Moqtada preparing to meet with Adherents of the Mahdi re complaints about the Najaf authorities

Azzaman, sandwiched in an unrelated story about inaction respecting the recent suspicious fires at the Central Bank and elsewhere, says:

An authoritative source in the Sadrist trend said Moqtada al-Sadr is preparing to meet with a representative of the Mahdawiyya movement (Mahdists, general name for the groups focused on the appearance of the 12th Imam) that have been asking for a curtailment of the role of the Najaf marjia [authority, a collective word for the Najaf authorities of whom the most powerful is Sistani] in connection with the accusations repeatedly made by the Maliki government and its PR and security branches--destructive accusations that need to be fought. The source said Al-Sadr didn't spell out the form these discussions will take, but said he is preparing to accept the request of one of the spokesmen for the Adherents of the Imam Mahdi, made on Al-Sharqiyya TV. Recall that Al-Sadr himself has begun studies in the Najaf Hawza to complete the studies necessary to himself obtain the title of marjia, studies that could take several years.

The state of play seems to be that the government continues to spin conspiracy accusations against the Mahdawiyya movement as a whole. What makes this a little ambiguous is that a major feature of the Mahdist ideology is opposition to the influence of the Najaf authorities, so some of this could amount to Najaf McCarthyism, if you will pardon the expression. The Mahdists say that kind of fixed institutional intermediation is unnecessary and harmful, because knowledge comes either directly by revelation, or via the precursors of the twelfth Imam. Al-Sadr was probably referring to this problem when he said immediately after the Ashura violence that Iraq needs a "professional" intelligence agency, suggesting the current system is sectarian and anti-Mahdist.

On another topic Azzaman reports on its website in English that the Iraqi "government" has decided to end the food-ration program in June of this year, over the objections of the Finance Ministry which says this is a bad idea. The reporter says the government decision was taken pursuant to an agreement with the World Bank. Experts are quoted with unsurprising comments to the effect this is going to hurt the unemployed, in a country where the official unemployment rate is 40%.

I haven't seen this reported in any of the papers in Arabic, or anywhere else in any language, for that matter. If it's true it is a major story, reflecting ongoing pressure from the global powers that be for the application of IMF economic orthodoxy right up to the gates of hell, if you will pardon the expression. Has anyone seen anything about this? Anywhere?

Market forces ?

This appeared in the lower-right corner of the front page of the Bahrein newspaper Akhbar al-Khaleej on Tuesday January 29, under the heading:

Iraqi deputy to Akhbar al-Khaleej: American Companies offered five million dollar bribe to all deputies in exchange for passage of the Oil Law --Baghdad. Special to Akhbar al-Khaleej

An Iraqi member of parliament said secret talks have been opened by parties representing American oil companies, that include an American offer to give deputies who vote in favor of the Oil and Gas Law money amounting to five million dollars.

The Iraqi deputy, who preferred his name not be mentioned, said the amount of money that could be paid for passage of the Oil and Gas Law [thus] doesn't exceed $150 million, if the $5 million figure is specified for each deputy, and this will be an insignificant amount compared to the concessions these American companies will obtain. He was referring to the fact that the Oil Law needs 138 votes to pass, and this is what the American parties are trying to obtain by several different methods, including the buying of votes, and blandishments, and threats.

The deputy said he thinks the Americans will adhieve their aim with some deputies who will promise to vote for the bill in exchange for the mentioned amount of money, but he said others will not be selling their votes for any price, or under any type of pressure.

The Iraqi deputy said these talks, which are being kept in the highest degree of secrecy, are centered on the leaders of parliamentary blocs, and on persons with influence in Parliament, so as to obtain the biggest number of votes possible. He said the Americans already had the votes of the Kurdish lists assured, but what they are trying for is to get sufficient votes to pass the bill and enact it at the earliest possible time.

Recall that there are still parliamentary blocs that are firmly against voting for the Oil and Gas Law, and that there are others that say this should be put to a popular referendum, since it is something that concerns the fate of Iraq's oil wealth, and the sustenance of the Iraqi people.

A researcher's remarks on Yamani and other Mahdist movements; Supreme Council allegations

Aswat al Iraq publishes a feature on Mahdist movements, including remarks by a researcher of Islamic affairs, Qadir al-Jabbar (not otherwise identified). There is an Arabic and an English version of this, but the English version leaves out several interesting passages, so here is the entirety of Jabbar's remarks.

Jabbar says the identity of Ahmed al-Hasan isn't well-understood, adding:

"There is a book and an audio-tape attributed to him, both of which show a naivete in his propositions that suggest that he could be a former, unsuccessful, student in one of the religious institutions of learning". The researcher continued: "The fact Yamani took the six--pointed star [star of David] as his symbol without worrying about any adverse reaction that this symbol could cause, given that it is the symbol of the Hebrew state, together with the material possibilities possessed by his movement along with all of the other Mahdist movements, induces the necessity of believing that these are "artificial" movements, to convey a group of concepts and destroy any chance of stability in southern Iraq".

Jabbar said what this group has in common with the other Mahdist groups is that they are built around small structural organizations, both on the leadership side and on the side of the followers, adding that the key people are mostly people that are obscure, socially, politically and in the religious sphere, close to the religious milieu but without having obtained degrees or any recognized level of learning. They are generally Shiite; they appear suddenly and they disappear suddenly; they use violence as their means of effecting change; they refuse to recognize any authorities, either political or religions, except those within the Mahdist movement; and their thought generally involves the rejection the current state of affairs root and branch.

The researcher Qadir Jabbar offered some examples of [other] such groups: "For instance we have the movement of Fadhil abdul Hussein al-Marsumi. His idea is that he is the Mohamed of our times. [He says] there is a new Mohamed in each age, and he urges people to give up studies of all kinds, including reading and the reliance on reading, to permit themselves to obtain knowledge by revelation. Marsumi's criticism is directed essentially against the Shiite [sect or religion] describing it as based on false beliefs, in spite of the fact that he himself, personally, bases himself on it. This is a point in common with the salafi Wahhabi sect, which some think he supports in his preaching." [If I may interject: I think the point here is that in common with the salafi Wahhabis, this man opposes the entire hierarchy of the mother-sect, but he himself--they themselves--adhere to the original principle. This would be true of a lot of fundamentalist movements, and it isn't clear what motivates this particular comparison with salafi Wahhabism].

Jabbar continued: There is another dangerous movement whose activities have been growing in recent months in Baghdad and other cities of the center of Iraq, namely the movement of Habiballah al-Mukhtar. Its leader preaches what he calls "the revolution of divine love", and its position can be summarized this way: After the failure of all of the sects and all of the religions, we have undertaken this correcting revolution which leads to God directly. And that implies the attempt to blow up all of the sects and religions, and this is something that relates this movement, in a distant way, to the Masonic movement. [Again, the rejection of intermediaries is something common to a lot of fundamentalist movements, and it isn't clear what motivates the researcher in this particular case to refer to blowing up the religions or what his point is about the masonic movement].

And Jabbar concluded by saying there is no question of these Mahdists being stamped out in the foreseeable future; rather, they can be expected to grow in numbers and activities.

The above is the whole of the remarks by the researcher Qadir Jabbar in the Arabic-language item published by Aswat al-Iraq. In their English-language version, the paragraph about Marsumi is left out, and also the remark in the last paragraph about supposed similarity with the Masonic movement. Those deletions could be on account of the obscurity of what he is talking about. But the English-language version also left out the researcher's remarks about the possibility of these movements being "artificial" and fostered with a destabilizing purpose. Maybe they thought it was too speculative for English-language readers, or maybe it was just an oversight.

The piece also includes remarks by a researcher at something called Institute of Arab Gulf Studies, who didn't want to be named even though his institute is named. Here too the English language version leaves out part of the Arabic version, but in this case I think they were unquestionably right to do so.

For what it is worth, the Supreme Council news-site Burathanews.net has published a story that purports not only to identify Ahmed al-Hasan al-Yamani, but to trace his career through religious studies in Najaf pre-2003 when he was allegedly sponsored by Saddam's mukhabarat, then following the fall of that regime he was sponsored by a number of Gulf-state intelligence agencies led by that of the UAE. And this includes details of the alleged revolutionary plot which included a complex series of planned operations in Basra, Nasiriya and Karbala, all thwarted by alert police action. He is a Dajjal, or anti-Mahdi (to coin a word based on "anti-Christ"), and the story is based on the idea that there have been and will continue to be a number of these repeatedly, noting that the similar plot that was broken up last year was of a different group and a different Dajjal.

Government spokesmen have referred in news reports in vague terms to the Yamani group responding to a "foreign agenda", but these above-mentioned specific allegations haven't been taken up by any other news media (other than Burathanews), and the experts cited in the above Voices of Iraq story don't mention it either, possibly because their isn't any actual evidence for it. It could be that the Supreme Council needed a story to reassure their own people that this was taken care of, for this year at least, even a story that might not bear a lot of scrutiny.

While we're on the subject, it should also be noted that website of the Adherents of the Mahdi (Yamani's group), www.almahdyoon.org, is dead, not surprisingly considering so many of its members are also dead. Their position was that the group has been systematically harassed by the agents of the Supreme Council and the GreenZone government (see a summary in English of one of their statements at historiae.org/mahdists.asp. There are a couple of very similar statements that were copied here before the Mahdyoon site went down. In this version, the Adherents of the Mahdi complain that members who were detained and tortured by the government were then "turned over to the criminal forces of the occupation, to be tortured according to the modern, Western methods!!" (Second statement at the last-mentioned location, first paragraph).

Jaafari talks to the resistance

Ibrahim Jaafari, the former Prime Minister, is in Cairo as part of a tour of Arab capitals. Jaafari is a member of the Dawa Party, but the wing of the party he heads (Dawa Party--Iraq Organization) has split from the wing headed by current PM Maliki and has signed an agreement with the Sadrists, some Sunni parties, and others (the famous "12-party understanding") espousing a "nationalist" program particularly insofar as it opposes Kurdistan-only oil contracts, and in effect declares Clause 140 of the Constitution a dead letter, meaning there can be no further dickering over the status of Kirkuk. Other "nationalist" principles are expressed too, although a little more vaguely.

In an interview with Radio Sawa on Friday, Jaafari said the following (according to the radio's website):

As to the parties with whom he had discussions in Cairo on ways for implementing national reconciliation, Jaafari said he met with Iraqi factions that bear arms and that have a nationalist program, in order to hear their points of view and discuss ways of bringing them into the political process in the interests of the nation, although he does not agree with them, in his words.

Jaafari stressed the importance of hanging on to the recent improvements in security and using that to promote the national reconciliation project, so that this doesn't turn out to be the calm before the storm.

Jaafari said his project is not that of a substitute for that of the government, and he does not intend the creation of an oppositional movement to the government of Nuri al-Maliki. The front he intends to create will not differ in anything that concerns the good of the country, as he put it.

Jaafari concluded by saying that "the political support I have obtained in Cairo" is something that will be to the benefit of the Maliki government.

This is the first I have ever heard of a Shiite party leader having discussions with any of the armed Sunni resistance groups, and I think the news is noteworthy for that reason. Which in turn suggests something else (something pointed out to me already a couple of times in the comments, and only now starting to sink in), and that is that there probably is some degree actual nationalist and "democratic" influence going on in the GreenZone, for instance why else would the US have been stymied so far in getting its Oil and Gas Law enacted; and how else can you explain Sunni parties signing on with the Sadrists and the Jaafari wing of the Dawa to any memo of agreement, no matter how vague.

Naturally this has to be disentangled from those activities that reflect the American effort to produce a broader-based GreenZone government mainly for the purpose of legitimizing the new bi-lateral security agreement, so in the coming period of time it may be a little more difficult than usual to sort this out.

(Thanks to the omniscient roadstoiraq for calling attention to the Radio Sawa item).

A gripping story, and another story yet to be told

The gist of Mark Perry's spellbinding two-part article in the AsiaTimes online (as far as Iraq itself is concerned) is this: Starting in 2003, US military officers on the ground started meeting with, and trying to work out cooperative arrangements with, Iraqis who needed help in fighting off the Wahhabi fundamentalists aka AlQaeda who were flooding the country after the fall of Saddam.

The efforts of these officers were opposed by the White House. Finally in 2005 one such cooperative effort went ahead anyway, involving cooperation between a Marine unit and Sunni leaders fighting AlQaeda in Falluja. That example of cooperation, with the support of "a tight circle of Pentagon civilian advisers around Rumsfeld", was eventually made the model for the Awakening Council strategy in Anbar province. A later attempt to expand this to areas south of Baghdad ran into trouble when a bomb blast at a meeting at the Mansour Hotel in the GreenZone killed many of that scheme's tribal supporters. But the strategy went ahead, including in Babil province, where the provincial government is Shiite, and including also an agreement with the multi-area Janabi tribe.

So the general approach is continuing, but at same time, this brings with it the realization that (1) If it is a sound strategy, even for the short term, then there was no reason not to have implemented it five years ago; and (2) If the best available strategy now seems to be to ally with Iraqi nationalists fighting AlQaeda, and this could have been implemented five years ago, but for the White House ideologues, this raises the next level of questions, or as Mark Perry puts it, continuing his summary of the thinking of the military officers involved:

All of which raises the question of whether the United States should have invaded Iraq in the first place, an issue that is becoming more pertinent to military officers who view the American adventure in Iraq as a political and military failure.

In a nutshell, from the military-operations point of view, the learning curve has been this: (1) The White House opposed any and all deals with Iraqi leaders even if it meant joining hands with Iraqis to fight AlQaeda; (2) now that White House opposition to that strategy has been reversed, and the strategy is showing dramatic short-term results, the question they are raising is this: Why not have done that initially, and in fact, if the key was to ally with Iraqis in fighting AlQaeda, why did we invade in order to fight these people in the first place?

I have left out, in this account of Mark Perry's story, a lot of the detail and the color, and I have also left out all of the extremely interesting intra-military debates, and for that there is no alternative but to read the articles from beginning to end, and carefully, a couple of times, to let the enormity of what has been done to the American military really sink in. It is a colossal story in itself.

But back to the question of recent Iraqi history. I have some comments on the story of how American strategy has played out in Iraq, as a result of a year and a half of reading accounts of this from the Arab-press side. In a nutshell:

Perry tells of obstruction from the White House (Bremer, Rice, and others) to deals of any kind with the Sunni tribes in the period from 2003 to 2005 or -06. Then deals of that type started being okayed. This is presented as essentially a case of obstruction by ignorant ideologues, eventually overcome in a process that could be called a victory for practical common-sense, or some such expression. Perry's story includes no particular motivation for the change to the Awakening strategy. It was merely that the merits of the idea gradually came to be unarguable.

The prevailing Iraqi view of this is quite different. American strategy starting in 2003 was to use Shiite groups to harass the remnants of the Baath regime and their sympathizers (aka the Iraqi national resistance, but which was and is in fact much broader than that), and anyone shooting at US troops was either in that class or AlQaeda. Hence the logic of the "no deals" prohibition. Then at some time in 2005 or 2006, partly in the face of growing disaffection on the part of the Saudis and others, and partly from concern about Maliki's ties to Tehran, there had to be a tilt to the Sunnis, hence the decision to enlist Sunni groups, in order to, among other things, act as a counterweight to the sectarian Shiite power. In other words, so far this has been a two-act occupation, first helping Shiites harass Sunnis, then in a second stage helping Sunnis deter Shiites. There are many provisos and nuances, but essentially this is the Iraqi story: This was from the beginning a sectarian strategy, with a shift sometime in 2005 or -06 from anti-Sunni/pro-Shiite to anti-Shiite/pro-Sunni, in terms of the overall weight of American military influence. The weight of the American alliances shifted, but this had nothing to do with "learning about Iraq", and everything to do with keeping the divide-and-conquer ball rolling.

The fact that there was a learning-curve-type struggle to okay this particular form of a tilt to the Sunnis doesn't mean that the tilt to the Sunnis "just happened". There is an ongoing US policy, which is a sectarian policy, and in the carrying out of that policy, this Awakening Council strategy was obviously seen as the way forward. There are two stories here: The story of the officers' struggles to get common-sense policies okayed; and the story of the sectarian US policy. They are two different stories. Mark Perry has given us a lot of the first story from the point of view of the common-sense of the officers on the ground. But the second story, from the point of view of the common sense of Iraqis, hasn't sunk in at all as far as the anglosphere is concerned.

And the reason why the two stories don't easily fit together is this: In the American mind, there was never any concept of Iraq, or of fighting in Iraq, other than the sectarian one. "Iraq" was always "Sunna versus Shiia". So any strategy, or any concepts at all respecting the country, had to start from one side or the other. Why this has been the case is another story, but it is a fact. And consequently, the idea of allying with "Iraqis"--even if it meant in a common fight against the Wahhabi fundamentalists--wasn't on. It would have meant allying with "Sunnis", at a time when we were trying to help the underdog "Shia" get out from under their yoke. It was one against the other; there was no concept of an "Iraqi".

And as Mark Perry points out, once people in the military realized that they could profitably ally with Sunni tribes in defending against AlQaeda, this immediately started to bring down the whole ideological house of cards: (1) Some Iraqis care about their country as a whole, and (2) why exactly did we take these same people to be our enemy in the first place. Not that good for morale, Perry notes.

I am sure that the story Mark Perry tells is exactly what happened, from the vantage-point of the US military officers on the ground in Iraq and those responsible for them. And as I said, the effects of this on the US military are a story that bears a couple of careful readings, a period of reflection, and then another reading. Because perhaps on the third reading you will begin to ask yourself why this story has taken so long to be told.

But from the point of view of Iraq, it isn't the whole story, and I don't think it is necessarily even the most important part of the story from their point of view.

Is there such a thing as "global opinion"? (Correct answer to quiz now posted)

Someone wrote that the blockade of the Gaza Strip has not only unified the Arab street for the first time since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, putting fear in the hearts of the Arab regimes that are complicit in this, it has also uncovered something about global opinion.

Israel was forced to back away from a [total] blockade, because the world does not believe that there is any state, whether civilized or barbaric, that would cut off electricity and fuel from a people that is already starving, and cause a humanitarian and health and environmental catastrophe in the way that we have seen...

And the same person wrote:

Ehud Olmert and his ruling group, when they behave in this barbaric fashion, wrong not only the Palestinians, but they wrong also the Jews who were victims of the Nazis, because all of the international law that forbids collective punishment as a war crime and that has become the common heritage of mankind--this [body of law] was the result of the sacrifices of those Jews, and the determination to prevent any recurrence of such events, to them or to any other people.

Quiz: In what forum do you think this was published?

"One enemy--one sacrifice"

The Jihad and Reform Front--Islamic Army Iraq; Army of the Mujahideen; Ansar al-Sunna--along with Islamic Resistance Movement (Jaami), and Hamas Iraq, have issued a statement announcing an "Iraqi Resistance Campaign in support of Gaza". Here are the opening sentences:

The Zionist-Crusader enemies continue [attacks] against the Ummah from the East to the West using the same weapons and the same methods and the same barbaric terrorism, with arbitrary arrests and terror bombings, which include the innocent and the unarmed, women and children and men, destroying houses over their residents, blockading cities and cutting off the necessities of life, in mad campaigns that are devoid of human meaning and that make a mockery of the expressions they proclaim about justice and the protection of human rights. Because at the same time that they bomb Gaza, they are also bombing Arab Jabour and other places again and again, in the ugliest form of tyranny and aggression, and they blockade other cities on made-up pretexts.

The blockades, the statement says, reflect the "policy of slow death by starvation and the cutting off of the necessities of life".

The statement doesn't suggest in what ways the Iraqi resistance is going to be able specifically to "assist Gaza"; merely that the Iraqi mujahideen have not forgotten their brothers in Gaza, and that they will now "escalate [their] military operations against the partners of the Zionists, and against the American enemies of mankind."

It's safe to say these are the first-fruits of the new "tactical" approaches that appear to have been authorized in connection with Bush visit--more bombing in Iraq, and starvation in Gaza--presumably designed to soften up the resistance in both places, but it's hard to see them as anything other than "mad campaigns, devoid of human meaning..." as the above-mentioned statement says, and in the light of history they will bring only shame and no doubt eventual catastrophe to the perpetrators. Certainly in the short term they will not help Condi lure resistance groups to the Cairo conference on Iraqi reconciliation.

The statement is posted on jihadi websites, and there is a summary here.

"They (the government) responded to ideas with force"

Asharq al-Awsat, in a report this morning on ceremonies of mourning for the victims of the violence in Basra and Nasiriya, highlights this:

The armed groups said they are followers of Ahmad al-Hasan and not of the Army of Heaven as has been reported in some media. ...And a spokesman for the group of Ahman al-Hasan, called al-Yemani, whose armed people fought with security officers in the two provinces, said day before yesterday in a tape broadcast on the Iraqi satellite station Al-Sharqiya although admitting that it cut parts of it: "There is no connection between it [the Ahmad Hasan al-Yemani group] and the Army of Heaven, although the government is trying to link it to them. The responsibility for all of the bloodshed lies with ... because they countered ideas with force. The Ahmad al-Hasan group has been in existence for eight years, but starting two years ago the government has had a campaign to arrest all of its members, keeping them in custody for several months [at a time].

And he said: The Ahmed al-Hasan group is a group with conceptual beliefs, and it is not terrorist, and it is not military, and it does not carry arms. It aims to join mankind by morality and not by intermediaries or by authorities (marjaiyat), because what emanates from them is [nothing but] fighting between sects.

The italics are mine. I don't suppose I can get an "Amen"...

Sadrists call for a non-sectarian intelligence agency; Government says: Hey, this investigation is going really well

Azzaman reports:

A spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry said security forces had taken apart the organization of Ahmed bin al-Hasan al-Yamani in the provinces of Basra and Nasiriya, having killed 70 of its members and arrested another 300. He said 12 policemen died in the fighting. He said the government seized documents showing that they planned a number of armed operations against participants in the Ashura commemorations. Basra is now calm and residents praised the actions of the police, he said.

The Azzaman reporter goes on to note that a spokesman for the Sadrist movement said Iraq is in need of a new agency for intelligence and information-gathering that can operate on a "sound and professional basis". In specific reference to the events of Basra and Nasiriya on the weekend, he said: "We stress the need for the Iraqi government to undertake the creation of an intelligence and information-gathering agency on a sound and professional basis". Citing the news agency Aswat al-Iraq (whose report in English is here), the reporter says the Sadrist spokesman talked particularly about the need for reliable intelligence about "plans aimed at splitting the ranks of the Iraqi people", via an agency that would "not follow any particular political line", adding that in this the government should "move away from the culture of muhasasa (sectarian allocations)". He said Iraq stands in need of an agency whose task would be to gather information on movements of armed groups, and to foil any plans aimed at disturbing law and order in the country.

The government newspaper Al-Sabah, not surprisingly, stresses what a great job the government authorities are doing, but without saying anything of substance. The number of arrested members of this group is continually growing, and a number of high-ranking people have been sent from Baghdad, all of them agreeing that the operation is going quite well. Just how well? For instance, one of these officials, Khalaf by name, accused a religious group in another country in the region of being behind this [al-Yamani] group, but he refused to name the country. He added that it wasn't the government of that country that is behind this group and financing it, but rather religious groups within that country, which he is not at liberty to disclose the name of, because of the investigation. And he said the government has found important documents and conclusive proofs (he doesn't say of what) that are part of the literature and program of this group.* Another official said the name Ahmad bin al-Hasan is a fictitious name, and they are still looking for someone they believe to be the leader. So far all of the people they have in custody deny ever having met personally with al-Yemani. Finally, in Maysan the authorities have set up a comment center to coordinate monitoring the main roads to Nasirriya and Basra, to round up more fugitives.

The reporter for Al-Hayat, for his part, says the Sadrist movement, and the Mahdi Army in particular, has emerged from the Basra fighting as the biggest winner, having fought much better than the local police, probably largely owing to their experience in having fought the British recently, compared to the inexperience of the police in any large-scale confrontations of this type. The Al-Hayat reporter calls the Mahdist group the Army of Heaven, and he has this to say about them compared to the Sadrists' Mahdi Army.

Observers note that there are major doctrinal differences between the Sadrists and the Army of Heaven, despite the similarity of names between the "Mahdi Army" of the Sadrists and the "Mahdawiyun" as the Army of Heaven are called who are followers of Ahmed bin al-Hasan al-Yemani. Because the latter have no connection with the Najaf hierarchy, and they do not follow any of the [Najaf] authorities, in fact they consider them corrupt and fraudulent. Al-Yemani claims to have his teaching authority directly from the Imam al-Mahdi, the last of the Shiite imams, and he demands allegiance to himself. And those who don't pledge allegiance are "hulk" (death or destruction) according to graffiti on walls in cities of the South, particularly Basra.

The Al-Hayat journalist says the Army of Heaven people used to sell their literature and proselytize and so on in public places, and in fact within sight and hearing of the local security agencies near the old Provincial Building in Basra, and so the fact that these recent events took the authorities by surprise calls into question their competence, and this, by contrast, points up the leading law-and-order role taken in this by the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army in particular.

Putting these reports together, it appears the Mahdi Army played the lead role in the law-and-order part of these events, in Basra at least, but as far as the investigation is concerned, it is in effect saying that the existing agencies are sectarian, and a new, non-sectarian agency needs to be created to deal with situations of this kind, both in terms of intelligence, and in terms of interventions of the kind that would have saved a lot of trouble in Basra.

What these initial reports don't provide is any real enlightenment on the seriousness of any underlying plot. We are told about graffiti-writing, and literature-sales and so on, but the plot is still something that isn't demonstrated. Which is perhaps one of the points the Sadrists have in mind in calling for a non-partisan intelligence agency.

* According to the account in another government-oriented Iraqi paper, Al-Mada, the government referred to the group in question as the "Yemani group or Adherents (ansar) of the Mahdi", suggesting this is the same as the group whose own statement stressed their political position against the Najaf hierarchy, and denied any connection with the so-called Army of Heaven. Visser noted the same thing happened last year, when a politically-oriented group under government attack denied any connection with the Army of Heaven.

The two Bush-visit "announcements": No more pretense of civil-combatant distinction in Gaza, and more, not less, bombing of Iraq

Bush visited the Mideast region from January 9 to the 16th, and a very productive trip it was: On January 10, US forces dumped 40,000 pounds of bombs on an area south of Baghdad in a 10-minute attack that was described as one of the biggest single air attacks since 2003 (in an area to which residents had been invited back only four weeks before that). Colin Kahl, a "political scientist" who had "just returned from a trip to the air operations center", told a WaPo reporter that psychological effect is very important. "Part of this is announcing our presence to the adversary," he said, referring to the Arab Jabour bombing. Suggesting that after almost five years of military occupation, the US forces have something new to "announce" to those who would expel them.

It wasn't the only "announcement" made in connection with Bush's trip. On Thursday January 18, right after he left, Ehud Barak announced the complete closure of all entry points into the Gaza Strip, naturally including fuel shipments, and this led, as expected, to the shut-down on January 20 of the only electric-generating station in the Gaza Strip, which as it happens serves Gaza City, and this in turn, via effects on water-pumping and -purification, refrigeration, and power to hospitals, brought the area to the brink of what the UN politely calls a humanitarian catastrophe, but which in the Arab world is seen as a declaration of war by Israel on the entire population of the Gaza Strip.

Here is what Ehud Barak said Israel was announcing:

On Sunday, Barak told the cabinet that the army was "weakening the daily life in Gaza."

"We are targeting the terror elements and we are trying to show the international community that we are exhausting all possible options before Israel decides on a broad (military) operation," a senior government official quoted him as saying.

In other words, bringing the place to the brink of mass starvation is the last, non-military, stop before launch of a "broad military operation"--"broad" because it will be as neglectful of the combatant-civilian distinction as is the starvation program. Interestingly, the Israeli elite explains this to itself in the following way: The requirement in international law to distinguish between combatants and civilians only applies to military activities. But the blockade and starvation aren't military operations, so the rule doesn't apply. (This is explained in an article by Yossi Wolfson called Economic Warfare in Gaza in which he explains the Israeli government position in a court challenge). As for activities in wartime, the Israeli authorities have come up with this additional theory:

The state turns international law on its head. Various provisions regulate civilian supplies in wartime, with the aim of keeping the situation from reaching the threshold of a humanitarian crisis. Israel cites these provisions but interprets them as allowing it to harm civilians as long as it stops short of that threshold, defined by it.

This is the mirror image of the waterboarding argument only on a vast scale: Okay as long as the purpose of the operation, in the mind of the perpetrator, isn't death.

In any event, the closings and resulting power-cuts are clearly an Israeli "announcement", presumably connected to the Bush visit, with ominous implications for the future.

And the Iraqi strategy? What was the "announcement" there, that Colin Kahl was talking about? Recall that the huge Jan 10 Arab Jabour bombing raid came the day after six American soldiers were killed while searching a booby-trapped house north of Baghdad, supposedly to clear the Arab Jabour area of that kind of risk, making it safe for the occupation forces to search. That was the "announcement": If we take losses, you, people of Iraq, will take bombing attacks of a size you haven't seen before.

In fact, we don't have to speculate, because Kahl's colleague Andrew Krepinevich spelled out the situation in the NYT just yesterday. The context was a Michael Gordon piece complaining about the fact politicians are for withdrawal, while military success is going to depend on the perception that the forces will stay as long as it takes. In this context Krepinevich said: "Unless you are suppressing insurgents the way the Romans did--creating a desert and calling it peace--it typically can take the better part of a decade or more [to successfully fight a counterinsurgency]." In other words, the alternatives are: A decade or more of occupation, or if not, then "creating a desert and calling it peace".

So there were two major announcements made in connection with the Bush visit: (1) Israel has dropped any pretense of combatant-civilian distinction, so if the blockade and threatened starvation doesn't do the trick, expect a "broad military operation". And (2) in Iraq, if there are to be troop-withdrawals, bombings will escalate, and you can interpret that in the words of the good-cop Colin Kahl about the clinical precision of these, or you can listen to the words of the bad-cop Krepinevich about creating a desert. But in either case, the point is that the US has announced that it is dropping its aversion to a policy of more and more bombing attacks, as a corollary to troop-withdrawal, take it whichever way you will.

The political dimension of the Ashura fighting (Updated with an interesting confirmation of sorts)

Troubles during Ashura between government security forces and various dissident Shiite movements, many of them with a messianic/political message, were not at all unexpected this year. According to a roundup by Al-Hayat a week ago (Saturday January 12)*, there are dozens of Shiite movements that have "appeared" since the invasion of 2003 (leaving open the question whether this means newly-created or just coming into the open), the most talked-about so far being the so-called Army of Heaven led by Ahmed bin Hasan (called "al-Yemeni" in keeping with traditional teachings to the effect a precursor of the coming of the 12th Imam will have that name), which was by some accounts the principal target of last year's slaughter by the government and US forces of some 200 individuals including women and children on the outskirts of Najaf.

Some of these many groups mix political-party activities with their religion, the Al-Hayat reporter says, and he notes in particular the group led by Mahmoud al Hasani al-Sarkhi, which came to prominence during a demonstration at the Iranian consulate in Karbala last year. This is a group known for being critical of the traditional Shiite authorities like Sistani.

They call themselves "Sarkhiyun" or "Mahdawiyun". In recent times there have been verbal battles between the followers of Sarkhi and other Shiite groups, and also there have been [violent] skirmishes between then from time to time, particularly around Najaf, Karbala, Nasiriya, and Amara and in the vicinity of Diwaniya, [the latter place being] the main stronghold of the Sarkhiyun, particularly after religious authorities in Iraq and Iran accused Sarkhi of not having advanced to the level of a major authority, which angered his followers.

(There's more on Sarkhi as a perceived threat to the Shiite hierarchy in this report by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting from August 2007).

The journalist goes on to name a number of other cases of dissident groups, including the following:

A group led by Ayatollah Fadil al-Malaki, whose positions the reporter describes as close to those of Al-Sadr and Sarhki. Al-Malaki has degrees in religious law from Najaf in 1968, and in secular law from the University of Baghdad in 1976.

"Likewise active on the Shiite scene is the Islamic Vanguard Party, which was a secret organization under the Saddam regime, and which formerly exercised military activities in the marshlands of the South".

"And there is the movement of Jawad al-Khalasi, a grandson of Mahdi al-Khalasi who was well-known in the resistance to the British occupation, for which he was subjected to torture and exile after the formation of the Iraqi kingdom (in 1921). Al-Khalasi [the present one] supports the resistance to the occupation and opposes the current political situation".

Then there is the Ayatollah Hussein Ismael al-Sadr, headquartered in Kadhamiya, espousing a line known as "political realism" which calls for solution of problems via discussion.

And there is a mostly elite group known as the "Shiraziyun," named after their leader Sadiq al-Shirazi, which tries to avoid confrontations with other trends, and espouses political economic and intellectual openness.

The journalist adds that of course the most important of the Shiite trends, besides that of the Supreme Council, are the Sadrist, the Fadhila (a breakaway from the Sadrists) and the Dawa, which has split into several parts, the main ones being the "Islamic Dawa Party" led by the current Prime Minister al-Malaki, and the "Dawa Party--Iraq Organization" which is led by a member of parliament by the name of Abdulaziz al-Anazi.

In spite of the great number of "dissident" (from the point of view of Sistani and the Supreme Council) groups, the newspaper headed this story as follows:

The Authority of al-Sistani still enjoys the majority, in spite of the appearance of dozens of new movements...Anxiety over emergence of Shiite movements on the occasion of Ashura preaching beliefs similar to those of the "Army of Heaven"

Clearly the issue, as Al-Hayat explains it, is the challenge to the authority of Sistani. The Sadrists with their demand for a US troop-withdrawal are naturally one part of that. But so are groups like those of Sarkhi, which the writer notes had already been "skirmishing" with "other Shiite groups" around various cities in the South in the recent period of time. What is interesting to notice in the wake of the Ashura violence, is that the news reports, all sourced to Iraqi- and local-government sources, refer only to Mahdist groups, and are silent about the political dimension.

Something very similar happened last year, when misinformation from the Najaf authorities helped conceal the political dimension of what happened (not to mention local suspicions that in fact it was the authorities, not the group in question, that triggered that bloody confrontation).

More generally, I think this shows it could be a mistake to differentiate too absolutely between political movements like Sadr's on the one hand, and religious or messianic movements on the other, as though none of the Sadrist leadership and rank and file has any expectation of the coming of a new age; or as if the partisans with their yellow flags that appear in the Ashura celebrations aren't interested in toppling the Supreme Council regime as a specific end in itself.

For a general summary of the current state of Shiite politics, see also this report by Reidar Visser.

UPDATE:
And see also Visser's follow-up piece, called "The southern Mahdists speak for themselves", where he summarizes a statement by the "Adherents of the Mahdi" in which they stress their reformist political views more than any precise expectation of a once-and-for-all historical event. They say they have been targeted recently at their premises throughout the three southernmost provinces (contrary to the government-sourced reports blaming the Mahdists for starting the trouble). Visser writes:

In an interesting statement, the Adherents of the Mahdi, the group targeted in recent security operations in the southern Iraqi cities of Nasiriyya and Basra, have explained the conflict from their own point of view.

Just as they did during the Muharram confrontation in Najaf in early 2007, the Adherents of the Mahdi disclaim any connection with the Soldiers of Heaven and violent plots against the ulama. They describe their own group as a “reformist” movement of the kind that can be found in many world religions (the parallel to Jehovah’s Witnesses is highlighted), and, interestingly, in this statement do not focus so much on their apocalyptic ideas but rather stress an anti-ulama theme that shares certain features with neo-Akhbarism in its focus on the Koran and the life of the Prophet. They encourage the Iraqi people to go back to the original sources of Islam, rather than asking the ulama for help. In their view, it is not a religious duty to perform taqlid (emulation) of a high-ranking cleric (as per the orthodox Usuli Shiite view), nor is religious tax (khums) payable to anyone but the Twelfth Imam.

The Adherents of the Mahdi then go on to decry the recent violent operations against the group...

Right now I don't know where this particular group fits, if anywhere, in the above enumeration by the Al-Hayat reporter, but what the statement does underline is the fact that groups with historical-progress expectations can be, and often are, groups with progressive or at least anti-clerical political views. So the government-sourced reports have to be read with particular skepticism. They are their natural political enemies.

* Al-Hayat scrubs their links after a day or two, but I took the precaution of saving this, and I copied the text of the article in a comment. Naturally you have to enlarge the characters to make it readable.

A Baathist explains what's at stake in the Cairo process

Saleh al-Mukhtar, a diplomatic official under Saddam, and currently, to all appearances, a spokesman for the loyalist wing of the Iraqi Baath, posted an essay on albasrah.net on Jan 14, [corrected date] in which he argued that no one in the armed resistance should attend the Cairo Conference, the gist of his argument being to put this in the context of recent American moves to thwart or dodge pressure for withdrawal. The argument goes like this:

First, he says it is important to recall that at this time last year, pressure for withdrawal was building, with allies starting to withdraw their troops, Congress and the media pressing for withdrawal, and pressure building even from within the Republican Party. At that time, several things were done, including the declaration of the Islamic State of Iraq, then the attempt to split the Baath party, and finally and most seriously, the decision by the ISI to declare takfiir on all Iraqis but themselves, "as a way of tearing apart the Iraqi people and the armed resistance." (Readers will recall that on Mukhtar's reading, Al-Baghdadi and the ISI are directly or indirectly cats-paws of the occupation. See the earlier post here called "A Baathist looks at the big picture"). And Mukhtar sees the Awakening movement as another part of this overall strategy. He continues:

These [countermeasures] were a lifeline for [Bush] and his administration, and he was able to exploit them with his usual swagger by saying: "See what progress we are making. AlQaeda is defeated and we control Anbar as a first step in controlling all the other rebel regions"!

This Cairo Conference is within this context of strengthening Bush's position in rejection of withdrawal, and in support of the hawks within the American decision-making organization, and it will constitute another achievement by way of enrolling more "rebels" in the Bush-club in Iraq, [who will] announce in Cairo their "repentance", and they will put on the turban of Sistani, or the turban of Tareq al-Hashemi and they will curse [in words only] the occupation, and they will use the most extreme verbal expressions in describing it!

What Bush wants is to be able to say this: "Look! After having created the Awakening councils which have weakened AlQaeda, now we have these people coming to us who used to oppose the occupation with arms and with political attitudes, who now join in the ranks of those creating democracy in Iraq, and they are abandoning weapons and terror. So why are you still pressing for withdrawal? We are making process. Let us not abandon it. Stop opposing us when we are half way on the road to victory!

Mukhtar says those inclined to want to attend Cairo argue either that it will be useful to understand the American position, or useful to explain to them our position. Mukhtar says that makes no sense. After close to five years of military occupation, what is it about the American position you need to have explained to you? And what is it about our position that you need to explain to them? Our position is withdrawal first, and the Americans have ignored that demand. Any negotiating should be in the service of the armed struggle, not vice versa. So the positive reasons for attending don't make sense. And if you attend, your presence will be used by Bush is part of the anti-withdrawal process explained above.

Finally, like Awni Qalamji, Mukhtar appears resigned to the idea that some resistance people or factions will attend Cairo, and wants to make sure they realize this is a red line and a defining issue. Mukhtar writes in conclusion:

The coming stage will see a sorting-out between two policies in the area of armed struggle and in the area of political activity supporting it: The first is the continuation of the revolution and the escalation and expansion of its operations so as to compel the occupation to submit to the conditions of the resistance, being primarily [the commitment to] complete and unconditional withdrawal. The second is the policy of haggling with the occupier, and giving up the aim of complete liberation, and instead acceptance of deals that infringe the sovereignty and independence of Iraq, using as an excuse the failure to achieve the fighting unity that could compel the occupation to submit to our conditions.

The purpose of Mukhtar's piece, like that of Qalamji, is to warn potential attendees of the meaning and implications of their attendance, and the implication is that they are concerned that this American strategy of splitting the resistance could in fact have some success.

Another likely story

Robert Dreyfuss, writing in The Nation (online version at least), says the Jan 13 announcement of a "12-party" memorandum of understanding was "groundbreaking" and a "big step forward," that "could change the face of Iraqi politics in 2008," and then quite amazingly he goes on to say emphatically that this agreement has "emerged independently of the United States", without citing any authority for the latter point.

Let's have a look at the background.

His aims are, first, to tell a story of cumulative efforts by some of the GreenZone parties to develop a common front against the essentially separatist parties in the north (the two big Kurdish parties) and in the South (Supreme Council and Maliki's wing of the Dawa), and secondly, to celebrate this as an assertion of autonomy and freedom from American influence. The first part is true, although Dreyfuss' account includes exaggerations. The manifesto did say Clause 140 of the constitution is now a dead letter, meaning that the Kurds should give up trying to annex Kirkuk, and it also rejected the validity of oil contracts signed by the Kurdish regional government without reference to the central government. That it "blocked the privatization of Iraq's oil industry" is a bit of an exaggeration by Dreyfuss (it talked about natural resources belonging to all the people); and as far as Basra is concerned, it should be noted that the Fadhila party, a major power there, whose supposed participation in this Dreyfuss calls particular attention to, said today (Thursday) that it has not in fact joined this new alliance, and any reports to the contrary are devoid of truth.

Dreyfuss goes on to summarize reports of meetings of some of these parties: one in England (apparently referring to this bizarre report about a meeting involving a fugitive Iraqi businessman in Leeds), then one in Beirut, and now a proposal for another meeting in Paris, as examples of gathering momentum for this, completely free of American influence. That's where the story leaves the realm of exaggeration and actually breaks down. Because the reason for these meetings is to prepare for a conference in Cairo, and that conference is being arranged, by all accounts, by the Arab League on behalf of the American administration. Cairo will be follow-up to the meetings a couple of months ago at a Dead Sea resort in Jordan, which were organized by former US State Dept big name Richard Murphy, which included representation by not only GreenZone parties, but outsiders to the political process, meaning resistance groups, including Baathists or representatives of them. In other words, the Dead Sea/Cairo suite of meetings is an American-sponsored process try and integrate some of the armed resistance factions into a restructured GreenZone political process. The fact that no one in Washington or anywhere else in the English-speaking world bothered to follow up on the Dead Sea meetings with even so much as a "no-comment" from Murphy suggests very strongly that Condi and the State Department have deliberately gone into a period of occultation so as to not show American fingerprints on this, and the above-mentioned Dreyfuss piece is arguably proof that this has borne fruit.

In this connection it is worth noticing that the resistance-supporter Awni Qalamji, in his op-ed yesterday, made an important concession, namely that some of the resistance factions have in fact been (in his view) co-opted by this process. This is what the lawyers call an admission against interest, so I think it is credible. Not only is the process leading up to Cairo largely an American attempt to co-opt some of the armed resistance, but also it seems to have been partly successful.

Moreover, those who follow this co-opting process have been reporting on US/Arab League efforts to get other Arab countries to cooperate in pressuring expatriate Iraqi opposition/resistance figures living in their capitals to come forward and participate in this process. (Yemen was an example where that process didn't seem to be working well).

So there are at least two processes involved: Hints of renewed participation in the GreenZone process by a Sadrist/Allawi/Sunni group, working together; and US attempts to co-opt as much as possible of the armed resistance as part of the same restructuring. Which then raises the question how these two processes fit together. Here Qalamji has an explanation. He says one of the proposed "motivations" that the Americans are putting before the groups they are courting is this: Your participation, they are being told, is essential to prevent the triumph of the separatist Kurd/Supreme Council regime, with its Iranian implications for the South. It has been on this basis, Qalamji says, that the Gulf states have been convinced to help pressure resistance people to come forward and join in the political process. Resistance people should participate in the GreenZone in order to contribute to "balance" in the government, thus helping form a political bulwark against Iranian hegemony in South Iraq. Of course, to say the two processes are linked doesn't answer all the questions about how they are linked. But it does suggest that Dreyfuss spin on this not only is unsupported, but also highly implausible.

The fact is, no one knows the dynamics that led up to the "12-party" manifesto; and I don't know what dynamics led Dreyfuss to make the astonishing claim that the Americans didn't have anything to do with it. But for Dreyfuss to say that this was in fact without American involvement (without citing any justification) suggests to me that: (1) This was probably something an American government source told him (otherwise how could he be so sure); and (2) This is part of the effort to keep the American role in the Cairo process out of sight. So that whatever happens next in the GreenZone will appear to have been free of American influence.

Of course, the fact that the Sadrist current appears to be on the same team with any Sunni parties is a positive sign for the long-term future of Iraq, but the importance of that too can be exaggerated, because Sadr/Sunni was never the main problem. The main problem is the Sadrist/Baath antipathy, which isn't the same thing at all.

Resistance supporter on the forces at work in the Cairo process

Awni Qalamji writes in his regular op-ed in Al-Quds al-Arabi in criticism of those groups that have been in the ambit of the armed resistance, who it seems are now prepared to attend the Cairo Conference, even though the US hasn't responded to the main resistance demand for a commitment to complete and unconditional withdrawal:

At this point we need to move from generalities [about resistance strategy] to complete specificity and clarity, because these forces that are interested in accomodation with the invaders and their agents have constituted a heavy burden on the armed resistance in its fight against the occupier, for many reasons.

First, their political program is the opposite of the program of the Iraqi resistance....[Instead of insisting on the prior commitment to complete and unconditional withdrawal] these forces have entered into a process that is the complete opposite of the resistance program, and is instead based on conciliation and truce and inviting the occupation to negotiations under the pretext of an expulsion that would be face-saving and a withdrawal with honor....

And here Qalamji offers a glimpse of what he thinks the process has been like. He writes:

And in spite of the lack of response to these invitations [made to the Americans by the forces he is criticizing] still they persist in their program, and they continue putting out initiatives and proposals for free, instead of withdrawing from that and returning to the ranks of the Iraqi resistance.

Qalamji says the attempt to sell this approach as "political resistance," and as a support for the armed resistance, is fraudulent and disruptive of the unity of the resistance. In this regard he writes:

...this has generated confusion in Iraqi and Arab circles, in the sense that it has become difficult to confront these forces and expose their attitudes and explain the causes that underly them and their aims, namely that they are not following this path out of conviction or out of mistaken reasoning that could be corrected by discussion or by making them see the danger of their mistaken policy, but rather that they are following this approach in order to realize a particular agenda of theirs.

That, Qalamji says, is the first reason why these self-styled "political resistance" groups have been a burden on the armed resistance.

The second reason has to do with regional politics in the Gulf. Qalamji writes:

The second reason is that these forces have given up their political autonomy for the benefit of Arab countries, and particularly the emirates of the Gulf. These forces are prepared to facilitate the particular agendas [of these Arab states] in the following sense: [These forces']participation in the [Iraqi] poitical process presents the opportunity for creation of a balance in the political equation [in Iraq]for the advantage of a small clique, using the argument that this balance prevents an alliance between the Kurds and those parties that are working essentially in the interests of Iran...which is something that implies division of Iraq with a Shiite state in the south allowing Iran to realize its ambitions...And this explains the support provided by these Gulf states, in varying degrees, to the aforementioned forces, and their complete coordination with them, including the necessary material and political and PR assistance, financing of their activities and conferences, and so on.

So Qalamji's second criticism of those groups participating in Cairo is that they don't represent the Iraqi people because what they do represent is a "faction", namely that faction in the GreenZone that wants to drive a political-process wedge between the Kurds in the north and the Shiite separatists in the south. It is worth noting: While some might think of fighting the Kurd-SCIRI alliance as "nationalist", Qalamji is saying no: This is part and parcel of the kind of sectarian back-and-forth that goes on under a regime that is dominated by the occupation forces. The nationalist position is to expel the occupier first, then deal with internal politics.

And Qalamji's third argument against these forces is an elaboration of that point, namely that by participating in this type of discussion with the occupier still occupying the country, all they are doing is arguing about the specific sectarian allocations with a view to altering them, instead of attacking the cause of this whole sectarian approach, which is the occupation itself.

Still, Qalamji says the experience of Cairo is going to be a positive one in the long run, because it will make those accomodating forces in effect declare themselves, putting an end to the above-described ambiguity, thus simplying the struggle.

Al-Quds: CFR Report says Saudis supporting the Awakenings and want Maliki replaced with Allawi (UPDATED)

[UPDATE: This Al-Quds al-Arabi piece is apparently a summary not of an actual report, but of an interview with Gause by a CFR person which CFR has posted here. And the remarks by Gause are in some cases a little more circumspect than the Al-Quds summary indicates. For instance, Gause says "I'm pretty confident the Saudis have supported this (the Awakening Councils) with their influence and their money"); and with respect to their desire to see Allawi installed as PM, Gause at the same time expresses skepticism whether this is politically possible].

Al-Quds al-Arabi summarizes on its front page what it says is a report prepared by Gregory Gause, a political science professor at the University of Vermont, for the Council on Foreign Relations, whose main points are the following:

First, Gause says the Saudi regime "would like to see" Maliki replaced as Iraqi Prime Minister by someone less sectarian and less close to Iran, someone like former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. And second, although he doesn't have conclusive evidence partly because of the chronic secrecy of the Saudi regime, Gause "is certain" that the Saudi authorities are supporting the Awakening Councils in Iraq, and in any event this phenomenon is one that they are very much focused on. The journalist writes: "The American researcher sees the Saudis as having supported the Awakening Councils with all of their political and financial resources, and [the Saudis as] thinking of the Awakening Councils as part of their natural influence within Iraq". The Al-Quds headline-writer puts it this way: "Report: Saudi would like to replace Maliki with Allawi, and it is secretly financing the Awakenings."

The journalist elaborates as follows:

Gause says although the Saudis recognize that the Shiites are majority of the population of Iraq, and recognize that [the Shiites] will continue their role as a political formation in the Iraqi governing regime, still, the Saudis are making known their anxiety that this [current] situation could lead to a major marginalization of the Sunnis in Iraq, in addition to turning the Shiite ruling class into a group of agents in the hand of Tehran, and most of all Nuri al-Maliki, the report says.

Ironically, says Gause, Maliki's biggest ally at the moment is George Bush, and while the formation of alliances as [potential] substitutes for the current Iraqi regime with the support of Allawi [NOTE: not exactly what he said; see below] are in accord with US administration policy, still, Bush has not approved the abandonment of Maliki. Gause adds that there is a personal element to this, in the sense that Bush feels comfortable dealing with Maliki on a human level.

Gause says the Saudis feel the best way to end the war is to choose Iyad Allawi as new Prime Minister, and they contemplate that an administration of his would include a lot of Sunnis.

(The published remarks by Gause on the Bush-Maliki relationship are a little different from what is implied in the Al-Quds summary. Here is that exchange:

Q: Clearly patience for political change is running out. Politically, that’s really the only hot issue now in the United States—why the surge hasn’t produced political results.

A: Right, but Maliki’s most important ally right now is George Bush. This is consistent with his administration’s policy from earlier efforts to put together an alternative parliamentary coalition in Iraq. The president and the administration don’t think it’s a good idea [to oust Maliki].

Q: They’re afraid it would be too unsettling?

A: Yeah, I mean the president seems to be very much a guy who deals with personalities. And it seems he’s gotten comfortable with Maliki.)

Current events

Twenty-two Iraqi political representatives wound up meetings in Beirut on Monday with the preparation of a document that will be presented to the Arab League with the idea it should be included in the final statement of the Cairo Conference (date still not set for that). What is interesting is that the 22 represented essentially the same parties that signed the recently-reported "12-party" memorandum of understanding which has the Kurdish parties so worked up--they are the Sadrists, Fadhila, Dawa (or at least that part of the Dawa that has split from Maliki), Iraqi List (Allawi's group), and a selection of Sunni parties and independents--plus, (according to this account in Al-Quds al-Arabi) some Baath representatives. [I fixed previous sloppy grammar in that sentence]

The Al-Quds reporter refers to this as "a meeting between Iraqis who support and who oppose the government... to try and bring together the points of view of those who are participating in the political process and those who oppose it". This Beirut meeting, he says, is further to the meetings that took place at a Dead Sea resort in Jordan a couple of months ago.

As for the Cairo Conference, the reporter says although there is still no date set for it, there have been specific preparations during the last two weeks, including meetings by Faleh al-Fayad, the the head of the Iraqi Office for Reconciliation and Dialogue with leaders of other Arab countries. The only specific result of these meetings the journalist mentions is that the Arab League has made it a condition for hosting this meeting that it confirm the concept of the Iraqi nation, and that there be a renunciation of sectarianism.

Meanwhile, Al-Hayat, which doesn't mention the Beirut meeting, reports in detail on statements (1) by Kurdish representatives condemning the recent "12-party memorandum" as an attack on the legitimate rights of the Kurdish region (on the issue of whether Clause 140 on changing administrative boundaries is or isn't well and truly now a dead letter; and on the issue of oil contracts not signed by the central government); and (2) by the odd-couple of Hakim and Hashimi promising there will be important progress in the "political process" in the coming days and weeks, hinting at things like the return of Sunni ministers to the cabinet and so on.

There was one point where the Baghdad argle-bargle did possibly overlap with the gist of the Beirut meeting: Hashimi, in his discussion of the bright future for "political change", said this: "It will be better if this change comes from within the political process, than from without." Whether this was a suggestion of the possibility of an actual coup, or merely an acknowledgment that those "outside" the process (including Baathists) are making themselves heard, isn't clear.

What is clear is

(1) That there are two currents: The separatists (Kurdish in the north and Supreme Council in the south); and the (at least broadly speaking) nationalists, including the signatories of the 12-party memo and the attendees at the Beirut meeting.

(2) That the central government has been whittled down to reliance almost entirely on the separatists (along with Hashemi), and now its supporters Hashemi and Hakim are promising that it will be re-broadened in the coming days and weeks.

(3) That the US is also anxious to create a broader base in the GreenZone, in order to legitimate a new bilateral agreement once the current UN mandate runs out; and in doing so the US is interested in splitting off what they can of the armed resistance and incorporating them into the "political process". This is the Cairo process.

Without knowing about the Cairo process we would be left in ignorance of the overall meaning of the current events. Which, as I have often said, is exactly what narratives like those of Juan Cole are all about.

Awakenings: A Baathist conspiracy?

Malaf Press Agency says Baathists have been joining the Awakening Councils in large numbers, since their rapid expansion has provided a "golden opportunity for the Baathists or a sector of them to return to power and obtain positions that could be political or military, only under a different form". Malaf Press doesn't mention the fact, but this idea of a return of the Baath "under a different form" was raised prominently in the debate about the new "Accountability and Justice" law that was passed Saturday, with a coalition of Allawi's group and some of the Sunni parties complaining that there was a too-vague clause barring "the return of the Baath party to power or public life whether in ideology or politically or actively, or under whatever name". [I have no idea whether anything like that that was in fact included in the version that passed; the point here is that this Malaf Press piece seems to be part of this "chameleon Baath" theme. In other words, if you think of news as either raw or cooked, this is cooked.]

The journalist says the participation of Baath people in the Awakenings is with the cooperation of the Americans and it is part of an overall agreement about not attacking American troops. He says that's the Americans' point of view. It is the Ahmed Yunis al-Ahmed wing of the party that is keen on this, he adds, and

The Yunis Ahmed wing of the Baath is intent on [using this participation to] have an important domestic role [in the future] and in having a military power under its control at a time when it can rely on this or use it.

By contrast, the journalist goes on,

the Izzat al-Douri wing of the party rejects participation in any of these Awakening Councils, on the basis that to do so would merely be to strengthen the roots of the occupation. But some in the Izzat al-Douri wing see this as a mistake, and think it would be better to join these councils, because this would give them a golden opportunity to achieve something on the ground and also a card to play politically or militarily in case of need.

The journalist saves his best for last. He says in conclusion that "a number of the groups under the supervision of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, director of Mukhabarat in the old regime have become part of these Awakening Councils, and particularly those in Anbar and Baghdad".

I could be wrong, but given the current heated-up political maneuvering, this focus on "Baath" and its "return" in connection with the Awakenings could well be mostly a sectarian talking point against anyone with any Baath background and/or against any idea of GreenZone accomodation with the Awakenings.

A&J: The definitive account

Turning to the government newspaper Al-Sabah this morning for the definitive account of what the new non-De-Baathification regime ("Accountability and Justice") will look like and how the votes went down, we find the relevant article headed like this:

Change in the color of the letters spelling Allah Akhbar to yellow in the Iraqi flag, and change in the shape of the stars

Referring to a bill on altering the Iraqi flag that passed first reading on Saturday. The stars are Baathist symbols of peace, justice and tolerance. The text of the article leads off with accounts of speeches to Saturday's parliamentary session by a representative of the EU promising the door will be open to good relations with Iraq. This was followed by a request by a representative of the Fadhila party for the Europeans to meet separately with the major parties both within and outside of the political process.

Then there was voting on measures on the agenda, but before voting on the A&J bill, a member by the name of Samarae said: The aim of this law is fairness to a large sector of the population who are unable to achieve stability under the penalty system in the De-Baathification law, and it has been achieved based on a political agreement that supports national reconciliation. But there isn't any description of the actual effects of the law, and in case you were thinking of referring to the text as it was originally sent to parliament (here), you should note that Samarae refers also to alterations made that same by the "special committee". And in any event, there isn't any attempt to say what the new law actually does, and more interesting, for a law said to be based on political agreement for national reconciliation, there isn't any identification of who voted for it. The Al-Sabah reporter merely notes that it was voted by "majority of those present, who amounted to 140 deputies", so those present barely constituted a quorum (50.1% of the 275 deputies), without indicating party breakdown, or even spelling out whether the vote was unanimous by those present, or merely a majority of those present. Instead he moves on to the flag-remodeling issue.

Another analytical approach was tried by the large team at the New York Times, but at the end of the day they couldn't figure out the meaning of the new law either.

Arab Jabour aftermath

An initial report from Al-Hayat says many innocent residents of Arab Jabour who didn't leave following a warning were killed in the bombing, and other innocent residents' homes and lands were destroyed, but on the other hand a local Awakening person said only terrorist hideouts were targeted. The reporter summarizes the state of the question as "murky".

Al-Hayat talked to surviving residents of Arab Jabour, and reports:

Murkiness prevailed respecting the actual results of the American aerial bombing of the agricultural village of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad, with families that escaped affirming that "the attack destroyed homes and farms of people of the area", and according to witnesses the attack led to the death of many residents who didn't leave their homes in response to requests by the Americans, because the time allowed was insufficient.

The journalist then reviews the numbers respecting "targets", the 40,000 ponds of bombs, how long it took (no more than ten minutes), and so on, adding:

Many residents who escaped were unable to return to their homes, but some who did return affirmed the destruction of their homes and agricultural lands, while the American forces and the Iraqi government have released no report on the killed and wounded or on material damage.

Ayad al-Ubeidi, 35, a resident of Arab Jabour, said the American forces did not allow the families in the target area sufficient time to leave, and that led to the killing of many of them. He said the Americans distributed leaflets some hours before the attack, asking residents to leave their homes. However, Saif Salman, a member of the Arab Jabour Awakening, said the Americans asked the area residents to move to a secure area 10 days before the attack, but not all of them were able to do that.

Col. Raed Hasan al-Zubaie, president of the Doura Awakening [adoining this area to the north] said the secure houses were not subject to the American attack, and he added that the military operations throughout Arab Jabour targeted nests of terrorists and AlQaeda groups only. And he said the operations were planned beforehand with the cooperation of officers of the Awakenings in this region.

The journalist reviews the American military spokesperson's boast that this was the biggest single bombing attack since 2003, and the explanation of another to the effect this was necessary because the US military had so long neglected the area. There isn't any mention of the Dec 11 call for families to return to the area, or the Dec 27 celebration of the opening of the security center.

For its part, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq called for international organizations to investigate this attack, which it said has killed "tens of innocent residents including women, children and old people, and wounded a similar number of others", holding the American authorities and the Iraqi government criminally responsible.

Snow

It snowed in Baghdad yesterday, for the first time in memory, and the Al-Hayat reporter noticed something remarkable. It didn't just snow in Sunni areas, and it didn't just snow in Shiite areas. And it didn't just snow on the Green Zone, or on all sectors except the Green Zone. It snowed everywhere. "General Snow", people said, brought the city together. In case you thought five years of occupation and sectarianism had erased the idea of unity from people's minds.

The US forces invited families back to Arab Jabour only four weeks ago

Roads to Iraq calls attention to this:

Radio Sawa broadcast on December 11 the good news from the American forces that the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha had been definitively cleared of the last vestiges of AlQaeda. Here's what their website reported that day

Joseph Inge, fourth brigade, third American infantry division, said his forces with the aid of the Awakening forces had been able to clear out the last strongholds of AlQaeda in the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha south of Baghdad. He told Radio Sawa: "We have secured the area by freeing it from the threat of AlQaeda, with the assistance of local citizens". And Captain Inge called on the families that had fled to return to their homes in those areas, promising every type of support and assistance to those families.

On Thursday 40 "targets"--described by the miitary as "reported AlQaeda safe-havens"--were hit by a total of 40,000 pounds of bombs dropped on Arab Jabour in a 10-minute raid by the American Air Force assisted by another brigade, the second, of the same third American infantry division that had invited families back into the area only three weeks ago. The military had no information on how many people it killed.

It is the same old question that keeps coming back in so many forms: Was this incompetence, a mistaken declaration of the all-clear, followed by a slight course-correction? To believe that, you'd have to believe that there were in fact 40 AlQaeda locations where three weeks before the Americans had said there were none, in an area that they now controlled. Controlled with the assistance of their new-found local allies, that is. Or was this bombing motivated by something else, perhaps connected with the politics of the Awakenings, because certainly the scope of this bombing suggests the concept of making this area into a shock-and-awe example of something: US military spokesman later told AP that this was "one of the largest air-strikes since the onset of the war"; and the AP reporter says it "recalled the Pentagon's 'shock and awe' raids in the 2003 invasion".

The Cairo Process: Yemen and the Baath are not playing the game

The lead story in Al-Quds al-Arabi this morning (Wednesday January 9) is that Yemen has refused (according to Yemeni sources) a GreenZone request to "turn over" to the Iraqi government members of the Iraqi Baath party living in Yemen, and likewise refused a request to make persons in Yemen connected with the former Baath party "stop their activities". Instead, Yemen is described as having demanded the speedy turnover to Yemen of Yemenis held in Iraqi prisons on terror and other charges. (The newspaper also quotes a Yemeni website to the effect that president Ali Abdullah al-Salah told an Iraqi Interior Minister person earlier this week that in fact Yemen does not host any of the leaders on the lists of the Iraqi security authorities, but rather only members of a clan that participated in the administration of the prior regime, so in effect he has no one to turn over). Al-Quds al-Arabi cites remarks by an Iraqi parliamentarian to the Iraqi government newspaper Al-Sabah, confirming there has been such an Iraqi delegation to Yemen, aimed a an exchange of wanted persons and an improvement in diplomatic relations.

To understand why this is a big story, please recall earlier reports about the Cairo-conference process, in particular the detailed account by Haroun Mohammed late last month (here, and in the immediately following post). He said US State Department people were convinced the process would make no sense without participation by the Baath and other resistance groups, adding that US strategy was to lean on Arab states in the region to lean on their Iraqi expatriate residents to come forward and play the game, using "pressure" if necessary. The news from Yemen this morning indicates, in effect, that this strategy did not turn out well as far as Yemen is concerned, ending up in a request for an exchange of "wanted persons", which itself was rejected.

A statement by the Iraqi Baath party published on albasrah.net (dated January 7, 2008) sheds additional light on this. The statement, in the name of their pseudonomous spokesman Abu Mohammed, says there have been questions raised recently about the attitude of the Baath and other resistance groups with respect to US preparations, being carried out through their "diplomatic channels" for a "Cairo Conference" now expected to take place in March. The Baath party will have nothing to do with this, the spokesman says, repeating many of the points made by Haroun Mohammed in the article linked to above--particularly to stress that the Americans are in a bind, because they need a more-representative GreenZone regime to give their planned bilateral US-Iraq security agreement any credibility or legitimacy at all. What is new in this Baath party statement is just the point that the "Cairo Conference" preparations are in fact still going on (although the target date now seems to be March, for what that is worth), and the Baath, for its part (at least the Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, or loyalist wing) will not be attending and rejects the whole process as another occupation attempt to split the resistance. This could be what triggered the GreenZone decision to get tough and try and have Yemen round some of them up and turn them over.

Hungern wie im Krieg

A German news-site (heise.de/tp) assembles the available links on the food-cutbacks issue, and explains this better than I did, in a post called "Going hungry like in Wartime: A new catastrophe coming in Iraq?" And they have one link that I missed in the earlier posts, one from the UN news agency IRIN dated December 4, quoting remarks by the Iraqi Trade minister on the exact details of the cutbacks and the budgetary shortfall. (Five items will be distributed instead of ten; there is a vague remark by the Trade minister about introducing means-testing). A health official in Baghdad is quoted:

Mohammed Falah Ibrahim, a food security expert at the Baghdad health directorate, said cutting items from the food rations’ system would lead to hunger in many parts of Iraq.

“These things should be studied very carefully, especially the cutting of children’s milk, because this will leave many poor families in danger and especially IDPs [internally displaced persons]," Ibrahim said.

“There should be a complementary plan in place to ensure that financial aid reaches those poor families who will be affected by this, otherwise many Iraqis could die of hunger," Ibrahim said.

Budget mysteries of the IMF

It was noted in the comments a few posts back that the Iraqi government signed a new agreement with the IMF on December 20, and that the IMF announcement included some of their usual language about government-commitments to austerity in current government spending. Including this, from the IMF director's homily:

The [Iraqi] authorities' program for 2008 aims to allocate resources towards investment, including in the oil sector, and to improve the provision of public services, while containing current government spending, notably on the wage and pension bill. The program—which envisages an increase in economic growth, a further reduction in inflation, and an increase in net international reserves—will also encompass priority structural reforms, including actions to strengthen administrative capacity and governance.

An announcement earlier in December about cutbacks in the number of items and the volume of each item to be included in the 2008 food-rations program seemed to dovetail with this. But it appears no one (except the commenter here) noticed the role of the IMF in this.

However, people's very understandable unhappiness with the food-cutbacks themselves was noticed by an Iraqi parliamentary official, and he makes some ambiguous remarks to the government newspaper Al-Sabah this morning about this. He said parliamentarians have been meeting with ministerial officials about 2008 budget, and they agreed on two points. The first on government salaries (to be discussed in a moment), and

The second point on which they agreed was on leaving the number of ration-card items unchanged, and on working to see that the rations reach citizens at the scheduled times, and he [the parliamentary official] disclosed that there will be a clause in the budget stating that the Finance Ministry will undertake guarantees of the expenditures necessary for the provision of the ration-card items in 2008.

The problem is that this isn't a question of "efforts" and "guarantees", but rather one of budgetary allocations. The earlier report on the cutbacks said the Trade Ministry had asked for $7 billion for the program, and had obtained only $3 billion, hence the cutbacks. Today's weasel-words by the parliamentary official in the government newspaper don't deal with that, and the puzzle of how much is allocated to the food program in 2008 remains, along with the question of IMF pressure on that budget. (Moreover, "leaving the number of items unchanged" is itself ambiguous, because it doesn't spell out whether this means "unchanged" at five items, or "unchanged" at the original ten or eleven).

The second piece of the budget puzzle has to do with government salary scale. As you will note from the above remarks by the IMF director, the Iraqi government agreed to cut current spending on government salaries. But what the parliamentary official says in Al-Sabah this morning doesn't seem to fit. He says in the meetings between parliamentarians and government officials, there was agreement on a new pay-scale, and on allocation of an additional $3 billion in the 2008 budget to cover the increased cost of this. At least that's what I think he said. Here is the quote. See if you agree:

[At these parliamentary/ministerial meetings] there was a prominent group of observations that will be included in the 2008 budget, namely the new pay-scale [for government employees] approved by the Council of Ministers, and there will be inclusion of $3 billion in the 2008 budget for the application of that.

The journalist adds by way of background: The Council of Ministers announced last week the new government-employees pay-scale, which will take into account years of service, educational degrees, marital status, location and so on.

These seem like fairly simple questions: How much money is actually in the 2008 budget for the food program; how does this compare to 2007; and what was the effect of IMF pressure on this? And given the IMF remark about the commitment to cutting spending on salaries and pensions, how can we understand the $3 billion in the 2008 budget for the "application" of the new government pay-scale?

Would it be too much to expect that somewhere in the Washington media establishment somebody might be able to dig up the actual text of last month's IMF-Iraq agreement, or of the 2008 budget? Or is this sacred ground.

More on the troubles of the Awakenings

From Al-Hayat, on the recent attacks on the Awakening Councils:

Observers in Baghdad say the spontaneous way in which these Awakening organizations were formed, and the big results they obtained in a short space of time has confronted them with political difficulties beyond their capacity [to deal with], and that is what they are now suddenly in the midst of.

Political parties and persons have accused them of being infiltrated sometimes by AlQaeda, and sometimes by Baathists, while the government, for its part, continues to warn that they could be turned into militias outside the law, bringing the issue of sectarian conflict back to square one.

The Americans credit them with a decline in violence, particularly sectarian, and with reining in the influence of AlQaeda in their traditional strongholds in the Sunni cities, but very quickly military and political experts warned that the diminution in violence could be temporary and not permanent, if this isn't accompanied by decisive political developments.

The journalist says the basic dynamics are still the same: AlQaeda retains its ability to adapt, and the Awakenings continue to stress that others aren't doing the job. The journalist puts it this way: Omar al-Baghdadi in effect acknowledged the inroads that these organization have made in the latter part of 2007 when he announced last month the special campaign for attacking them, but "those close to the armed groups say, in the light of these recent attacks, that AlQaeda still has the ability to adjust and change its strategy".

Leaders of the Awakening Councils say they represent the first line of defence against AlQaeda ...in the face of the lack of provision [by others] of military or financial or morale requirements for facing this kind of a challenge.

By way of illustrating the political and sectarian crossfire their quick success risks putting them in, the journalist quotes the leaders of three other Awakening councils, one of them a former Baathist officer, who accused the Maliki government of "having a hand in the elimination" of some of the Awakening people. Another accused the Mahdi Army of being involved in this "on the basis of religious fatwas" (not elaborated on). And a third blamed the Iranian Quds Brigades.

(Harith al-Dhari, for his part, in an Al-Hayat interview, puts the picture this way: When there was money in Al-Qaeda, people in need of money joined AlQaeda; now that there is money in the Awakenings, people in need of money join them. While the Iraq-weakening aims of the forces behind all of this are not in question for Al-Dhari, this latest take seems to leave the specific political upshot of the Awakenings indeterminate).

Disinformation officers on the job

Yesterday's attack in Adhamiya, killing the head of the Adhamiya awakening council and a large number of others, represented an escalation in the campaign of ISI attacks on the awakening groups, a campaign launched by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi with his strange early-December speech (calling for three hits per ISI fighter, campaign to last until January 29), further juiced up by the latest Bin Laden speech also attacking the awakening groups by name.

This campaign of attacks by the ISI on the awakening groups follows a period of relative calm, and it is perhaps natural that the retailers of various sectarian points of view would not waste any time in trying to tell the story their way. Here are two examples: Juan Cole trying to implicate the "neo-Baathists" (!!) and (according to Nahrainnet) AlJazeera trying to implicate the Maliki government!

For instance, this morning Juan Cole writes that the attacks yesterday were "a further sign of a determined new-years attack by the radical Salafis and/or neo-Baathists..." He made up the part about "neo-Baathists" out of whole cloth, citing no evidence that the recent wave of attacks has been anything but ISI. It is part of his overall idea of discrediting any Sunni group as indistinguishable from the takfiiris. It is an old story, but it is worth pointing it out again this morning.

Interestingly, the Sadrist news-site Nahrainnet.net sees the same thing happening from the other side of the sectarian battlefield. Their reporter was watching AlJazeera and heard the AlJazeera reporter say from Baghdad: "There is a good possibility that it is the Maliki government that is behind these two explosions [yesterday in Adhamiya] and the [other] attacks on the awakening councils." To which the Nahrainnet reporter adds two exclamation points.

The Al-Jazeera reporter (Nahrainnet says) went on to "assert that a Friday sermon a couple of weeks ago in Karbala by a Sistani spokesman attacking the awakening councils, along with statements by representatives of some of the Shiite parties, support his opinion that the government was behind these attacks!!" This was an insult to the intelligence of viewers, the Nahrainnet reporter adds, because in fact there isn't any Iraqi party or group, no matter how anti-government, that suggests that the government could have been behind these attacks. [Actually, another Awakening leader did make that very accusation: see next post].

The Nahrainnet reporter suggests this strange episode reflects American policy, which is to strengthen the Awakenings to make them "an alternate army in Iraq...to make them proxies for American in the control of Iraq...in case they have to withdraw under pressure..."

Nahrainnet is suggesting that AJ smearing the government in this way is part of the ideological "Sunni army versus government army" balance-of-power struggle that the US has undertaken to rein in the Shiite government.

Just as from the other end of the sectarian battlefield, Juan Cole is dusting off his "Salafi--Baathist, what's the difference" propaganda weapon against the Sunni opponents of the government.

The Cairo Conference will not take place, and other news

(1) Al-Hayat quotes Sadrist and Allawi-list deputies who say those two groups, along with the Fadhila party and some independents from the UIA and perhaps elsewhere, are getting ready to sign a "commitment document" expressing agreement on a number of points, including (1) opposition to the UN's proposal for extending the operation of Section 140 of the Constitution; (2) the need for a schedule for withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq; and (3) opposition to the Iraqi government signing any bilateral security agreement with the United States. In other words, a bare-bones nationalist position.

Needless to say, the Allawi spokesman exhibited his group's usual tendency to exaggerate the importance of this, claiming this will solve a lot of problems and change the course of the political process. No, said the Sadrist spokesman, this is merely a statement of some common principles on which we agree, to be used as a basis for confronting the current legislative program.

(2) Another Sadrist spokesman said the Sadrist current will refuse to attend any reconciliation conference where the Baath party is represented. His quoted remarks include a specific reference to the Mahdi Army as a factor in this: He said the freeze on the activities of the Mahdi army is still in effect, and while that freeze is still in effect it would be difficult for the Sadrist current to be represented at a conference where the Baath party is represented. The remark isn't explained or elaborated on.

(3) Faleh al-Fayyad (UIA, head of a parliamentary committee on national dialogue), in Cairo, told Aswat al-Iraq that a representative of the Arab League will soon visit Baghdad to help promote national reconciliation, but Fayyad added that reports about plans for a broad-based conference in Cairo this month on national reconciliation aren't true, because there is no time and place currently set for such a meeting. And someone in the Iraqi foreign ministry said the ministry doesn't know anything about any such plans.

(4) Azzaman and Aswat al-Iraq both quote parliamentary sources as being confident that the 2008 budget will be approved by Parliament this week, and also a final version of a law to replace or amend the current de-Baathification law. But in neither case is the actual substance of the legislation explained.

Tentative summary: The efforts to get political-process and resistance factions together by sometime this month in Cairo is not going as well as expected, so the official line now is that there never was any designated time or place for that. The underlying aim of that was to set up a broader-based GreenZone regime to better legitimate the US-Iraq bilateral agreement that will be needed once the UN mandate runs out the end of this year. Probably the Sadrist-Allawi-Fadhila et al agreement, including commitment to demand scheduled withdrawal of US forces and to oppose any bilateral US-Iraq agreement, soft as that agreement may be, could represent something of an intra-Parliamentary challenge to that whole project (by insisting on scheduled withdrawal as a prior requirement); while the Sadrist refusal to sit with the Baathists (citing the current Mahdi Army stand-down) represents another, different, challenge to that project. The reason it's so difficult for people to follow the thread of this is that the project itself (broader GreenZone base for a bilateral US-Iraq agreement) has never been acknowledged in any widely-circulated English-language accounts, so events in the mind of the anglosphere are again taking on that all-too-familiar ketchup-on-the-wall o-those-crazy-Iraqis character.

Neo-liberalism: The Big Picture

(See also the comments for a discussion of the specific IMF role in this)

Hunger is not one of the widely-discussed or advertised issues in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter, usually assigned instead to the cubbyhole of the "humanitarian". So probably a lot of people, certainly myself included, didn't notice what was arguably the most important announcement of 2007 from Baghdad, namely that the recent security-improvements will not be used to boost ration-card food-allocations to Iraqis, but rather that the food allocations will be cut. AlJazeera carried a brief announcement about this under the heading "economics" on December 6.

The Iraqi government announced its decision to diminish the ration-card allocation to Iraqi citizens in the coming year, on account of what it called budgetary insufficiency to provide the food-assistance which serves over 60% of Iraqis.

The Trade Minister said [only] five commodities will be distributed, namely sugar, flour, rice, milk, and cooking-oil. The ministry had asked for a budget of $7 billion for distribution of the 10 basic commodities, but all they were allocated was $3 billion. He said the ministry will continue distributing its existing stores of [the other five commodities that have normally been included in these rations, including] lentils, chickpeas and soap, but it won't be able to buy any more of these. The Minister noted that over 60% of Iraqis have a basic reliance on these food-rations.

The food ration system was begun in the era of the late president Saddam Hussein after the imposition by the United Nations of economic sanctions on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

And yesterday (January 4) Azzaman ran a short item as part of its selection of English-language news, headed "Food rationing to continue but with fewer items".

If you go to Oxfam.org and type "Iraq rations" in their search-box, you will see something very interesting. In January 2003 their executive director warned against invading Iraq, citing the certain effects this would have on the civilian population. Here is the beginning of that report:

Oxfam International today called on the international community to oppose a war with Iraq on the grounds that it would lead to a massive humanitarian crisis. (Porto Alegre, 26/Jan/2003) - Speaking at the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre Oxfam International’s Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs said that assessments made by Oxfam staff indicated an enormously vulnerable civilian population. ‘The impact of a war on civilians would simply not be acceptable and we do not believe that those advocating war have understood this. Oxfam demands that governments who are considering war as a positive option explain properly to the public how they are going to avert a humanitarian catastrophe,’ Mr Hobbs said.

Oxfam’s assessment is that with over 15 million people of Iraq’s 22 million people already on World Food Program food rations –a consequence of the last war, over ten years of sanctions, and the policies of the Iraqi government - there are huge risks to millions especially vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly.

‘One of the major risks is that in using so-called ‘surgical’ airstrikes - as happened in the last gulf war – there is a grave risk that power stations will be targeted and destroyed. Oxfam knows that if that happened, the Iraqi water and sanitation system, which depends on electricity and which is already in a parlous state, would collapse, leaving millions of people vulnerable to diseases and epidemics.’

Then a few months ago in July 2007 they issued a report they summarized as follows:

While horrific violence dominates the lives of millions of ordinary people inside Iraq, another kind of crisis, also due to the impact of war, has been slowly unfolding. Up to eight million people are now in need of emergency assistance. This figure includes:

• four million people who are ‘food-insecure and in dire need of different types of humanitarian assistance’
• more than two million displaced people inside Iraq
• over two million Iraqis in neighboring countries, mainly Syria and Jordan, making this the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world.

This paper describes the humanitarian situation facing ordinary Iraqis and argues that, while violence and a failure to protect fundamental human rights pose the greatest problems, humanitarian needs such as food, shelter, water and sanitation must be given more attention.

So in addition to the two million internally displaced, and the two million refugees in other countries, there are around four million Iraqis, Oxfam figures, that are on the edge of chronic hunger. And in the face of this, the US supported GreenZone regime cuts back the food-ration allocations. I think someone noted that the $3 or $4 billion alleged budgetary shortfall is equivalent to the cost of about two weeks or a month of US military "operations" in that country.

It's amazing what you can do with words nowadays. Everyone knows that "we" helped "improve security" with the "surge", but naturally it is assumed that, with respect to those four million Iraqis on the edge of hunger, that is something that has nothing really to do with "us". That's because "we" are specialists in military affairs. That's why we are there. For the surgical air-strikes, wall-building, random arrests, arming of vigilante groups, and the rest of it. All of which is merely to clear the ground for others to fulfill their humanitarian responsibilities to their own citizens. Military operations are the service we provide. It is up to others to provide the other services.

Of course, most people in the world consider this ludicrous. Anyway, we already have this debate about whether the progressive dismantlement of Iraq has been American policy or merely the result of American "bad policy implementation", and as time goes by, no doubt there could same debate about hunger and starvation. Already, for those who very plausibly see American policy as anti-Arab, there is the example of Gaza to point the way.

What Hakim said

The full text of the talk by Abdulaziz al-Hakim in Najaf on Thursday is available on the Supreme Council's website almejlis.org. Let's take a look at what he said.

This is the run-up to Ashura, the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Hussein, which falls on January 19 this year, and Hakim explained that every year, there is a sort of State of our Union message that looks at the political, cultural, and social issues facing the Shiite community in the coming year. First he takes these points up with explicit reference to seventh-century history. Last year the main points included the importance of dialogue, and the principle of not being the initiator of violence, but fighting only in self defense. This year, he said, there is another issue, based on the refusal of Hussein to buckle under to the demands of obeisance from Maawiyah bin Abi Sofiyan, the tyrant of Damascus who was to be the founder of the Umayyad caliphate, and his son Yazid. Hussein refused to pledge allegiance, Hakim reminded his listeners, because he knew this was unjust and illegal regime, and allegiance would mean the end of his own moral authority and the honor of the group. So a major theme this year will be the refusal to buckle under to an unjust and corrupt system, in a steadfast way:

And this is a lesson for us in our lives today, in the sense that we have to learn to say what is the right, but with consideration for the common good (or common "reconciliation": same word). And the consideration for the common good which is connected to the lives of people generally, is not something that can be judged by anyone at their whim, or on the basis of a personal opinion, because the result of that would be chaos. Rather, those who should judge this are those who are experts in the conditions of the times, and grounded in religion...[and he further describes the ayatollahs, adding that everyone has an obligation to be guided by them].

So far so good. The absolute obligation to stick to the "right" is modified by a need to merge that with the common good, and that has to be done according to "the conditions of the time" as interpreted by those trained in religion to do so. So next Hakim goes on to talk about the "conditions of the time" in terms of currently outstanding problems. He starts that section off like this:

Today we face a number of problems that require serious attention from all of us in order to bring Iraq to a safe shore, particularly after all of the achievements owing to the persistence and sacrifices of Iraqis in these past years, both before and after the fall of the former regime--and among these problems is the existence of criminal gangs with Saddamist roots that are trying to impose their control on the country, and their means include killing and threatening and terror to attain their aim of hegemony and theft and imposition of tribute (or tax) on the people and robbing them and killing loyal people particularly those in positions in the marjaiyya...[and he goes on to recount in detail the killings of Najaf authorities recently and under the Saddam regime] And these gangs are filled with hatred and resentment for this line [of Shiite authorities] being the same line that they have been killing for over three decades...These are Saddamist Baathists who took the decision to work under various pretexts and various names to set fitna among Iraqis, and within the single entity [I think this means: and also Shia-on-Shia fitna], and they have tried to establish a condition of chaos as they did with their attacks on the quiet city of Amara. These [Saddamist Baathists] are they who have undertaken all of these crimes, whether under different names or anonymously. And it is incumbent on you to understand them and their atrocities in the various regions of the country, and to let the people know about them; and to stand up to them because it is not possible to accept them, or to be silent, or to submit to them....

The gist of this is that the aspect of the life of the Imam Hussein that the times call on Shiites to emulate is that of steadfast refusal to buckle under to injustice and illegality. And the above text shows that what Hakim wants his people to preach this coming year is the continuing confrontation with the Saddamist Baathists, under whatever name they may be operating. There is no mention in this particular section of his talk of the takfiiris, salafis, ISI, AlQaeda, or any such thing. Which is of course noteworthy, considering that the ideology of killing apostates, including Shiites, is their ideology, not that of the Baathists. In any event, this is the second point I would like to emphasize, namely that Hakim's overall theme for the coming year is continued resistance to what he calls the Saddamist Baathists, and he wants his preachers to spread the word about that.

Next, and comprising the body of his talk, there is a list of sixteen specific areas where there is need of improvement, starting with improvements in the daily lives of individuals through better services and so on; then fighting government corruption; then speeding up the rebuilding of the shrines at Samara; then preservation of the unity of Shiites, where he adds: "We are convinced that preservation of their unity by the People of the Household (Shiites) in Iraq is the basis of national unity, so it is incumbent on everyone to work for the strengthening and solidity of that unity".

His sixth point has to do with national reconciliation, and the key part goes like this:

National reconciliation is the lofty aim we all work for in order to overcome the past, once [literally: after] the oppressed have obtained their rights and the oppressors their punishment for the crimes they have committed against citizens. Today we are seeing terror being driven out of more places in Iraq, and progress in reconciliation on the popular level, and we are seeing Shiites and Sunnis coming together in many areas, following the attempts by the terrorists and the takfiiris to push Iraqis to the brink of civil war through killing based on [sectarian or racial] identity, and operations [aimed at causing forced] evacuation. And we are seeing progress on the level of contacts between Shia and Sunni clerics, with conferences in Najaf, Basra, Baghdad and other places, and these meetings have had a major effect. So I urge on you the necessity of continuing in this line, so as to achieve greater unity and rapprochement in the interests of harmony and concord.

It was from this section of his talk that the media picked up the theme of Hakim's "surprisingly conciliatory" remarks about the awakening councils.

Continuing, Hakim enumerates other areas in need of improvement, including (7) improvement in the status of women; (8)more help for the poor; (9) encouraging the return to the government of those who have left; (10) independence of Iraq via a bilateral treaty with the US, thus ending the UN mandate; (11) more progress in construction and development; (12) preparation for the next round of elections.

And next comes the section on federalism, which reads as follows:

The concept of a centralized state in Iraq has ended, under the auspices of (or with the continuation of) the acknowledgment in the Iraqi constitution of a federal state and the establishment of a Kurdish region in Iraq. And according to the Iraqi constitution the Iraqi state is a state protective of compromise (or "reconciliation": same word), and not authoritarian, and what that means is that all are bound by the constitution and are bound to give rights for the establishment of regions, and grant to the governates broad powers, as the constitution says. Unfortunately there have are some who continue, still today, to think with the mentality of the centralized state, and work to constrain the governments and to not grant them the prerogatives (or benefits) that the constitution calls for, on various pretexts....

And Hakim goes on to note cases where provinces have done a lot more in terms of development and so on than has the central government.

There are a couple of important points. First, this is a sweeping rejection of the whole "mentality of a centralized state". I don't think you can find in these statements any justification for thinking Hakim is proposing federalism as merely a distribution of powers once a strong central government has been established. On the contrary: First of all he says the whole concept of a centralized state is finished. And secondly his constitutional principle of "compromise" rather than "authority" means that governates under the current system, not to mention federal regions under a future system, should be favored. (Please note: I am not talking here about what the constitution says or doesn't say, but only about what Hakim's views are, namely that they seem to be radically anti-central-government).

So there is first of all a historical mission to stand up to tyranny and illegality which translates into a continued need to expose and confront the Saddamist Baathists who continue to try to tyrannize the country. And while there has been progress in reconciliation "on the popular level", and "on the level of contacts between Shiite and Sunni clerics", still Hakim describes national reconciliation as that lofty aim that will come about after the oppressed have obtained their rights and the oppressors have been punished. How this implied settling of accounts with the Saddamist Baathists is supposed to come about Hakim doesn't say, but obviously, to say the least, things like de-DeBaathification on the national level are not part of his program for this year. The progress he sees in popular-level and clerical-level rapprochement is on one level; but the historical mission having to do with vindicating the rights of the oppressed seems to be on a whole other level.

And it seems his position on federalism reflects this. Speaking in Najaf about federalism clearly implies the big Shiite nine-governate federal region. And his proposed constitutional principle that would put "compromise" ahead of "authority" as an overall principle when it comes to regional or even provincial affairs, shows that his focus is not on elevating the recent local progress into reconciliation on a national level, but rather his focus is on the big Shiite region, which is something that can be fostered and developed without compromising that historical mission of refusing to buckle under to the ever-present threat of Baathist tyranny.

That seems to be the picture. Now whether Hakim delivered this sermon or anything like it in the Oval Office is probably doubtful. Still the question remains: Did the US administration pick Hakim and his group to be their ally not understanding their world-view; or did they pick Hakim and his group to be their ally with an understanding of their world-view and knowing what this would could mean for the structure of a post-occupation Iraq?

Solidarity (with an additional note upon awakening)

Let's say you had a dream last night and there were hundreds of Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders meeting together in a big tent in the southern part of Baghdad, praying the same prayer in the same way, and affirming their unity, along with Awakening Council leaders and local police and army people too. The representative of the Sadrist trend, which convened the meeting, denounced those who had introduced into Iraq the terms "rejectionist" to apply to Shiites, and who purported also to excommunicate Sunnis on the same narrow sectarian grounds. One of the Sunni tribal leaders stood up and said we are intermarried and we are interconnected, and the only people with problems about sect are the politicians with their sinecures. Another said we are together on a ship bound for safe land, and those who are not with us will be left behind. And so it went. There were no Americans there, no Hakim, no Maliki, none of them, no representatives of "the political process". And you woke up and looked in the papers for a report about this, and you didn't find any.

But it happened. You weren't dreaming. An Agence France Presse reporter filed about the meeting, and Al-Quds al-Arabi had a story about it, almost exactly in the way you dreamt it. But it wasn't--you know, it wasn't, like in the papers. Which doesn't mean it didn't happen. It did. It's hard to find anything else to say about this, except that the meeting was held in that area in South Baghdad where three months ago several hundred Sunni families fleeing the atrocities of the ISI, were given refuge by Shiite families and by the Sadrist organization in the neighboring district. If you type Hur Rajab in the search-box at the top of this page, you will see summaries of reports at that time from Reuters, Nahrainnet and others. That wasn't like, you know, in the papers either. You probably still think the whole idea is a dream, but I can't do anything about that.

(Additional note upon awakening: Interestingly enough, there is a piece in the NYT this morning (Friday) on the "Shiite praises awakenings" theme, along with a dramatic picture, looking like an outtake from Lawrence of Arabia or something. But it was a different meeting! The speaker was Hakim of the Supreme Council, delivering a very Bush-like address on the need to continue fighting terrorism everywhere, with the usual Supreme Council thing about the need for federalism (this was delivered in Najaf, so "federalism" meant the big nine-province quasi-separatist Supreme Council scheme) so that services can be provided without reference to a central government. What made it particularly interesting was that the NYT failed to tell its readers who the audience was. This was an audience of "messengers" and "[female] messengers"--a Shiite term for lay-preachers of the Shiite faith--and needless to say there wasn't person of the Sunni persuasion anywhere.)

Latest news on Condi's Cairo process

Another interesting thing you can learn at the Roads to Iraq blog: it appears the resistance-group that goes by JAAMI or Islamic Front for Resistance in Iraq has a web-site (jaami.info), and they reported January 1, under a Cairo dateline, some of the recent goings-on that the Egyptian government is trying to mediate, in preparation for the coming Cairo Conference on Iraqi reconciliation*. This Jaami piece is titled: "Under cover of strict silence on Sadrist discussions in Cairo: This was an American agenda for talks, under the cover of 'preserving the Arab nature of Iraq'!". Note the exclamation point.

The gist of the story is that a delegation from the Sadrist current visited Cairo the week of November 25 to December 4, having been officially invited by the government of Egypt, and the first point the reporter wants to stress is that in the month since then, no one has said a word in public about this, reflecting, he says, the determination of the Egyptian authorities to keep this out of the media. He wonders why. He describes the series of meetings as being on the theme of "the Sadrists stance with respect to the Sunnis, in the light of what the Mahdi Army has been engaged in against individuals and mosques in residential areas." Which would seem to indicate this is coming from the point of view of the operational side, shall we say, of the Jaami. And from that point of view, the exclamation point in the title seems to say: "Imagine! Negotiating with the Sadrists as if this were for the preservation of the Arab nature of Iraq! No wonder they're keeping it quiet."

His first substantive point is that his sources told him the Egyptians wanted from the Sadrist delegation a "clear policy statement expressing a nationalist orientation that preserves the Arab character of Iraq". And the reporter says this "indicates that the visit came by way of rectifying the attitude of the [Sadrist] current, in search of Arab support for easing pressure [on the Sadrist current] from the Americans and from the [Iraqi] government". The reporter recalls: Salah Obaidi (leader of this delegation) had said just before the visit that this was in the context of the Sadrists opening to the Arab milieu (or environment) and the continuation of a program of exchange of points of view, supported by the Sadrists. (This too seems to be consistent with an operational Sunni-resistance view of events: There is American and GreenZone military pressure on the Sadrists, so the latter are naturally interested in any talks that could lead to an easing in that pressure).

Here comes the key part:

Political sources, who declined to be identified, said the invitation by the Egyptian government [to the Sadrists] to meet with them in Cairo, which was transmitted by way of their ambassador in Damascus, was [a move] directly assigned by the American administration , so the meetings between the Sadrists and the Egyptian government had an American dimension, particularly since this [American] administration is completely unable to negotiate directly or indirectly with the Sadrist current, and this is something that greatly complicates things for the Americans.

The Egyptian government attempted to get from the Sadrist delegation a commitment in writing in which they would repudiate [the idea of] Iranian hegemony over their political decision-making, indicating a request (or demand) that there be a parallel or equal influence from the Arab side (i.e., on Sadrist decision-making). And the meetings also proposed the concept of [the Sadrists having] direct meetings, or indirect meetings mediated by the Egyptian government, with various parties, first of all with the Americans, and then with the Political Office of the Iraqi Resistance. There was suggested the possibility of Egypt providing funds to help the Sadrists in needy urban areas; and there was suggested the possibility of Egyptian mediation in securing the release of Sadrist prisoners at the earliest possible time.

In other words, this story is that Americans are using Egypt as their agent in an attempt to wean the Sadrists away from Iran. The Americans had Egypt invite the Sadrists to Cairo to tell them this, namely that in exchange for a commitment to limit Iranian influence on them, there might be the possibility of Egyptian financial aid, Egyptian mediation in prisoner-releases, and more generally an easing in the current military pressure on them.

So there could undoubtedly be another dimension to the exclamation point in the title. "This is being mediated by Cairo! Just look at the wonderful renaissance the people of Gaza are enjoying under the honest-brokership of this courageous regime, and you Sadrists, too, will no doubt also want to put your trust in this highly trustworthy regime!" But as I have indicated, the actual point of view of this article is that of a Sunni-resistance group questioning the bona fides of any idea of Sadrist "arabism".

And to underline what he sees as the strangeness of this whole opening-to-the-Sadrists enterprise, the reporter recounts a couple of developments that occurred in the months before this recent visit. He says Adel AbdulMahdi (Supreme Council, and the Iraqi vice-president) had secretly made a financial contribution to Al-Azhar, which was later--quite publicly--returned to him by the authorities apparently by way of embarassing him. (This was apparently reported, but I didn't see anything about it). "And another strange thing", this reporter says, " is that the Egyptian newspapers have recently been praising the Sadrist current as "an Arabist current", an expression they normally apply to groups like the Baath, the Nasserists and the nationalists". In other words, it appears to him that there have been other, earlier, manifestations of this attempt by the Egyptian establishment to court the Sadrist current, as opposed to the Supreme Council.

If the Sunni-resistance reporter with an operational perspective sees this as primarily about what he sees as the hypocrisy of talking about the "Arabism" of the Sadrists, the longer-term point is that if reconciliation is going to have any meaning at all, then harping on the Arabist/Sadrist point isn't the end of the story. Rather, look at the process. The Americans, according to this story, are trying to manage a process where rapprochement between the Sadrists and the Sunni resistance is carried out on American terms (without a withdrawal-commitment: the references here are to financial assistance and prisoner-release only), which is bad enough, but look who they have picked to be their universally-trusted mediator: Egypt! You'd almost think this wasn't a serious undertaking at all.


* Plans for the Cairo Conference are referred to here; here; and elsewhere. But this is still being treated with reverential silence by the big media, possibly to avoid all kinds of embarrassment in the preparations (like those indicated in this piece, for example); or possibly because nothing might come of it. Or both, maybe?

"A long and many-sided struggle": Major Sunni faction says Iran is the current priority

(This is revised and expanded from an earlier post that had a different title).

A regular spokesman for the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Shammari, responded to interview questions in a new Qatari newspaper called Al-Arab*, about the latest BinLaden speech, rumors of negotiations with the awakenings and/or the Americans, the reasons for the recent decline in attacks on the occupation forces, and current priorities in this "long and many-sided struggle". On the BinLaden speech, he said the time has gone by for that kind of platitudes. What BinLaden has called "mistakes" are more properly called sins and crimes, and he should have addressed that issue clearly and directly with a view to rectification. He didn't do so, and instead the result of the speech has been an escalation in AlQaeda attacks on the IAI in Samara, Latifiya and other places, Shammari said.

He said there have been no negotiations between the IAI or anyone representing them with either the awakening councils or the Americans. "When has a resistance group ever sided with the occupier... And don't forget", he reminded the interviewer, "you are not talking about people who arrived in Iraq on the backs of the American tanks. We are on the other side ..." As for talking with the Iraqi government, he said: "There is no government in Iraq such that we could have any relationship with it..." Specifically, the interviewer asked if it was possible for the Iraqi resistance to pick someone from among well-known political or religious figures to represent them in negotiations with the Americans, to which Shammari replied: "Absolutely not. The group has a Political Office which is its official representative, and if there were to be negotiations with the Americans or with any international party, the only authorized party on our side would be the Political Office."

The lengthiest answer was on the reasons for the decline in attacks in American forces in recent months. The questioner suggested this might be owing to a diminution in attacks by a weakened AlQaeda, but Shammari said it is owing to the preoccupation by the IAI and other factions with these AlQaeda attacks on them:

This is not a forced retreat, but it is a temporary tactic [on the part of the resistance] relating to battlefield management in this long and many-sided struggle, and of course it is known that the decline in the influence of AlQaeda isn't the cause the diminution in operations [against the occupation forces], but rather [the reason is] that AlQaeda is focusing on the other factions with a view to starting a jihad against the mujahideen. And naturally this is the most serious kind of danger for the mujahideen, because this comes from our own flesh and blood who are familiar with us in a way that the occupation-enemy is not, and this has become the priority for AlQaeda, against whatever of the other factions, but in particular against the Islamic Army in Iraq...

And Shammari names people well-known in the IAI who have been killed by AlQaeda, calling this a "general war" AQ has launched against the IAI in Iraq, not limited only to certain areas, and which has compelled the IAI to end its policy of patience, and reply in kind. Shammari explains that it is this overall preoccupation with AlQaeda on the part of the IAI and the other jihadi factions [with the AlQaeda attacks] that has had an effect on the overall jihadi scene, adding: "this is because AlQaeda, and particularly since the death of Abu Musab [al-Zarqawi] has taken on a hidden agenda, and they are no longer interested in the concerns of the rest of the mujahideen".

But probably the most enlightening in terms of strategy was this exchange on the relative importance of the Americans and the Iranian threats.

Interviewer: Have you thought about what could happen in Iraq after the Americans withdraw? Have you thought about the Iranian danger?

Shammari: The Iranian danger needs no proof or explanations, because it is a paramount reality on the ground. We have a clause in out political program in which we say Iraq is under two occupations, the Iranian and the American, and the most dangerous and difficult is the Iranian. And in fact we were the first to warn of this, and we have called on our brothers in all of the other jihadi factions to support this so that now the Political Office of the Iraqi Resistance supports this, with a slight modification in the draft. The leadership of the Islamic Army has issued an order to all of the operational units to the effect that the operational units must bring their programs into line with the political program of the group. ...We have not neglected the Iranian occupation at all, in fact we have formed special forces to target them...

Interviewer: There is a new reality that has been imposed on Iraq, with Baghdad changed demographically from a Sunni city, and there is the same situation in a number of other regions, not to mention the propositions about federalism, which it is feared could lead to the break-up of Iraq. What are you doing about these critical [or thorny] issues?

Shammari: As I have said to you, the struggle is long and it has many parts, and we are dealing with these parts in the appropriate way, without haste. God willing, the result will go to the strong

*The paper should be available at www.alarab.com.qa, but seems to be currently busy or something. The interview text, however, is also reproduced here.