Press Roundup for Sunday

Guerrillas in al-Anbar province killed a US serviceman on Saturday. Anthony Shadid reports that Abdullah al-Janabi, fundamentalist Sunni leader of the Muslim mini-theocracy in pre-assault Fallujah, claims that the US military action has attracted hundreds of new fighters to the anti-American struggle in the Sunni Arab heartland. Shadid reports fighting in Mosul, where guerrillas used a car bomb to wound 8 US soldiers. The US targeted a guerrilla position with a 500-pound bomb,in return. In the northern city of Kirkuk, guerrillas used a car bomb to injure two US servicemen and a translator, and in nearby Hawija, two other US troops were wounded by a roadside bomb. A car bomber wounded two US troops in Baiji. In the city of Hit, west of Baghdad, guerrillas ambushed Iraqi National Guards, killing 7. The Marines announced that there had been clashes between guerrillas and Marines on Friday in Ramadi. On Saturday, as well, there were high-profile assassinations of Shiite clerics and a high Iraqi official.

Al-Hayat says that one of the leaders of the Asociation for Muslim Scholars, Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been present at Fallujah until shortly before the recent military campaign in the city, when he escaped.

Other incidents, including the assassination of three high-ranking Iraqi police officials, and the killing of four Kirkuk city employees, are reported by Reuters.

The Iraqi killer of Reserve Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman has been brought to justice in an Iraqi court. Although he has since changed his story, he at one point admitted to killing Jones-Huffman with a bullet through the back of the neck while the latter was stuck in traffic in downtown Hilla. The assassin said that he felt that Jones-Huffman "looked Jewish." The fruits of hatred sowed in the Middle East by aggressive and expansionist Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza against the Palestinians and in south Lebanon against Shiites continue to be harvested by Americans.

70 Parties Register to Contest the Elections

Al-Hayat reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party has registered a full party list of 275 candidates. The party, led by Muhsin Abdul Hamid, has long pushed for vigorous Sunni participation in the elections. Abdul Hamid is convinced that Sunni Arabs are a majority in Iraq (they are 20% at most), which may help explain his optimism. IIP toyed with a boycott of the elections during the recent Fallujah campaign, but has decided to contest them. My sources tell me that Abdul Hamid is convinced that the Shiite parties have a secret deal to recognize Israel, and that only the Sunni Arabs can stop Iraq's economy and society from being penetrated by Tel Aviv.

The Iraqi Turkmen Front has presented a list of 63 candidates, and even one small group of Kurdish Shiites (called Failis) has presented a complete list. Other Failis are cooperating with Grand Ayatollah Sistani's unified Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance. The small Sunni Arab National Democratic Party of Nasir Chadirchi will field 12 candidates. (For a small party to go it alone in this election is probably a fatally flawed strategy, and I doubt if the NDP will get seated).

The Iraqi Communist Party, founded in 1930, has announced an independent electoral list of 257 candidates. The size of the party in its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s is disputed, with estimates ranging from 60,000 to half a million. In the 1930s and 1940s it attracted a lot of Jews, Shiites and Christians seeking a non-ethnic basis for national political identity. The CPI was, in any case, a highly significant party. The colonel's regime of Abdul Karim Qasim allied with the Communists because the officers lacked much other grassroots political support. This alliance alarmed Washington, which is widely rumored to have therefore thrown its support to the Baath Party, a nationalist/socialist party that despised the Communists. It is said that in the first Baath coup of 1963, the US passed over to the regime the names of several hundred Communist moles, whom the Baath had tortured and killed (Saddam Hussein was working as an interrogator in this period). The 1968 Baath coup stuck, and although the Baath kept around some tame house Communists, the new one-party state led to a virtual atrophy of the CPI.

There is some possibility that Iraqi secularists from various backgrounds and communities will vote Communist to protest the inexorable movement of Iraq toward being an Islamic republic. The likelihood is, however, that the Communists will not get many seats in parliament and will not be an important voting bloc.

So far, 70 party lists have registered, 6 of them coalitions and the other 64 consisting of single parties.

Muhammad al-Bazzi of Newsday explains the mechanics of the Iraqi elections. Basically, voters will get to vote just once, for a party list. The list is in ranked order, beginning with the top candidate and descending. Let's say the party list has 200 members, and it gets 10 percent of the national vote. That outcome will allow it to seat its top 27 members in the 275-member parliament. The other 173 members of the list (number 28 on down) will be out of luck.

AIPAC Spying Case Heats up

Richard Sales, veteran UPI terrorism correspondent, reveals the explosive information that

' In 2001, the FBI discovered new, "massive" Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, said one former senior U.S. government official. '

It was the uncovering of these spy rings that led the FBI to put Naor Gilon, the chief of political affairs at the Israeli embassy in Washington, under videotape surveillance. They were "floored" when Larry Franklin walked in and sat down and began offering Gilon a confidential document. Franklin was one of two Iran desk officers for the Near East and South Asia bureau at the Pentagon.

Franklin reported to Bill Luti, who in turn reported to Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Department of Defense. Feith is a long-time activist in the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, which mobilized throughout the 1990s to destroy the Oslo peace process and ensure continued Israeli land grabs in the West Bank. Karen Kwiatkowski reported that a phalanx of Israeli generals marched into Feith's office before the Iraq war, without signing in as regulations required. Feith organized the "Office of Special Plans," also staffed largely with JINSA and other rightwing Zionist activists, which cherry-picked intelligence so as to make a (false) case for the Iraq war.

Sale reports more on what exactly suspected Pentagon spy Lawrence Franklin was passing to the Israeli embassy concerning US plans for Iran:

' Larry Franklin, a Pentagon analyst in the Near East and South Asia office who worked for the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans confessed last August to federal agents he had held meetings with a contact from the Israeli government during which he passed a highly classified document on U.S. policy toward Iran, these sources said. The document advocated support for Iranian dissidents, covert actions to destabilize the Iranian government, arming opponents of the Islamic regime, propaganda broadcasts into Iran, and other programs, these sources said. The FBI was also interested in finding out if Franklin was involved or could name any Pentagon colleagues who were involved in passing to Israel certain data about National Security Agency intercepts, these sources said. '

The FBI is looking hard at a number of high-ranking officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a high-powered coordinator of donations to congressional races by pro-Israel lobbies. AIPAC is so successful that virtually no speeches critical of Israeli policy are ever given Congress, even though such speeches are given in most democratic parliaments in the world, and representatives and congressmen are afraid to sign letters in support of the Palestinians or even of a genuine peace process.

In fact, AIPAC can arrange for representatives and senators to sign the most outrageous and one-sided letters to the president demanding support for virtually all Israeli military and foreign policy goals. That is how a boycott of Syria, a country that had been extremely valuable to the US in the war on terror, was passed. The congress was induced to give up Syrian help and expertise in fighting radical Muslim terrorists for the sake of a minor gesture to make Israel's ruling Likud Party happy. This level of the control of congress by what is essentially the agent of a foreign government has deeply distorted US foreign policy and made the US a dishonest broker. US knee-jerk support of Israel's crackdown on Palestinians was cited by Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the top al-Qaeda planner of 9/11, as his prime motivation for hitting the United States.

Sale summarizes recent actions in the case, which involve the FBI looking very hard at some top AIPAC officials:

' On Dec. 1, FBI agents visited the AIPAC offices in Washington and seized the hard drives and files of Steven Rosen, director of research, and Keith Weissman, deputy director of foreign policy issues. The FBI also served subpoenas on AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, Managing Director Richard Fishman, Communications Director Renee Rothstein, and Research Director Raphael Danziger. All are suspected of having acted as "cut outs" or intermediaries who passed highly sensitive U.S. data from high-level Pentagon and administration officials to Israel, said one former federal law enforcement official. One current FBI consultant said Rosen's name had first been given to the FBI in 1986, along with 70 possible incidents of Israeli espionage against the United States. No action was taken against him, this source said. Rosen's attorney did not return phone calls. '

Reporter Laura Rozen interprets a recent article in The Forward to indicate that indictments are likely in the case.

AIPAC denies any wrongdoing, and Lawrence Franklin has mysteriously been provided with a high-powered attorney with long experience defending spies, as a result of which he has ceased cooperating with the FBI.

Many past alleged cases of spying for the Israelis on the part of AIPAC and similar organizations have been dropped because of political pressure from their American patrons (/clients?)

Press Roundup

Reuters reports on a growing Iraq fuel crisis that could lead to civil turmoil and harm the prospects for elections. How ironic, if lack of fuel should roil Iraq of all places.

According to the Guardian, a former CIA agent is suing the agency because he said he was pressured to conform to the official estimates on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This analyst entertained severe doubts about the common wisdom, and was punished for expressing them, he said.

Only 47% of Americans now think that a stable, democratic Iraq is a likely outcome. This percentage is down from 55% in April. That is, American confidence in the Bush misadventure in Iraq has fallen below the half-way point. How fifty percent of the American people can possibly still think Bush is doing a good job in Iraq is a great mystery. The AP-Ipsos poll found:

' Those most likely to have lost faith in the chances of a stable, democratic Iraq are those with college degrees, Southerners, homeowners, city-dwellers, Catholics, independents and Democrats. '

Hmm. Who could be left?

Muqtada: Elections will Divide Iraqis
Sistani Rep: Beware of Voter Fraud

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i, representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Karbala, said in his Friday sermon, "We affirm the necessity of holding elections on time, since they are a guarantee of unconstrained sovereignty, and so as to elect a leadership that represents the will of the people, and so as to end the Occupation. At the same time, we insist on the need to hold the elections in a fair and just manner, otherwise they will be fruitless. Indeed, they may backfire on the Iraqi people if there is any cheating or fraud." He added, "We warn against such a consequence, since it will drag the country into a cycle of public disorder and disturbance worse than the present situation, and the people will even lose their confidence in the present leadership." He emphasized that "all must participate, to make the elections a success."

I take away from all this that Sistani is worried that Iyad Allawi and his American sponsors will attempt to hijack the election through some sort of voter fraud.

Az-Zaman further notes that the grand ayatollahs in Najaf issued a demand that King Abdullah II of Jordan apologize for his comments to the Washington Post, which painted the Iraqi Shiites as mere cat's paws of the Iranian state. They complained that the king's remarks constituted "naked interference in Iraqi internal affairs" and could have the effect of provoking communal tensions. They pointed out that the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and intimated that foreign influence in Iraq is coming instead from its Sunni Arab neighbors. (This last is a reference to the widespread Shiite belief that Saudi Wahhabis are supporting Sunni fundamentalists in Iraq.)

The article also reported comments of Muqtada al-Sadr: "Over here you have America shelling cities for the sake of security and the elections, and over there you have the parties that are alleging that elections will help establish security and stability, forgetting the existence of the Occupation."

He said the Sadrists were not participating in the elections because their officials kept being arrested, they were not given permission to open an office in Najaf or to hold Friday prayers in the Kufa Mosque, or to recover the mosques that they used to manage, as well as because of the lack of security in several Iraqi cities.

Az-Zaman: Muqtada al-Sadr warned that the elections scheduled for January 30 will lead to the ethnic partition of Iraq. He wrote in a sermon delivered for him by Shaikh Abd al-Zuhrah al-Suway'idi at the Muhsin Mosque in Sadr City, "They allege that the elections advance security, and security advances the elections. This is false and wrong." Announcing his boycott of the elections, he said, "Beware, beware lest ethnic divisions have a place in the elections. I want only a noble Iraqi election, neither Shiite nor Sunni. However, Iraq can protect for me my religion, my honor, my unity."

Muqtada also offered to protect Iraq's churches, some of which have been attacked in Baghdad and Mosul. "I am entirely prepared to provide protection to the churches if our Christian brethren want it." He assured them he would not interfere in their affairs: "Rather, the guards would be solely in their service."

The Financial Times gives some more of Muqtada's sermon:

' "The elections aim to separate the Iraqi from his religion. When people vote for politicians, secularists, those who co-operate with the occupation - they will not think of God," said Mr Sadr in a letter read out by one of his deputies in north Baghdad's al-Muhsin mosque. "Do not make politics your way, and do not let the marjaiya [Shia clerical establishment] support the elections," the leader's message said. However, in a sign of tensions in his movement some of his followers said that they would cast their votes anyway. '

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Gunmen attempted to kill Yahya Hashim al-Husaini, an official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in the northern district of al-Hilla at around 10 am on Friday. They only succeeded in wounding him with gunfire and putting him in the hospital.

On Thursday, unknown assailants had killed Sattar Jabbar, a candidate on the 228-member United Iraqi Alliance list (largely Shiite). Jabbar was a leader of the Iraqi Hizbullah (not related to the Lebanese party of the same name), which organizes the Marsh Arabs that were displaced by Saddam. Their leader is Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, the "Prince of the Marshes," who is also a candidate.

On Friday, wire services reported that gunmen shot down three more members of the Hizbullah Party. This violence came on top of attacks in Baqubah and Tikrit on Iraqi National Guards, which left 9 of them dead in addition to 4 civilians. US troops suffered two dead and other casualties as a result of a helicopter crash in Mosul.

One fears that the attacks on SCIRI and Iraqi Hizbullah officials may result from internal Shiite disputes rather than necessarily having been perpetrated by Baathist Sunni guerrillas.

Al-Dhari Explains Sunni Arab Boycott

Hareth al-Dhari spoke out Thursday about the reasons for which his Association of Muslim Scholars urges a boycott of the Iraqi elections planned for January 30. According to opinion polls, al-Dhari is among the most popular Sunni Arab politicians in the country, and his AMS has emerged as certainly the most important political grouping. Excerpts:

' “The independent election commission in Iraq considered Iraq a single constituency, despite its huge space (438,000km). Also, the UN has pledged to send 25 observers, only seven of whom have arrived, to monitor the ballots.” Al-Dari drew comparison with the UN-supervised 2001 elections in Eastern Timor , where the UN divided the tiny country into 12 constituencies and sent around 300-400 observers to monitor the ballots. “This, in a nutshell, means the United Nations could not be monitoring the elections in Iraq." '

This is a fair point. There are amazingly few UN election workers in Iraq.

' Al-Dari added that it was impossible for fair or free elections to be held under the US occupation as it would create unhealthy reality that leads to marginalizing any Iraqi force opposed to the occupation . . . “Taking part in elections like these means nothing but to grant legitimacy to a completely illegal situation.” '

This way of thinking is completely self-defeating and also historically inaccurate. Nehru would not have been prime minister of an independent India if the Congress Party had not fought elections under British colonial domination. Sistani has the right idea here.

Al-Dhari has too high opinion of what has been accomplished by the Sunni Arab guerrilla war, and seems to have a completely unrealistic notion of what the situation will be like if Sunni Arabs have little representation in parliament. They could then only be spoilers, but could not get much positive that they want.

' “The range of those opposed to the elections is getting wider and wider, further feeding indications that the polls could be put off,” Muthanna Harith Al-Dari said. He said more than 69 Iraqi groups of various Iraqi sects and a list of 106 dignitaries living abroad have already signed a petition calling for boycotting the polls. “A quarter of the Iraqi dignitaries who signed the petition are Shiites,” Al-Dari said, a few hours before representatives of the Shiite community announced a broad-based coalition of 22 political parties to run in national elections. '

The point is that all these groups are tiny, whereas the really big important parties are revving up to win the elections.

In short, Al-Dhari is wrong that the guerrilla fighters have achieved much positive; he is wrong that cooperating with elections cannot result in independence; he is wrong that the boycott movement is significant outside the Sunni Arabs. The only thing he is right about is that the technical preparations for the elections are problematic.

I was at a public event on Thursday night and someone asked me why the Sunni Arabs didn't just take the best deal they could get. I replied that they think they are the real majority of the country, or that is the public pose (requiring them to invent a million Iranian Shiite infiltrators to explain all those extra Shiites). They think they can push the Americans around and maybe even push them out of the country. They think once the US is gone, they will have a better, not worse chance, at regaining something like their former political ascendence.

In other words, they seem to be living in a dangerous fantasy land.

Shiite List Announced for January Elections

Sameer Yacoub of AP gives an overview of the unified Shiite list announced Thursday, The United Iraqi Alliance. It groups a large number of Shiite and other parties, including the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Abdul Aziz al-Hakim); the Badr Organization (former Badr Corps); The Dawa Party (Ibrahim Jaafari); the Islamic Dawa (Abdu'llah al-Unzi); the Iraqi National Congress (Ahmad Chalabi); and a large number of independents, about half the list (who are leaders in their localities) in the national elections. There are some Sunni candidates, as well as a handful of Kurdish ones, but it appears that Shiites are the vast majority of the list.

The big surprise was that the Sadr movement did not join in. Muqtada al-Sadr had neglected to register his movement as a political party. His aides are also being arrested and harassed by the Allawi government's national guards, and his withdrawal from the list is related to this targetting of his men.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Muqtada has nevertheles promised to support the list.

Another surprise is that the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council, was included as a party alongside the others.

Will blog more later Friday.

Mark LeVine Replies to Robert Spencer

Mark LeVine, Middle East historian at UC Irvine, writes

AN OPEN REPLY TO ROBERT SPENCER.

Dear Mr. Spencer

First of all, thanks so much for titling a piece you did about me "Noam Chomsky as Rock Star":
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID= 16220)

This is the best blurb I've gotten yet for my forthcoming book!

For the record, while at one time I would have liked to have been a rock star, that sad truth is that marriage and children have made constant touring out of the question for the foreseeable future. And while I admire Noam Chomsky, I have never to my knowledge wanted to be Noam Chomsky. Linguistics is just way beyond me; just knowing a few languages is hard enough. Also, I have heard he drinks a lot of coffee. My stomach tolerate take more than a cup a day.

More seriously, however, it seems that you did not read most of what I have written before writing your critique of my work. I say this because I have discussed in detail most every thing you have accused me of not discussing--the origins of Hamas, the immorality and futility of suicide bombings, hatred for Israel and the like. It would be nice to be accused of something that I didn't do, instead of being accused of not doing something I have in fact done. Then at least I could learn from the criticism, which is always a good thing. Perhaps you just googled a few recent articles of mine and made your judgements from those? It wouldn't be the first time a conservative has done that. Once the right-wing talk show host Dennis Prager called me a liar on national radio when I told him on his show that I'd witnessed Palestinian marches against suicide bombings. He did so after doing a google search during a commercial break. Unfortunately, the evidence was not googlable because the articles were too old, but was findable on Lexus-Nexus, as I explained to him after the show. He promised to have me on his show again to apologize but has yet to make good on this offer (I have written about the dangers of Google history in war time, if you're interested:
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/
03/28/news-levine.php).

You could also have checked my CV, which is online, and found articles in Le Monde, the Christian Science Monitor and Tikkun magazine dealing with these issues. May I suggest that it might be time for you to hire a new research assistant?

Your main issue with me, beside my taste in music and linguists, seems to be that I naively argue for a "hudna" or truce between Americans and Muslims, especially radical Muslims. This is certainly debatable advice on my part. In fact, I offered it precisely so it would be debated. However you, your criticism sadly does not contribute to a much-needed debate; instead it falls into the orientalist trap of trying to use Islamic legal compendiums dating back well over 600 years (Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, the author of the source you cite for your analysis of "hudna," 'Umdat as-Salik, died in 1386) to define for all times what Muslims think about a particular issue. This is probably not the best way to understand what Muslims think about various issues today; just as basing the opinions of Jews solely on the writings of Maimonedes or even Americans based solely on the views of the authors of the Declaration of Independence (or better, the Magna Carta) would likely produce a distorted understanding of contemporary views. But such thinking is among the primary ideological moves in Orientalism and the larger discourse of imperialism (if saying this makes me a "Saidist"--a term I've never encountered before. Shouldn't it be "Saidian"?--then so be it), as evidenced so well in James Mill's 1817 primer for British imperial rule of India, the History of India, which argued with great fanfare, and just as great error, that the thousands year old "Laws of Manu" were a primary basis for understanding, and so governing, Hindu society.

This doesn't mean that some, or many Muslims, might want to use a truce to regroup or grow stronger in order to better attack "us" later. Nor does it mean that some extremist Muslims use medieval texts to justify terrorism or violating agreements (what the US Government uses to justify these things is an equally interesting matter, but it seems not to interest you). But if I were you I'd be a lot more worried about a billion plus Chinese with the fastest growing economy in the world, a huge percentage of America's debt, burgeoning high-tech sector and a lot of nuclear weapons, than a billion plus Muslims, if you're looking for the main strategic threat to whoever it is you think the "West" is in the near future.

Moreover, you seem to think that all you need to do to understand Muslims is read religious texts and look at extremists. The 99.9% of Muslims who don't engage in violence against the West, the vast majority of whom don't base their life of the 'Umdat as-Salik (however important it might be for religious scholars), whose lives are incredibly diverse, complex and conflicted, and whose dreams for their futures and those of their children and their societies are in fact quite close to ours, just don't seem to count much to you. That's too bad--and if you don't believe me, believe the report by the Defense Science Board released last week
(http://www.truthout.org/
docs_04/120104V.shtml)
that warns President Bush that Muslims don't hate our freedom and ideology but rather our support for all those supposedly "moderate" regimes which are in fact incredibly repressive and corrupt governments whose continued existence is owed to US backing.

But let's get back to your arguments about the untrustworthiness of Muslims when it comes to honoring any hudna "they" might "sign" with "us." Let's leave aside the fact that Muslims might have some pretty good reasons not to trust us--in fact, a lot more reasons than we have not to trust them. Let's just take the example of Hamas, since you seem so knowledgeable, or at least interested, in this group. I have interviewed Hamas people who've discussed the truce issue and I have called them on it too. In fact, last time I met with a senior leader in Gaza I asked him whether the death of Oslo meant Hamas would join the calls for a one or binational solution being increasingly advocated by Palestinian and Israeli academics, or even push harder for an explicit Islamic state solution, as mentioned in various core documents of the movement. He looked at me like I was crazy, and actually said, "Are you crazy? We want a divorce, not to live closer to Jews." You can interpret it however you want. His interpretation, offered in his next sentence with a lot of exasperation, was "Just give us a state and leave us alone already."

However you want to interpret it, though, the reality is that Muslims have as little ability to "destroy the west" as Hamas has to destroy Israel. In fact, the Asian avian flu that Sec. of Health and Human Services Thompson is suddenly worried about after resigning could easily kill exponentially more people in the next year than Muslims could kill westerners in a hundred years of jihad. Sorry, i know that the threat of jihad to what you call "the West" is your big thing... If you're worried about loss of life, though, better to change your group's name from "Jihad Watch" to "Asia Avian Flu Watch". You'd save a lot more lives that way.

On a few other notes, who exactly do you mean by "aging rock glitteratti" that I supposedly hang "hobnob" with? And what exactly is "hobnobbing"? And since when has Noam Chomsky's star "faded." Please correct me if I'm wrong, but last I saw he had lot more bestsellers in the last three years than you and all your friends put together have had in your entire careers. As for Edward Said, didn't your mother tell you not to speak ill of the dead? And while I would love to take credit for making Chomsky and Said "cool again," can you show me when they went out of style? You also accuse me of making "no mention of the fact that Chomskyites and Saidists have placed Middle East Studies departments in American universities into an ideological straitjacket that would have made Stalin blush." That's because they have done more to open the field from the "ideological straitjacket" of the first three decades of its life as a Cold War invention than almost anyone else. Your argument that they've put it in a straitjacket is one made by someone who never has actually read them in any detail and in fact knows absolutely nothing about the field of Middle Eastern studies, most of whose practitioners predicted exactly the terrorism that happened with 9/11 when our Government and spy agencies were busy elsewhere, and who rightly predicted exactly what would happen when the US invaded Iraq (so far that makes it Middle East Studies 2, Bush/Neocons 0 by my count).

In the same way you clearly haven't read my work in any detail. In fact, this may come as news to you, but Opeds do not the sum total of a scholar's intellectual production make. We also write articles in journals and even edit and write books, of which mine deal with the very issues you accuse me of not dealing with. How can I accuse you of this? Well, you write "LeVine owes his status [as wunderkind] to his willingness to place the responsibility for the strife between the West and the Islamic world squarely on the shoulders of the West." And where exactly did I write that I "place responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the West"? Can you please show me where I've written that? I'm not saying I haven't, but I sure don't remember doing so (perhaps all those years on the road have taken their toll). If I did write that somewhere, then that was not very smart of me and I appreciate your calling it to my attention.

But one think I do know is that almost everything I write I make sure to discuss exactly how and why blame has to be shared, and Muslims like Americans (or Israelis and Palestinians) need to take responsibility for their actions. In my chapter in the book Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation
(http://percevalpress.com/
twilight.html)
that I co-edited, I specifically argue this. But now that I think about it, I say that in the very "Truce with the Muslim World" article that clearly got you upset enough to spend 10 minutes or so writing your article about me!

Perhaps you should have read it to the end. Here's the link: http://www.tomdispatch.com/
index.mhtml?pid=1663.
What I did write was, among other things, "Clearly, a different kind of truce is needed; one that signals the first step in a genuine reappraisal of US (and to a lesser extent European) core positions and interests as well as those of Muslims, so that genuine peace and reconciliation become conceivable." More to the point, I wrote, "Beyond the criminal minority, the 9-11 report was right to demand that Muslims worldwide confront the violent and intolerant version of their religion that is poisoning their societies and threatening the world at large. Religious leaders and ordinary citizens alike must engage in soul-searching about the toxic tendencies within their own cultures similar to the one they demand of Americans and the West more broadly... Muslim political leaders should begin a process of rapid development of participatory civil societies and hold internationally monitored elections within specified (short) time periods or their regimes will face censure and sanctions by the international community. This is the surest way to build a foundation for defeating terrorism. "

I dunno, but I think that this is pretty much what you accused me of not writing, isn't it? And you didn't have to look any farther than the very article you read. Is it inappropriate for me to suggest that you get some tutoring in effective reading strategies before your next expose?

And while we're at it, you quoted but never answered or rebutted the following argument of mine: "Not just Palestinian activists, but foreign peace activists and even Israelis are routinely beaten, arrested, deported, or even killed by the IDF, with little fear that the Government of Israel would pay a political price for crushing non-violent resistance with violent means…. Not surprisingly considering this dynamic, a poll I helped direct earlier this year revealed that Hamas has now surpassed the PLO as the most popular Palestinian political movement.” I think it's a good argument, so thanks for publicizing it. But can you rebut it? I don't think so...

It's getting late and my wife is kicking me to stop typing and go to sleep already--I wonder if rock stars and Noam Chomsky have to worry about this when they want to work late. Let me close, Mr. Spencer, by saying that I would be happy to debate you publicly if you'll take the time actually to read what I write rather than going off about what you wish I'd have written. You have a standing invitation to come to UC Irvine anytime. I'll get a nice big room and some bottled water. You make arrangements with C-SPAN, as I assume you have better connections there than do I. Not being a rock star, and considering the budget cuts at the University of California, I can't offer you a free dinner, sorry. However, since you seem to need help thinking straight how about inviting Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis along to help you? I'd love to get the three of you on a stage. For that, I'll spring for dinner.

I assume you know how to reach me, although I'm not sure why you didn't bother to do so before writing your wonderfully titled expose.

Best and peace,

Mark LeVine -- That's LeVine with a capital V, not Levine.
History
University of California, Irvine

mlevine
@
uci
.edu

Rumsfeld, the Military Irrelevance of Fallujah, and Retina Scans

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was called on the carpet at a meeting with troops in Kuwait, as Reuters reports.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to armour our vehicles ... (scrap) that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat?, the soldier said. "We do not have proper armourment for our vehicles to carry us north (into Iraq)."

Rumsfeld's response was deeply dishonest, and typical of his theory of psychological manipulation in politics.

He conceded that "not every vehicle has the degree of armour that it would be desirable for it to have," but said the army was hurrying to plate more vehicles. "I think it is something like 400 a month are being done," he said. "As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time... if you think about it, you can have all the armour in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armoured Humvee and it can be blown up."

Rumsfeld basically told this serviceman, "screw you!" Obviously "400 a month" is not going to resolve the problem to which the soldier pointed. And it simply is not true, as Rumsfeld implied, that soldiers in a tank are as much at risk as they are in an un-armored truck or other vehicle. There have been a number of reports of rocket-propelled grenades just bouncing off Abrams tanks. The soldiers know when they are being made fools of.

Rumsfeld's dictum that "you go to war with the army you have" begs so many questions it would take days to list them all. But just for starters, let's point out that the officer corps wanted to send more like 300,000 troops to Iraq in March of 2003, not the 100,000 that Rumsfeld insisted on. Rumsfeld's mania for turning the entire US military into special operations forces ignores the need to keep order in the aftermath of a war. Paul Bremer admitted that "we never had enough troops on the ground" and that the lack led to the orgy of looting, which the US was not in a position to stop and which there was not even much will to stop. The looting in turn paid for the incipient guerrilla war (and a good deal of the looting was from weapons depots like al-Qaqaa, despite the Bush administration's denials).

So Rumsfeld didn't go to war with the army he had. He went to war with a much reduced military force, to make some sort of weird point.

And then Rumsfeld ordered the Iraqi army itself dissolved. And he ordered that thousands of former Baath members be fired from their jobs, even as school teachers. These steps created a huge recruitment pool for the Sunni guerrilla movement, which began blowing up US troops. Why would you dump 400,000 trained soldiers into unemployment lines just after invading a country? And the dissolution of the Iraqi military ensured that the US troops would have to try to keep order in the country, a task for which they were not trained.

So from the beginning to the end, Rumsfeld put the troops in this position. All the disastrous decisions were Rumsfeld's (and Bush's and Cheney's). These decisions weren't made by the soldier who asked in Kuwait why he had to rummage around in scrap metal to armor his vehicle. And the decisions weren't necessary or wise. They were arbitrary, and were made by civilians over the objections of the uniformed military.

This open dishonesty of Rumsfeld and Bush is becoming so brazen now that they have their second term that it is breathtaking. A few brave souls in the press are beginning to dare call the administration on the lies.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder calls a spade a spade in his article today. He writes:

"There is no comprehensive way to quantify how rebel activity has been affected nationwide by the Fallujah assault."

That is, many claims were made by the US military and by the Bush administration that an assault on Fallujah would make a significant dent in the guerrilla war. Lasseter is telling us that there is no way, two weeks later, systematically to evaluate these claims. Why?

"American officials no longer make available to reporters a daily tally of the number of incidents reported around the country."

Because we, the American public are simply not being told the truth by the Bush administration. This cover-up is absolutely outrageous. We, the American people, are paying for this war. We, the American people, are providing the troops for this war. We, the American people, are engaged in a national debate. We, the American people, will be going to the polls to vote for candidates who take a position on this war. We, the American people, deserve to have the full truth about how many attacks are launched by guerrillas every day in Iraq. We deserve to know how many Iraqis are being killed. We deserve to know what in hell is going on over there.

I urge everyone to write your senator and congressional representative asking them to act to ensure that this information is released to the public. There is no security issue here. The guerrillas know very well how many attacks they are launching daily. I am not asking for operational details, just for the basic numbers.

Lasseter was able to find at least one officer who would be frank about the situation:

' "We haven't seen any recent difference in insurgent organization or tactics in our (area)," said 1st Lt. Wayne Adkins, a spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division, who said violence was down in the area the division oversees, stretching from north of Baghdad to north of Tikrit. "They are using the same intimidation tactics against Iraqis you see elsewhere in Iraq." '

In other words, no, Fallujah hasn't made a difference militarily.

In that case, was it really worth it? Fallujah probably was the nail in the coffin of the electoral process, since in the aftermath most Sunni Arabs determined to boycott the elections, which will sink their legitimacy.

And, US military plans for social control in Fallujah seem genuinely Orwellian and clear violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Plans, it is alleged, are being made for forced work details by men in the city, and for use of high tech social engineering tools like retina scans for identification.

How fantastic these dreams of social control really are was underlined by an article in al-Zaman on Thursday morning that reported renewed US aerial bombardment of the Jubail and Julan districts of Fallujah, in hopes of killing the remaining guerrillas. Eyewitnesses reported firefights and the sound of explosions, suggesting some fighting on the ground, as well. One may conclude the Fallujah, despite being a ghost town where 2000 persons were killed and 1400 captured, is still not conquered weeks later.

How little a difference Fallujah made could be easily witnessed on Wednesday when AP reports that guerrillas launched a highly coordinated and professional set of attacks in Samarra. (Yes, the same Samarra that had been supposedly cleared of guerrillas by US military action this fall). Guerrillas raided the police station for munitions and then blew it up. They killed a policeman and a child. Then they attacked US troops at various points in the city, detonating a car bomb near a US base and using machine gun fire on troops at an intersection. No word of US casualties. The Samarra police chief resigned earlier in the day because his house was attacked and his family feared for his safety (read: his wife made him stop working with the Americans.) Many police in Samarra were refusing to patrol, lest they be killed by the guerrillas as collaborators. The Samarra violence left at least 5 dead.

Guerrillas in Mosul attacked a checkpoint manned by Iraqi national guards. The clash left two guardsmen and four guerrillas dead, and there may have been civilian casualties. In Ramadi, guerrillas fought US troops. Three civilians were caught in the crossfire and killed, and one was wounded. A carbomber in Baghdad targetted a passing US convoy but missed it, and killed Iraqi civilians instead (-az-Zaman).

Stories are now coming out about the 2003 war itself, which was presented as almost antiseptic in the US electronic media. Chris Hedges reviews a new book by embedded reporter Evan Wright in the NYRB, writing

"the anecdotal evidence, including the obliteration of villages where there was no serious resistance, along with isolated incidents where the unit had to stop and tend the children and civilians they wounded or killed, mounts by the end of the book to present a withering indictment of the needless brutality of the invasion. He writes toward the conclusion of his narrative:

' In the past six weeks, I have been on hand while this comparatively small unit of Marines has killed quite a few people. I personally saw three civilians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye. These were just the tip of the iceberg. The Marines killed dozens, if not hundreds, in combat through direct fire and through repeated, at times almost indiscriminate, artillery strikes. And no one will probably ever know how many died from the approximately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered dropped from aircraft.' "

These observations by an eyewitness lend some credence to
former Marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, who testified in favor of Army Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, 26, who deserted just before the war and is seeking asylum in Canada. AP's Beth Duff-Brown reports that

"Massey . . . said his 7th Marines weapons company killed more than 30 civilians during a 48-hour period in April while stationed at a checkpoint in the southern Baghdad district of Rashid. The victims included unarmed demonstrators and a man who drove up in a car and raised his hands above his head in the universal symbol of surrender. "I know in my heart that these vehicles that came up, that they were civilians,'' he said. ''But I had to act on my orders. It's a struggle within my heart.'' The orders, he said, were to shoot at anyone who drove into what is known as the ''red zone'' surrounding the checkpoint because they could be suicide bombers. . . . I saw plenty of Marines become psychopaths. They enjoyed the killing.''

A Marine spokesman said that he did not want to suggest that Massey was lying, but insisted that Massey's interpretation of the situation was different from that of the corps.

Massey is being a little unfair. If you are in a guerrilla war zone and a car comes speeding at you and doesn't stop when so ordered, if you don't shoot the driver then you risk it being a car bomber who will kill you and your men. Of course civilians got killed that way, but it isn't clear that that is criminal as opposed to regrettable. But that some of the troops had a sadistic streak or thought all Arabs responsible for 9/11, etc., is also quite plausible. Those sadists aren't typical of the troops, but we know they exist. Timothy McVeigh took delight in blowing Iraqis away, during the Gulf War.

Rather than issuing a blanket denial, the US military would be better served by simply admitting that war is hell and civilians get killed in prosecuting it. The American public is adults. They should know the score, and they should know that if a country goes to war, it will kill a lot of innocent people.

Knight Ridder's Joseph Galloway goes beyond Lasseter's complaint about lack of information. He points out that the US military appears in some instances to be outright lying to us. He instanced the false report given to CNN in mid-October that the US was about to attack Fallujah, done so as to see how the guerrillas in the city would respond and where they would hole up. He also instanced the US military's willingness to let the US public believe that former NFL football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, when in fact he was killed by friendly fire from fellow US soldiers. Tillman didn't believe in God, so he could handle the bleakness of life and death. The American public apparently had to be provided with some comforting myths by the Pentagon.

I was struck by how impossible it has been to know how many civilians were killed by the assault on Fallujah a few weeks ago, because the US military illegally targeted the hospitals to prevent word getting out. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is creating a new fog, not of war, but of the manipulation of information.

In the medium run, it is the uniformed military that will suffer from Rumsfeld's policies of dishonesty and psychological manipulation of the public, which are also being pushed by undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith. Once that trust is decisively undermined, we are going to see a backlash that will make the Vietnam syndrome look tame.

King Abdullah II and President Yawir Worry about Iran and Shiism

Robin Wright and Peter Baker of the Washington Post got King Abdullah II to say the most amazing things about alleged Iranian influence in Iraq.

It is simply not the case that hundreds of thousands of Iranians are piling into Iraq to vote in the upcoming elections. The Iranian government has discouraged pilgrimage because of the poor security situation, and the Coalition troops would be able to notice that level of infiltration. It isn't happening.

Why is Abdullah so nervous? Look at it from his point of view. Three years ago, you had a Sunni-dominated, secular Iraq; a Sunni Jordan; a Sunni-majority Syria with a Baath government that is dominated by the Allawi Shiite minority; a Sunni Palestine; a joint Maronite Christian-Sunni Muslim dominated Lebanon; a Sunni Saudi Arabia and Gulf. Sunni-dominated Iraq had served as a bulwark against the influence of Iranian Shiism and of Khomeinist ideas. Khomeini believed in Islamic governance and maintained that Islam is incompatible with monarchy.

Since the Americans overthrew Saddam, the Iraqi Shiites seem likely to form the next government. I would guess that about a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to Khomeinist ideas. That means those ideas are now on Jordan's doorstep, with no Baath buffer.

Worse, what if Shiite Baghdad and Shiite Tehran form a new axis? What if they spread the idea of Islamic government and the need to get rid of kings? If those ideas jump over into Sunni fundamentalist movements in Jordan, the head that wears the crown could rest uneasy indeed. Likewise, the new Shiite axis of Baghdad and Tehran would have a natural ally in Allawi-dominated Syria and in the Shiite Hizbullah Party of southern Lebanon. Shiites may now be 40% of the Lebanese population, and they could eventually be the majority of the country. Hizbullah and Iran have friendly relations with Hamas in Gaza. Shiite Iraq would inevitably hook up with the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the Shiite plurality in al-Hasa or the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (where the oil is).

Suddenly Abdullah II could be surrounded by a sea of Shiite influence, and it could be anti-monarchical and theocratic. If such ideas (shorn of their Shiite tinge and naturalized in fundamentalist Sunnism) became dominant among Jordan's substantial opposition movements, and perhaps these groups got money and support from Baghdad and Tehran, Abdullah II could end up being overthrown.

The king's worries about a million Iranian infiltrators into Iraq are merely his own unfounded nightmares. His perception of a new Shiite order in the Mashriq or eastern reaches of the Arab world is entirely correct.

Controversies over Middle East Studies at Princeton

The Daily Princetonian has a fascinating overview of controversies about Middle East Studies at Princeton University.

Churches Bombed in Mosul

Reuters reports that guerrillas in Mosul cleared two churches and then blew them up. There were no injuries, but extensive damage was done to an Armenian and an old Chaldean church. Mosul, a city of 1.2 million, has a substantial Christian population (Christians form about 3 percent of the Iraqi population).

Christian leaders in Iraq have threatened to form a militia for self-protection. The guerrillas have targeted Iraqi Christians on more than one occasion, associating them with the Christian foreigners now occupying Iraq. (This association is unfair, since the Chaldean Christians represent a culture that is older than Islam in Iraq; but such links are made).

The church bombings underscore the way in which images from Iraq are competing with the images favored by the Bush administration.

A US soldier was killed by guerrilla rifle fire in Baghdad.

Four Iraqi National Guardsmen were killed in separate incidents.

Elections face Logistical Obstacles

Mohamad Bazzi of Newsday reports that quite aside from major security problems, the January 30 elections could be derailed by poor preparations. In contrast to the 600 UN election workers in Afghanistan for the recent presidential elections, there are only 35 in Iraq, and security concerns are delaying the sending of more. Even the rules of the election haven't been completely spelled out yet.

Responding to similar skepticism voiced by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Iyad Allawi suggested that the elections might be staggered and held over 3 weeks instead of in a single day. His thinking appears to be that the US troops will better be able to keep order if they are concentrated in a few provinces at a time.

The problems Bazzi reports, however, are so extensive that it seems unlikely that Allawi's suggestion could resolve them. And US troops haven't shown an ability to keep order even in the heavily fortified Green Zone, so how can they guard even a fraction of the 9000 polling sites successfully?

In Kuwait, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, gave an interview in which he described the security situation as "not good." He expressed optimism, however, that the guerrillas were gradually being isolated and losing their bases among the people, so that they are weaker each day than the last.

Al-Hakim said that elections had to be held Jan. 30, since otherwise the present Iraqi interim government would become illegitimate. Its term was set to run out by the end of January, 2005, at the latest. He implied that after fighting Saddam for decades, the Iraqis would not accept such a descent into arbitrary rule. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Character Assassination

Yes, I'm aware that Daniel Pipes of the so-called Middle East Forum sent some puppy out to slime me over at David Horowitz's Frontpagerag. So this is the way it goes with the Likudniks. First they harass you and try to have you spied on. Then they threaten, bully and try to intimidate you. And if that fails and you show some spine, then they simply lie about you. (In this case the lies are produced by quoting half a passage, or denuding it of its context, or adopting a tone of pained indignation when quoting a perfectly obvious observation).

The thing that most pains me in all this is the use of the word "antisemite." Pipes already had to settle one lawsuit, by Douglas Card, for throwing the word around about him irresponsibly.

Israel is not being helped by extremists like Pipes and his associates (see below). It is being harmed, and its very survival is being placed in doubt by aggressive annexationist policies, and by brutal murders and repression, which Pipes and his associates support to the hilt.

Moreover, among the real targets of Pipes and Co. is liberal and leftist Jews. Indeed, the article attacking me begins with a vicious attack on Joel Beinin, a past president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes are encouraging a new kind of antisemitism, which sees it as unacceptable that Jews should be liberals or should crticize Likud Party policies.

Regardless of whether one supports it unreservedly or not, Israel poses a practical problem for American academics studying the Middle East, because it still has bad relations with countries like Syria (part of which Israel still occupies). Obviously, if you want to do field work in Syria and use the Syrian manuscripts, you are better off not going to Israel. I've had friends who admitted to Syrian border police that they had so much as been in the West Bank, and who were refused entrance to the country.

I say this to give a context for the following anecdote. In the 1990s some Israeli academics came to me and wanted to have a joint project on Middle East Studies, partially funded by Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. I felt that these academics, who are doves, should be supported, and gladly joined in. I was kindly hosted at one point, as well, at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva. I was well aware of the choice I was making, and I felt it was important to stand with my progressive Israeli colleagues.

I remember when in Israel talking to these leftish academics about politics. I had once met Shulamit Aloni here in Ann Arbor, and I said I admired here. My Israeli colleagues were appalled that I should speak so well of what they thought of as a paternalist party like Meretz, and wanted to move me substantially further to the left. That is an aspect of the real Israel, a place where the full range of political views is debated. It is completely unlike the discourse on Israel in the United States, where anyone who departs from the Likud line is punished and pilloried.

Then one of our joint conferences was planned just after Jenin, and some of the Israeli academics didn't feel right about holding it. They were furious at Sharon and wanted to boycott their own government. I felt the conference should be held. The Israeli invasion of Jenin was horrible, and it left 4000 innocent people homeless, but it wasn't a reason to cancel our conference. I pointed out that the US had killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants in the 1960s and 1970s, and if we were going to cancel conferences over such matters, we probably should never have a conference in the US again. I mean, I was making this argument to Israelis for heaven's sake.

When a movement sprang up to boycott Israeli academics in Europe, I wrote against it in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the Middle East Studies establishment in the United States, I have stood with Israeli colleagues and against any attempt to marginalize them or boycott them.

But of course, for the pro-Likud forces, all that means nothing. Being fanatics and often even cultists, they will accept nothing less than a toeing of the party line. And they have perverted the word "antisemitic" to simply mean "won't go along with Gush Emunim's plans." I think there is some danger of the word "antisemitic" as a result becoming useless and being discarded altogether. Why not just speak of racism or bigotry? We don't have a special word for anti-Black racism, and the African-Americans suffered their own Holocaust in the centuries of the slave trade. If someone accused me of being a racist because I objected to Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the full absurdity of the accusation would be obvious. "Antisemitism" has become so wrought up with Likud propaganda that it now can be employed in dishonest ways, as a cover for aggression and expropriation.

Here is the information on the "Middle East Forum" (which isn't a "forum" at all, it is just some sugar daddy giving Pipes $20 million a decade, on which he pays no taxes, apparently for the purpose of smearing and bullying people with whom he disagrees).

Revenue: $2,136,592

Expenses: $2,024,412

Assets: $519,519

Liabilities: $185,966


MIDDLE EAST FORUM
1500 Walnut St
Ste 1050
Philadelphia, PA 19102


Board of Directors
DAVID P STEINMANN, CHAIRMAN

Steinmann is also President of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a pro-Likud warmongering organization that seeks "total" war against Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians, and which helped drag the United States into its current Iraq quagmire. The Pentagon's Douglas Feith is a long-time JINSA activist.

JACK BERSHAD, CHAIRMAN (here identified as legal adviser to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

IRWIN HOCHBERG, CHAIRMAN (Irwin Hochberg, the national campaign chair of Israel Bonds, chairman of the International Commission of the Anti-Defamation League, and former chairman of the Jewish Federation of New York; Board Member of the Zionist Organization of America, which has steadfastly supported Israeli colonization of the West Bank and the dispossession of its Palestinians. Of the recent proposed peace plan worked out by Israeli and Palestinian doves at Geneva, Morton A. Klein, the president of ZOA said: "It is outrageous for individuals acting in opposition to the democratically-elected government of Israel to negotiate an 'accord' that undermines Israel's security by putting pressure on Israel to retreat to indefensible borders and divide its own capital, Jerusalem.")

ALBERT WOOD, CHAIRMAN (Prominent philanthropist connected to the Zionist Organization of America)

STEVEN LEVY, CHAIRMAN

DANIEL PIPES, PRESIDENT

SCOTT ROSENBLUM, CHAIRMAN (Member, "Golden Circle" of far rightwing "U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon" that unites Likud supporters and Phalangist brownshirts)

LAWRENCE GOULD, CHAIRMAN

LAWRENCE GRODMAN, CHAIRMAN

JERRY SORKIN, CHAIRMAN

Is Sorkin really still on? Eyal Preiss writes at the Nation
'During this same period [after 9/11], Sorkin says, the diversity that had once characterized the Middle East Forum's board vanished. "I sat at one board meeting and thought to myself, am I at a ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] meeting?" says Sorkin, whose views on the Arab-Israeli conflict are moderate. Sorkin told me he respects Pipes and always felt welcome at the Middle East Forum. Eventually, however, he decided to move on, and says he was not alone...'

Clearly, what most of the MEF board members want is Israel's further colonization of the West Bank and large-scale theft from and dispossession of the Palestinians living there. The way they deal with anyone who objects to this massive land grab, which creates hatred for Israel and for the United States in the Muslim world, is pretty clear. They have been getting their way in Washington and in the corporate media for so long that they seem shocked that anyone should dare stand up to them.

I don't have $20 million a decade to compete with Pipes. It is just me and my little Web Log, which costs only a few hundred dollars a year. I can't go toe to toe with JINSA (one of whose fiercest members is Douglas Feith, the number 3 man at the Pentagon), or with ZOA, or AIPAC, or any of the other organizations that stand behind the Middle East Forum.

But what I would do is to ask my many Jewish friends to please stop giving these people money. (And I appeal to everybody to stop going on those propaganda tours that JINSA hosts). Liberal Jews are being cynically used by rightwingers who secretly despise them, but know they are a soft touch for any appeals to the welfare of Israel. Liberal Jews need to found more of their own organizations and become more active in lobbying for their humane vision of Israel. Give money to Brit Tzedek v'Shalom or Tikkun, and found more, and more progressive such organizations. Cut the fanatics of the ZOA and JINSA off without a dime. The plan of the leaders of these latter organizatons is to gradually shift the American Jewish community toward Revisionist Zionism and Likudism, so as to make it a permanent pillar of the right wing of the American Republican Party. The right wing of the Republican Party is decisively not "for others." It is about the rich being selfish. And Revisionist Zionism of the Likud is not "for others." It is the supreme selfishness, the erasure of another people. And that is not what the American Jewish community has stood for for hundreds of years. It isn't what the Jewish tradition is about.

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?" - Rabbi Hillel.

Shiite List to be Announced

Hussein Shahristani, the Shiite scientist charged by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani with cobbling together a big comprehensive Shiite list, said Monday that the full listing of candidate names (in ranked order) would be made available on Tuesday. The list is being called the United Iraqi Congress. The list groups the major Shiite parties and factions, including the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Party, the Islamic Dawa, Iraqi Hizbullah (Marsh Arabs), the secular-leaning Iraqi National Congress of corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi, and many Shiite independents. About half the list will be Shiite tribal chieftains and notables not associated with one of the (largely expatriate) parties. A few Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and Faili Kurds are also on the list, and it was being rumored that the small Sunni Arab nationalist party of Nasiruddin Chadirchi might be on the list as well. Likewise the chieftain of the largely Sunni Shamar tribe may be included on the Sistani list.

The election will be conducted as one national poll, with voters getting only one vote, for a particular list of candidates. If a list has 100 candidates and gets 10 percent of the vote, it will be able to seat its top 27 candidates. The list must be presented in ranked order.

Twelver Shiites of the Usuli school that predominates in Iraq believe that laypersons should defer to religious scholars on issues of religious law. That Sistani backs this list will be a powerful incentive for Shiites to vote for it.

It is still unclear how a disaster will be averted if the Sunni Arabs largely boycott the election or don't come out to vote for their candidates in nearly the same proportions as the Shiites and the Kurds. They could end up substantially under-represented in parliament as it moves to crafting a permanent constitution.

Meanwhile, 600 delegates from the Shiite communities of the Middle Euphrates met in Najaf to consider the creation of a large Shiite province out of several smaller ones. Modern Iraq has 18 provinces. Saddam for some time created and maintained a 19th so as to strength the hand of the Sunni Arabs. Iraq has reverted to 18 provinces, but many Iraqi ethnic groups are dissatisfied with them. The Kurds want to create an ethnic, Kurdish province out of 6 existing provinces. The Shiites of the three far southern provinces have spoken of creating a big Shiite province. Now the Middle Euphrates Shiites appear to be aiming at some gerrymandering of their own. Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, the former national security adviser for Iraq, has suggested dividing Iraq into five ethnic provinces, with one Kurdish, two Sunni Arab and two Shiite. His plan leaves out the Turkmen and Christians, who would demand their own provinces. Countries with small numbers of largely homogeneous ethnically-based provinces tend to be more unstable than countries with large numbers of states or provinces that are each ethnically mixed.

Clash on a Street called Haifa

Guerrillas on Haifa Street in downtown Baghdad fought a running battle Monday with Iraqi police or national guards, and killed one civilian working for the US. The battle took place near the Green Zone, where the US embassy is sited.

There were also attacks on an oil pipeline that supplies Baghdad from the north, and clashes in the west, in Anbar province. From Friday through Sunday guerrillas killed 5 US troops in Anbar.

The CIA station chief in Baghdad has concluded that things are deteriorating in Iraq and may not get better any time soon. This breathtakingly honest evaluation was unacceptable to US Ambassador John Negroponte, who insisted it be hedged about with warnings that it was too pessimistic.

Uh, John, when you have conquered a country and ruled it for 18 months, and when you have 140,000 plus troops on the ground, and when you have to forbid your embassy staff to take the 10-mile-long road from the capital to the airport because their lives cannot be assured on it-- then, John, things are deteriorating and may not get better soon. Get used to it.

Carnage becoming Routine in Iraq: Another Bloody Sunday

ArabNews summarizes the carnage in Iraq on Sunday.

Tikrit: Guerrillas ambushed a bus as it let off Iraqis working for the US military at a weapons dump in Tikrit on Sunday morning around 8:30 am, spraying it with machine-gun fire and then fleeing. They killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded another 13. (The incident shows that the guerrillas are perfectly happy to kill Sunni Arabs as well as members of other groups). I wonder if their employment at a weapons dump was a motive for the shooting? Were these Iraqi civilians helping detonate munitions that the guerrillas would prefer to loot?

Baiji Around 8:30 am, a guerrilla drove a car bomb into a checkpoint in Baiji manned by Iraqi National Guardsmen. He detonated his payload, killing three of the Guards and wounding 18. One of those killed was a company commander.

Samarra Guerrillas staged an ambush of National Guards as they patrolled this largely Sunni city an hour's drive north of Baghdad, killing one guardsman and wounding another 4.

LatifiyahGuerrillas ambushed Iraqi National Guards jointly patrolling with US troops in this small city south of Baghdad, killing one Iraqi soldier and wounding 6.

Guerrillas used roadside bombs to kill, altogether, 4 US troops in Baghdad, Baqubah and Mosul over the weekend.

ArabNews writes, "About 40 small, mostly Sunni political parties met yesterday to demand the elections be postponed by six months, but stopped short of calling for a boycott." They warned again that if the Sunni Arabs do not or cannot take part in their proportion to the population, the resulting government will lack legitimacy.

My own suggestion as to how to resolve the problem of a Sunni boycott appeared Sunday in the Detroit News. I suggest a one-time set-aside of 25% of seats in Parliament for the predominantly Sunni parties that do take part in the elections.

The US military on Sunday arrested Muhammad Hasan Al Yahya. He is the coordinator of the six-man committee that is cobbling together a mega-list of Shiite candidates for parliament. KarbalaNews.net reveals that Al Yahya is a blood relative of the Grand Ayatollah, and says that the US forces surrounded the Waziriyyah district of Baghdad where Al Yahya lives, and closed in on him.

A number of Shiite figures immediately demanded his release. KarbalaNews.net maintains that its sources in Najaf say that the US released Al Yahya late Sunday. There is no indication as to why he might have been arrested.

Rumors are flying in Baghdad as to whether Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement will run on Sistani's mega-list or not. Al-Hayat is saying that he has declined. But The Khalij Times says he is joining.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that Shiite clerics in Baghdad are finding their patience tested by continued Sunni attacks, and some are beginning to adopt a militant posture that they had earlier avoided.

Abu Ghuraib Redux

The Arabic satellite television programs showed the new Abu Ghuraib pictures repeatedly late last week, and they provoked a new round of disgust with the United States. Boing Boing tells the story of how these photos were tracked down on a photo sharing site by a reporter using the google search engine. I am mirroring the pictures still available on the web via El Mundo and jonturk.com, linked from Boing Boing.


picture 1.

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

Picture 5

Picture 6

Picture 7


A group of US civil rights attorneys has brought suit in Germany against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the torture case.

Although US military spokesmen keep suggesting that the torture practices were confined to a few soldiers in the lower ranks, and that the photos were mere trophies, Seymour Hersh has argued that the soldiers were ordered to humiliate and photograph the prisoners as a way of blackmailing them into becoming informants for the US. The Americans were depending on Orientalist works like Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind in finding ways of controlling Iraqis, and were convinced that threatening males in an honor society with humiliation was the key.

The downside of using humiliation against a man whose life revolves around his honor is that he is thereafter bound to hate you, and to someday take his revenge. I wonder how many of the "insurgents" who have blown up so many US troops had been "controlled" this way in Abu Ghuraib or elsewhere.

Blogging Fallujah, and the US Air War against Iraqi Civilians

Thomas E. Ricks has a characteristically piercing examination of the way in which a single blogger has been able to challenge the public relations efforts of the entire US military with regard to the human cost of the Fallujah campaign. He contrasts the US military's powerpoint slides of the fighting in Fallujah (linked to at Soldiers for Truth) with Fallujah in Pictures, a web site hosted by an anonymous individual in New York, which put up disturbing pictures from the fighting that were not printed in US newspapers or shown on US television, but which were widely seen in the rest of the world. Ricks interviews experts who universally conclude that the blogger's presentation trumped that of the US military.

One part of the war where pictures can't help stir controversy is the aerial bombardment of Iraq, which takes place in the midst of conflict, and often at night, such as to render it invisible to the cameras of journalists. Tom Engelhardt's "Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq" is a seminal piece of anti-war journalism, standing alongside the articles of Naomi Klein as among the more thoughtful interventions so far from that side of the aisle. Excerpts:

"The Old City of Najaf that abuts the holy Shrine of Imam Ali was largely destroyed in August, partially from the air in the midst of bitter fighting between American troops and relatively lightly armed, ill-trained but tenacious young Shiite men loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. ("Few in the shrine could sleep through the ominous rumble of American AC-130 Specter gunships, capable of firing 1,800 bullets per minute. When the bombs fell closer than ever, hundreds rose to march and chant in the courtyard, saying they hoped their voices boosted the morale of the Mahdi Army.") In one of our last acts before a cease fire was declared, according to Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, we used "a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards away from the shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to American commanders as ‘motel row…' [R]eports indicated the hotel was a redoubt for al-Sadr fighters… The official said the strike had been ‘100 per cent successful,' demolishing the hotel."

Filkins later described the post-truce moment this way: "[The rebels] stood in a scene of devastation. Hotels had crumbled into the street. Cars were blackened and twisted where they had been hit. Goats and donkeys lay dead on the sidewalks. Pilgrims from out of town and locals coming from home walked the streets agape, shaking their heads, stunned by the devastation before them."

Similarly, much of the city of Falluja has just been devastated in fighting in which American fire power of every sort was called in. The razing of that city began with weeks of "targeted" air attacks on what were termed insurgent "safe havens." Falluja is now a wasteland and, while fantasies about its reconstruction abound, the fighting only continues. (At least 20 U.S. troops have died there, to almost no press attention, since the city was declared secure and the operation deemed a "success.") Falluja remains cordoned off; up to 250,000 Fallujan refugees are still unable to return; and American military strategists, who over the months since the first failed Marine attempt to take the city in April planned its eventual destruction, are now evidently planning to "ask" the "head of every household" (read: males) "to wear an identification badge" once back in the city."

The use of air power in Iraq has been among the more troubling policies in the post-Saddam period. It appears to be the case, from the Lancet survey, that between 40,000 and 100,000 excess deaths have occurred among Iraqi civlians since the war began, and 85 percent of those deaths were because of US aerial bombardment (these statistics were gathered excluding Fallujah, lest it skew the national averages). That is between 34,000 and 85,000 Iraqis killed by US bombing, most of them civilians. Jeffrey Sachs and Tom Engelhardt are among the few American observers who even seem to be noticing the phenomenon.

Arab/Kurdish, Sunni/Shiite Violence Flares, Killing Dozens

The violence in Iraq on Saturday, which killed at least 40 and wounded many more, was particularly worrying because it was again characterized by a strong element of ethnic warfare.

In Mosul, a car bomber pulled alongside a bus bringing in Kurdish militiamen or peshmerga, who guard the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (led by Jalal Talabani), and detonated his payload. The huge blast killed 17 of the Kurds and wounded more than 40. I saw an interview with a Mosul resident on al-Jazeerah, who was asked why peshmerga are being used to police part of the city. He admitted that the police had collapsed. (The 4000-strong Mosul police force virtually disappeared from the streets when, during the Fallujah operation, guerrillas launched a brief take-over of the city). (-al-Hayat)

Ten bodies were found in Mosul on Saturday, nine of them belonging to Iraqi national guardsmen killed as "collaborators" by the guerrillas. In the Turkmen north, in Talafar, 4 beheaded bodies of national guardsmen were found, and in Sinjar west of Mosul, five bullet-riddled bodies turned up. Nearly sixty such executions of national guardsmen have been discovered in the past 10 days.

In Baiji, the body of Tamadur Shakir al-Sudani was found. She had been shot seven times. She had served on the provincial governing council of Salahuddin province and had been kidnapped last Thursday.

Mosul city (pop. 1.2 mn.) has an Arab majority, but there are important minorities of Kurds, Turkmen and Christians. Mosul province has historically been dominated by Kurds. The US has never deployed enough troops in and around Mosul to establish security there, and the city saw massive looting by Kurdish tribesmen and other groups after the fall of Saddam. (The 2000 US troops in the north were deployed instead to Kirkuk to guard the oil fields there, in spring, 2003). The Arabs in the city had a strong commitment to the Baath Party, and Mosul university students demonstrated in favor of Saddam last winter. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood was long strong in Mosul, as well. In 1959, a failed Arab nationalist coup was launched from Mosul, but was put down by the colonels' regime, with the help of Kurdish tribesmen.

Ten other Iraqis were killed in separate incidents in the north, including 3 who worked for the Americans.

Two American troops were killed on Saturday. Late Friday, two US soldiers were killed and 5 wounded by a bomb near the Jordanian border, after which the Jordan-Iraqi border was closed.

The Salahiyah Police Station in Baghdad was hit by a car bomb, which killed 3 policemen and wounded 40.

Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post reports that clashes also broke out in Latifiyah south of Baghdad between Sunni Arab guerrillas and the Shiite Fury Brigade, a group formed in Basra in the south to protect Shiite pilgrims traveling from the north to the Shiite holy cities, whom the Ansar al-Sunna or Helpers of the Sunnis, have been attacking and robbing. Shadid notes that this is the first set-piece battle between Shiite and Sunni militiamen since the fall of Saddam. (There have been urban disturbances, as between Kadhimiyah and Adhamiyah after the capture of Saddam).


Al-Hayat interviewed Ammar al-Hakim, an official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq privy to the negotiations by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani toward creating a united Shiite list. He said that the list would be announced shortly. He said SCIRI had no dispute with Muqtada al-Sadr and that the only reason its head, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had not met with Sadr was because the latter had difficulty moving around for security reasons. He said it was very important that Sadr join the group list. But he said that if some groups were not in Sistani's list, it would not be a sign of disapproval from Sistani but rather the result of their own choices.

Mariam Fam of the Associated Press knows better than Max Boot what the Fallujans now think of the Americans, because she has actually talked to the Fallujans. They don't seem to be very happy to have been liberated. They even seem to be muttering about perpetual jihad. Fam's report comes to conclusions similar to those of Shadid, also an Arabic-speaking reporter on the scene in Iraq.