”

The fliers appeared to be leaflets made by the Ministry of Justice or its allies to be handed out in case Iraqi police officers killed Mr. Sadr in an arrest attempt. Somehow, they were distributed prematurely. There were no reports of Mr. Sadr’s death today.

Just to connect the dots a bit, one of the country’s most prominent religious-political factions, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), has been previously active in student-led movements at Iraq’s universities and is also a bitter rival of al-Sadr’s militia in the jousting for control of Najaf and neighboring cities in the the south. So it’s a good bet that they’re applying this tactic in both areas.

An article in the Washington Post a week ago stirred up an issue that Joshua Marshall and others raised months earlier — how right-wing ideological purity, rather than technical or Middle East expertise, was the main job requirement for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad (ironically housed in Saddam Hussein’s “Republican Palace”).

Here’s some further supporting evidence that seems to have gone unnoticed on the left half of the blogosphere, perhaps because it was provided by conservative blogger/occasional paid pundit Dan Drezner. I personally find Drezner’s analyses vastly overrated, but in this case he’s just passing along the firsthand confession of a U.S. staffer back from Baghdad, discussing how professional recruiters (from a company named Korn/Ferry) learned the hard way that politics would rank ahead of competence:

The first week they arrived, Office of the White House Liaison (OWHL), headed by a man named Jim O’Beirne, found out about CPA’s staffing plans. A turf war ensued. At one point, OWHL personnel told the two Korn/Ferry employees that they had to clear their desks and be escorted out of the building. Of course, Reuben intervened and nothing that dramatic happened. What did happen is that recruitment was reassigned from CPA to OWHL by OSD. The Korn/Ferry people were only to help interview and process candidates already screened by OWHL.

I sat in the same room of cubes for several weeks watching this unfold, talking daily with the Korn/Ferry people, and observing the first interviews run by OWHL. OWHL hired retired military personnel, most of whom had run for public office as Republicans and been defeated in the 2002 electoral cycle, to staff its CPA recruiting arm. I observed one such individual, a retired Navy CMDR who lost a Virginia legislature race in 2002, question one applicant as to their stance on Roe v. Wade. I watched resumes of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to “the President’s vision for Iraq” (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was “uncertain.” I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy, FERC, and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC contributors.

Oh, well, it’s not like we were trying to do anything hard, like build a democracy from scratch after 30 years of dictatorship or anything. And things are going so great over in Iraq, I guess there’s really no reason to complain.

Some amusing breaking-news gossip from the World War II memorial ceremony today, as reported on Daily Kos:

It was on CNN.  Bush 41, 43, and Clinton were talking at the end of the ceremony.  Clinton wagged his finger in Bush 43′s face.  Dunno what they were talking about but it seemed at least superficially cordial. Then Poppy suddenly shoved Clinton in the chest with both hands, enough to throw Clinton off balance.

Stuff like this happens whenever your hosts here at Needlenose get together, but it’s rare to see professional politicians get caught at it on live TV.

Hopefully, we’ll be hearing a lot more about this. Given the popularity of Daily Kos, the comments thread linked above should be the best place to find additional juicy tidbits as they get reported.

We’ve received a boost in traffic from yesterday’s needling of the New York Times and reporter Adam Nagourney.

The fact is, though, that No More Mister Nice Blog has been tracking Nagourney’s one-sided gloom for a while. And when he hasn’t been doing that, he’s been writing things like this blistering and precise dissection of self-styled muckraker Christopher Hitchens’ hypocritical defense of Ahmed Chalabi. So here’s a “tip of the needle” in NMMNB’s general direction.

From ellipses:
In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi’s specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam’s human-rights abuses.

“It was a complete fake,” Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious.

To Baer’s dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer has a profile of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who snookered the Bushites into invading Iraq. It delves deeply in the machinations of Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) and his personal U.S. PR representative, Francis Brooke, in manipulating American opinions. Here’s an interesting excerpt:

In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit “a forgery shop” that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. “It was something like a spy novel,” Baer said. “It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.” Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, “he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.” . . . Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi’s help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. . . Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. “That would be illegal,” he said.

I can’t say this comes as a shock to me, since I was writing a year ago about the INC’s links to bogus evidence in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion. But it’s nice to see the pattern confirmed.

Now, if someone could just connect the dots between Chalabi (and/or Iran) and the forged documents about uranium from Niger…