Talisman Gate بـاب الطلــسم

Welcome to the Other Talisman Gate

2011-10-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Talisman Gate, Baghdad, Iraq, circa 1907

"Kazimi, whose Talisman Gate blog is widely read by Iraq experts and commentators in the United States..." The Washington Post, July 19, 2007

Welcome to my blog. This is the place where I explore issues like whether Nostradamus had predicted the whole Zarqawi phenomena, and is Walid Junbulatt the real Hariri killer? In other words, this space is devoted to all the stuff that would peg me a crank should I try to put it out in print. But what the hell, journalistic credibility is way too over-regarded. Plus, blogging is an exercise in vanity; it is the joy-ride of ego-trips. So, excuse my pompous self-righteousness, and try to enjoy your stay.

New article on Syria and its jihadists in Newsweek

2011-05-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

Here a link to it: Handing Jihadis Cause

"gj" you need to remind me what the prize was all about.

Imara wa Tijara إمارة وتجارة

2011-03-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

My new Arabic-language blog, Imara wa Tijara, is up and running (...still requiring a little tweaking that will come with time)...

www.imarawatijara.com

The story of the Sunni Salafist insurgency in Iraq, 1999-2010

2011-01-21T06:04:00.000-08:00

I just returned from Iraq, where I was privileged to hear the whole story of the Sunni insurgency, from beginning to end; everything from the name on the ID card Abu Musa’ab al-Zarqawi was carrying when he first came to Baghdad in November 2002, to who paid how much for what. I cannot share the details of all this stuff, of which I took copious notes, since it is not my story to tell. That will be the task of those who told me, when the time is right. At least one is in negotiation to sell the material to an important U.S. paper. But rest assured, the right people in the Iraqi government, and the U.S. government, now know the narrative and are acting on it.

A lot of the details, in terms of who’s who, that I had written down here along the years were inaccurate. However, I was gratified to learn that the over-arching analysis culled from open sources, such as the speeches and communiqués of the jihadists and insurgents, in terms of the anti-Shia and caliphalist trends, I got right. Other matters, like how the insurgents deliberately infiltrated foreign and Arab news bureaus to feed the news cycle strategic disinformation, and how this disinformation filtered back into Western intelligence reports and analyses, I also managed to nail.

Operationally, I went wrong by trying to understand the network of the non-Al-Qaeda actors as having their origins in the Saddam regime, as former officers, security officials and Ba’athists. What I missed was that there was a supra-network of young Salafists and other assortment of young Sunni Islamists who came to age during the 1990s—many of whom spent time in Saddam’s prisons and who all know each other—whose alumnae went on to become Al-Qaeda, the Islamic Army, the Ansar al-Sunna, the Army of the Mujaheddin and the 1920 Revolt Brigades. This supra-network led the insurgency, and recruited the ex-regime officers and Ba’athists as sub-contractors of the jihad; the Saddamists worked for the Salafists from the very beginning, not the other way around.

(Note: It is interesting that their first violent act, the opening salvo of the Sunni Salafist insurgency, occurred on January 1, 2000, targeting Ba'athists congregating at a liquor store in the Waziriyeh neighborhood of Baghdad, way before any American soldiers appeared on the scene.)

Other current schools of thought among insurgency-watchers, especially on matters such as the Awakenings and the role of the tribes, are very, very off mark.

Another blind spot for me was how much involvement regional actors had in the jihad, and how much their money mattered. America’s allies are directly implicated, as financiers, ideologues, orchestrators and managers, in the deaths of American soldiers. I hope this is not glossed over by those now privy to this information. Without this money, it seems to me, the insurgency would have been crippled early on, even with Sunni resentment at fever-pitch. The money made the nightmare of the last eight years possible. It was also eye-opening for me to realize that squabbles over money, as it began to peter out, had a very big deal to do why the insurgency could never coalesce into a whole.

Again, I was privileged to hear this fascinating story, and it kills me, being the pamphleteer that I am, not to be able to publish all this for you. But I gave my word. As it is, this information rests with a very limited number of people who may have an interest in making it public. If one dies, then the material is lost. I was told this story so that I would safeguard its eventual release, if the others don’t make it to tell the tale.

I am conflicted about those who shared this with me. They are, after all, my enemies, on every level. They seem sincere is their efforts to undo some of the wrongs they have wrought on our country, and on our friends. Is it enough to redeem them? I don’t know. I simply don’t know. But the many successes Iraq has had recently in rolling up the bad guys are coming from sources such as these. The ethics of whether the prevention of future misery outweighs the crimes of the past is something too heavy for me to consider at this stage. I suspect that it doesn’t, which makes it all that much more tragic.

PS: I at least got permission to say that the post below is not correct: the current leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Husseini al-Baghdadi, is Sheikh (______________redacted) al-Mashhadani, while Al-Nassir li Din Allah Suleiman, the Minister of War, is (_______________redacted), "Abu Jihad", a Palestinian, and formerly one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards in the Al-Farouq Camp in Afghanistan.

The Islamic State of Iraq's New Caliph

2010-12-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

For those still following the news of the Islamic State of Iraq: a recent detainee (Hazim Abdel-Razzak al-Zawi, self-styled 'Minister of Security' in the ISI, cousin of former ISI leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi) who was arrested in Anbar ten days ago has revealed to Iraqi security services the real identities of the current leadership of the ISI, according to the spokesman of the Ministry of Interior.

So the ISI's current proto-caliph, Abu Bakr al-Husseini al-Qureishi al-Baghdadi, is allegedly Dr. Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Samara'i ("Abu Du'a'"), while the 'Minister of War' who goes by the pseudonym Al-Nassir Li Din Allah Suleiman is allegedly Nu'man Salman Mansour al-Zaidi ("Abu Ibrahim", formerly the ISI's "vali" for Anbar).

Al-Zawi also revealed that, just like Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, al-Samara'i and al-Zaidi were formerly detained by the Americans, specifically in Bucca Camp, and then released. There is a very significant pattern of how many active and captured terrorists in Iraq are former detainees that were released in the past two years without being transfered to Iraqi jurisdiction. One needs to ask, why were they released? Who was responsible for such decisions? Why were such decisions taken? But who are we kidding, when was the last time anyone was held accountable for their major blunders in Iraq?

It should be noted that most of this recent tranche of info on the ISI seems to be coming from the break-up by the Ministry of Interior of an important terrorist cell active in Baghdad, which was responsible for planning many of the major terrorist operations of recent memory, including last month's church attack. One should take note that while these terror acts got plenty of ink in US papers, the arrest of this cell was hardly reported: two short paragraphs in the New York Times, one paragraph in the Washington Post.

Now I know that I've been away for a while from this blog, but it's not like I didn't give you a head's up that it would wind down as I busy myself with other things. There are instances when I wanted to write again; for example, I wanted to remind you folks of the British-led intelligence cell that was negotiating with Iraqi insurgents that I used to write about; this is relevant when measured against the British blunder of believing an Afghan shopkeeper's scam of being a major figure in Taliban, revealed last month.

But frankly, these things don't rile me up as much as they used to, and hence my indifference to this blog: Iraq is fine. It is prospering. Anyone who goes there can see it. There's no more debate as far as I'm concerned. The foreign bureaus can BS all they want--it makes absolutely no difference.

I will begin to write anew, as promised, as other places in the Middle East begin to tremor and come apart.

Baghdad Haze

2010-07-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've been in Baghdad for a couple of weeks now, with a brief sojourn to Basra, and I can report that no one has the faintest idea of how the political situation is going to play itself out.

In a week's time, five months would have passed since the election.

It's summer. It is hot. Very hot. And there's less electricity than last summer. As one can imagine, that fact that it is hot (...50-55 C, 122-131 F), and that there is little electricity to alleviate the heat, eats up at least 20 percent of any conversation.

Iraq, in pictures

2010-05-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Some folks make way too much of Iraqi political hot air, not realizing that it is the same brand of political hot air found the world over. Every caustic, grandstanding statement is a harbinger of "a return to violence and civil strife", as far as the Western press and analysts are concerned. I wonder what they would make of these pictures taken at a dinner hosted by Adel Abdul-Mahdi last night. All the same people who've been accusing each other of all sorts of nasty things are sitting around, amiably chatting, and waiting for the food to be served. They don't look as if they are about to come to blows, even though they've been doing plenty of trash talking beforehand, words of zeal and fire assiduously jotted down and quoted by the nihilist half wits of the foreign bureaus.

Iraqi politics today is merely an extention of Iraqi opposition politics. To understand one is to understand the other. And as someone who has lived through it, I must say that I do find it very hard to explain to the uninitiated. But maybe these pics will help:

From left to right: Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein (INA, pretender to the Iraqi throne), Izzeddin al-Dawla (Iraqiyya, Nineveh), Muwaffaq al-Ruba'i (INA), Nasseer al-Chadirchi (INA, National Democratic Party), Ammar al-Hakim (INA, ISCI), Tareq al-Hashemi (Iraqiyya, Vice President).

From left: Ahmad Chalabi (INA), Ayad Allawi (Iraqiyya), Adel Abdul-Mahdi (INA, Vice President), ?, Hassan al-Shimmeri (INA, Fadhila), Rafi' al-'Isawi (Iraqiyya, Deputy Prime Minister), ?, ?.

And oh, Iraqi forces, acting in concert with Kurdish intelligence and the U.S. military, have arrested Abu Abdullah al-Shafi'i (Ja'afar Hassan, a.k.a. Wuriya Hawleri), head of the Kurdish jihadist group Ansar al-Islam, in Baghdad a few days ago. This, again, is a huge debilitating strike against an influential jihadist network that's been active for at least eight years, with direct ties to Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda HQ, and with the distinction of facilitating the entry of jihadists like Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi into Iraq early on.

Abu Abdullah al-Shafi'i, in custody

CONFIRMED: It WAS al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir

2010-04-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) posted a statement a little over half an hour ago on Al-Faloja and other jihadist forums corroborating the news that the leader of the ISI, and the jihadist candidate for Islam's new Caliph, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi (Hamid al-Zawi) as well as the 'Prime Minister' of the ISI, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (Abdul-Mun'im al-Badawi), were both killed a few days ago.

The statement can be found here (Arabic text). It was signed by 'Abul-Walid' Abdel Wahab al-Mashhadani, the Minister of Shari'ah Commissions for the ISI, who was appointed to this position in the last reshuffle of the ISI's 'cabinet' in September 2009. He claims that a new leadership had already been named in al-Baghdadi's lifetime to take over in the eventuality of his death.

This is a huge victory. It has been underplayed in the Western press and by DC-analysts as just another decapitation strike, but it is much more than that: taking out al-Baghdadi put an end to the boldest ideological undertaking of the new generation of Al-Qaeda-supporting jihadists; their attempt to resurrect the Islamic Caliphate in all its imperial glory.

The fact that they chose al-Zawi, a retired policeman, who moonlighted as a oil heater repairman, as the new caliph, based on his dubious claims of genealogy, is really fascinating. I wish I had access to that trove of info the Iraqi forces found at the strike site!

And so ends the saga of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi...

2010-04-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Had the Iraqi authorities announced that only Hamid al-Zawi was killed, there would have been wiggle room to believe that he wasn’t Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

And had the authorities announced that only Abu Ayyub al-Masri was killed, there would have been wiggle room to believe that he wasn’t Abu Hamza al-Muhajir.

But since both were killed together, at the same location, confirms beyond a doubt, at least to me, a longtime skeptic, that both are indeed al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir respectively.

This is a marvelous achievement. It will be very difficult for the Islamic State of Iraq to tell its underlings that al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir are still alive, even if it manages to reproduce the voices associated with their past broadcasts. It would be too easy to denounce the speakers as imposters. The circumstances of their death together, plus their earlier identification, makes this story extremely hard to refute. Commentators on the Al-Faloja jihadist discussion boards are in disbelief. There's really no way for the jihadists to do damage control here, especially at a time when all they wanted to demonstrate by their recent waves of bombings was their own survivability.

The fact of the matter is that al-Zawi was one of the names that had been suggested as the real identity of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Just remember that the claim was first made in July 2007 (with all the relevant details) on a random posting on a discussion board, and that it was only in May 2008 that the name and picture linking al-Zawi to al-Baghdadi was made by the police chief of Haditha. It’s all here at this link from this blog back in 2008.

I had always thought it was Abu Zaid al-Mashhadani, but I am ready to concede that I was mistaken.

I was also always hesitant to identify al-Masri as al-Muhajir (who sometimes would reveal his real name as Abdul-Mun’im al-Badawi; the last time he did so was in September 2009 was he was promoted from Minister of War of the ISI to the position of First Vizier (Prime Minister), in addition to keeping his Minister of War portfolio) (see link here, with loads of background).

Over the years, it became clearer to me that al-Muhajir was speaking with a trace of a North African accent, probably even Egyptian. Al-Masri has also been identified by Egyptian terrorism experts in the past as Abdul-Mun’im Izzedin Ali Ismail (born 1969).

Now I am willing to fully concede that al-Masri is indeed al-Muhajir.

It is odd that while it seemed that both their real identities were in the public domain since at least 2007, neither took the step of addressing their supporters in a video message, showing their faces. It is one thing to follow an amorphous ‘leader’ hiding behind a pseudonym, and quite another to pledge allegiance to a man who’s biography and pedigree is known. They did not take advantage of what a media stunt such as that would have afforded them.

It should also be noted that al-Baghdadi was the jihadist candidate for caliph, and all the pertinent details of that effort can be viewed at this link. Killing him is a big, big deal in terms of leaving behind an ideological vacuum for the Zarqawist wing of jihad.

Maliki’s most incredible assertion at his press conference today was that al-Zawi/Baghdadi had been detained at some point by the Americans, who later released him. This is the same situation with Muharib al-Juburi, the ISI’s former spokesman (killed in July 2007) who had also been detained by the Americans and then released. That means at a certain juncture, U.S. troops were picking up the right culprits, but had to release them for lack of evidence. These episodes with Zawi and Juburi make the case that evidence or lack thereof does not always trump suspicion, especially when it comes to terrorism cases.

Remember, al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir are directly responsible (…often openly boastful) for tens of thousands of murdered Iraqis, tens of thousands of injured Iraqis, tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis, and hundreds of US and Coalition casualties.

Those in the Western and Arab media who have lamented the loss of life in Iraq, and often blame the Americans for it, should be joyous today that these two mass-murderers have been held to account for their reign of savagery. But I doubt that will happen.

Several have already tried to spin this story as another round of BS from the Iraqi government. While it is true that Iraqi and US authorities have made many egregious mistakes in the past by claiming to have killed and arrested either al-Muhajir or al-Baghdadi, this time they are correct. And I say this as someone who has long argued that they had their identities mixed up, and I have consistently criticized both the Americans and the Iraqi government for failing to clearly identify the leadership of the ISI.

The last case of mistaken identity involved Ahmad al-Majma’i as al-Baghdadi. I refuted those claims here, here, here and here (this last link has a lists of al-Baghdadi’s speeches and a summary about him).

For the longest time, US authorities believed that al-Baghdadi was a fictitious person, a claim I also refuted over the years (here and here; in the last link I identify where I believe Baghdadi was hiding in 2007, in al-Niba’i, which is very close to the Tharthar area were al-Zawi and al-Masri were killed according to Maliki).

So there you have it, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the two most significant leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq after Zarqawi, are no more. This is a massive blow to the jihadists, and a sign that U.S.-Iraqi intelligence and operational cooperation has reached a very mature stage.

Congratulations to all those who made it happen, and congratulations to the hundreds of thousands of victims of terrorism in Iraq; they have been avenged.

When Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, that day marked a turning point towards the waning influence of the jihadists. Today’s ‘miracle’ (...killing both, and dispelling doubts does make it a miracle) will spell the eventual extermination of their few remaining cells. It may take years, but today is certainly an important landmark on that road.

Here a link to the pictures of the corpses as released by Maliki's office, caution: gruesome.

UPDATE: Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel (Arabic) had me on to comment on the story for their Daily Harvest program. They ran a piece before I spoke seemingly casting doubts on the government's version, and they even went as far as suggesting that the jihadists were not responsible for targeting civilians. When it was my turn to speak I said that I am fully convinced that the two men who were killed were Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, and that for millions of Iraqis today was a day of retribution and reckoning.

I would like to add one thing: the honorable thing for the Iraqi government to do is to name a main thoroughfare in Baghdad after the American soldier who died in this operation. There have been bad and tense days between Americans and Iraqis, mostly stemming from outside meddling as well as unnecessary misunderstandings, but destroying the jihadist leadership yesterday should be remembered as a day of triumph and gratitude in the long term relationship between the U.S. and Iraq. Many thousands of U.S. citizens died in this worthy fight, but nothing is more poignant and clear as to who the bad guys were, and who the good guys are, than killing off al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir in a combined U.S.-Iraqi operation. One would hope that Iraqi politicians have the guts to lead, and to tell the Iraqi public that we have a moral debt towards the Americans, rather than cowtow to the noisy anti-America mob. Today would be a good day to show Iraq's gratitude towards America. Maliki mentioned the US role in his press conference, but did not express any thanks.

April 9: Liberation Day

2010-04-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

Yup, it's as simple as that.

Sadrist Referendum Results

2010-04-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Sadrists announced today the results of their referendum on who should be Iraq's next prime minister.

The Sadrists claim that 1,428,000 voters participated across Iraq, which is over double the number of votes their candidates tallied in the national elections. Needless to say, these 'elections' were conducted without oversight and did not adhere to any accepted standards for polling, and hence the numbers are very suspect.

The value of the referendum, however, is that it exposes the politics of the Sadrist movement.

The results were:

Ibrahim al-Ja'afari (former PM from the Da'awa Party): 24 percent

Ja'afar al-Sadr (son of the chief ideologue of the Da'awa Party who was executed by Saddam in April 1979): 23 percent

Qusay al-Suheil (top member of the Sadrist 'politburo'): 17 percent

Nouri al-Maliki (PM incumbent): 10 percent

Ayad Allawi (former PM): 9 percent

Baha' al-'Araji (Sadrist MP from Nassiriya and highest independent Sadrist voter earner in the national election): 5 percent

Ahmad Chalabi (courter of the Sadrist vote): 3 percent

Adil Abdul-Mahdi (current Vice President from ISCI): 2 percent

Rafi' al-'Isawi (Sunni from Anbar, ran on Allawi list, current Vice President): 2 percent

Other: 5 percent

What the Sadrists wanted from this 'referendum' was to shoot down Maliki's prospects for a second term by claiming that their 'base' had rejected him. The Sadrists form the majority bloc within the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) which Maliki's State of Law bloc needs to ally with in order to form a cabinet. They also demonstrated that almost the same number of 'voters' had chosen Allawi (9 percent) to Maliki's 10 percent, so the Sadrists are as free to negotiate with Allawi as they would with Maliki. This is a bargaining tool meant to show that they could easily break with the INA and crown Allawi as the next premier.

The Sadrists already know that they can't have one of their own (Qusay al-Suheil or Baha' al-Araji) as PM since they are an overall minority (10 percent) among the Shia vote. Al-Suheil, a 45 year-old agricultural hydraulic engineer (PhD) from Basra, got 17 percent of the vote, but he only managed to scrape together 8,415 votes in the general election (in Baghdad, where he ran). Plus, al-Suheil is unknown to the wider Iraqi public while al-'Araji, a prominent Sadrist MP and head of the Legal Committee of parliament with dual Irish and Iraqi citizenship who recently blurted out some caustic sectarian remarks, has a multitude of corruption cases against him waiting to break, according to sources in the Integrity Commission.

And they also know that even though Ja'afari is popular among Sadrists, he cannot become PM again as most Iraqis, irrespective of whether this is fair or not, attribute the 'sectarian' outbreak to Ja'afari's tenure as PM in 2005.

Ja'afar al-Sadr is an unknown quantity for the Iraqi political elite. Almost all he has to go on is genealogy: he's the only son of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, one of modern Shi'ism most important thinkers. Not only that, but the Sadr family had historically played an important role in Shi'a and Iraqi history over the last two hundred years, which would make Ja'afar the equivalent of Shi'a royalty; he was 10 years-old when his father was executed. He is Muqtada's second cousin, as well as his brother-in-law (Muqtada is married to his sister). During the opposition days, the only time we heard about Ja'afar was in 1999 or 2000 when he managed to escape to Iran. The story at the time was that the Hakims and the Iranians suspected that he was a Saddam spy, and the man who smuggled him out of Iraq (all I remember was that he was from the town of Shatra) was interrogated and tortured by either the Badr Corp or by Iranian security. Since then, Ja'afar studied by correspondence with the Islamic University of London, and had a brief stint as a student with Sheikh Kadhim al-Haeri, a top Iraqi-born cleric in Iran who is close to the Revolutionary Guard. At one point, Ja'afar made his way to Beirut, where another line of the Sadr family resides. His participation in the election last month as no. 5 on Maliki's slate for Baghdad was his first foray into politics. He was the second top vote earner with 28,779 votes, after Maliki.

Ja'afar had been marketing himself as a secular candidate. It should be noted that the first time his name was mentioned as a PM candidate was by Ibrahim al-Sumaida'i, a political analyst and gadfly, during an Al-Arabiya talk show before (I think) the election.

So are the Sadrists really supporting Ja'afar for the PM slot? Why would Muqtada create a rival to himself from within the Sadr family? If Ja'afar gets the job, then he would slowly yet ultimately eclipse Muqtada as the representative of the Sadr family, and he would only increase in stature among wider Iraqi constituencies at Muqtada's expense. So why would the Sadrists throw their lot behind him? Is this a message from the Sadrist midlevel leadership to Muqtada, along the lines of 'You are replaceable'?

The emergence of Rafi' al-'Isawi, at least in Shi'a eyes, as the least provocative Sunni partner within Allawi's list is a significant point. Tariq al-Hashemi, Usama al-Nujaifi, and Salah al-Mutlag are all rejected as too extreme. But 'Isawi, a former leader of the Islamic Army that was cultivated by the Americans who propelled him upwards to the position of Vice-President (...after Salam al-Zoba'i resigned), is seen as a moderate, and he could very well displace Allawi as the face of the Iraqiyya bloc, or at least lead a breakaway faction that forms a cabinet with whoever is chosen by dominant Shia and Kurdish slates as prime minister.

The simple act of placing his name on the ballot (...and getting as many votes as Adil Abdul-Mahdi, whom the Sadrists hate as the acolyte of the Hakims, and who is popularly rejected due to the Ziwiyya bank incident) is a poignant message in and of itself.

Furthermore, I thought Bayan Jabr's name was on the ballot, but his name was not announced among the results. Jabr, the Finance Minister and Hakim ally, received almost 69,000 votes in the general election in Baghdad, which was a surprise to most.

So it is clear what the Sadrists don't want: no more Maliki. But it isn't clear who the Sadrists think should replace Maliki. Overall, this gambit serves to constrict the Sadrists in the ongoing political negotiations, rather than help shape them. It could very well be that the Sadrists, in their instransigence and vetoing certain candidates, may play themselves out of the game.

UPDATE: I feel I need to further clarify my opinion about this referendum as Western reports begin reporting on them and taking them seriously: these are cooked up numbers. There was no vote. There was a show for the cameras that people were voting, but whatever results those ballots added-up to were most likely ignored. The results were readied beforehand. This media stunt was a naked and brazen attempt by the Sadrist politburo to shape Iraq’s ongoing political negotiations for the formation of a government. How else can one explain how a Sunni write-in candidate like Rafi’ al-‘Isawi was picked by 2 percent, that is 30,000 voters of the alleged tally? How did a secondary Sunni figurehead factor so prominently among the Sadrist constituency in the preceding weeks to the point that thousands of them remembered his name and jotted it down on the ballot? Could it be that it’s because he’s about to embark on an official trip to Iran as a representative of the Iraqiyya slate?

How did Qusay al-Suhail, another write-in candidate, jump from 8,500 votes to 250,000 votes (17 percent) in the span of a month since the national elections?

Please do not take these numbers seriously. The Sadrists are having fun with mathematics, and trying to shape the debate. They think they are disqualifying candidates, while inserting new names into the mix. Iraq had a real election last month. Those numbers are real and are an accurate reflection of what the Iraqi voter wants. The Sadrists numbers reflect what a handful of members on the Sadrist politburo want, or even maybe, and this is just a maybe, what some Iranian power centers want. It is an exercise in political make-belief. Remember, the Sadrists are but one component among many that can go into the formation of a government.

Another wave of terror, and the significance of what happens next...

2010-04-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

Baghdad experienced another wave of attacks today. These are more of the same: "thematic" terrorism, that is the newest mark, and boast, of the Al-Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Today's attack was all about blowing up residential buildings. The randomness, as well as the target choice, are meant to create a sense of enduring unease: ISI terrorist cells, which could be as few as 5-7 in the capital, still have the wherewithal to pull off such acts, so what will they hit next?

They've already hit ministries and government institutions (the August 19, October 25, and December 8, 2009 attacks), hotels (January 25, 2010), embassies (April 5, 2010), as well as today's attacks. The ISI has consistently claimed responsibility for these attacks. The attacks are part of the ISI's 'Raid of the Prisoner-of-War' offensive, which so far have had six waves.

A week ago, the media arm of the ISI, the Al-Furqan, released a 35 minute video (can be viewed directly here), which shows the first wave of attacks, against the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Aug. 19, 2009. Lending credence to these claims is new footage from three seperate angles of the attacks on the Finance Ministry, which were clearly shot by ISI operatives. It is harder to do so in the area of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since there are many government departments in that busy area and anyone trying to film anything would have been noticed by security personel as well as bystanders.

About 100 Iraqis died in that first round. The combined total deaths of all six attacks could be around 400, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of injured. Since then, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been back to work, and its building is undergoing a face-lift to fix the damages. The apartment blocks around the ministry have all been fixed (...my neighborhood), and repainted. The school across from the ministry is being refurbished. Life goes on, despite the mayhem and fear the terrorists unleashed that day. I don't know whether this is a testimony to the resilience of Iraqis, or of humanity as a whole, but the world should take note. It is easy to be paralyzed with fear. That is what the ISI is going for. But somehow, life goes on. Iraq goes on. Iraqis don't lose heart, they don't seem to fall apart. I wish more news outlets would report on that weird, and life-affirming, phenomenon. The terrorists, as their video shows, get a high from the media exposure given to their attacks. But what if the media begins reporting on the other reality, that Iraqis seemingly get back on their feet after every violent news cycle? Wouldn't that demoralize the terrorists?

About Those Sadrist Numbers

2010-04-01T18:56:00.000-07:00

Sixty-eight candidates from the Iraqi National Alliance made it to parliament, 38 of whom are Sadrist (alternatively called Tayyar Al-Ahrar) candidates. (Two ‘compensation’ seats were also awarded to the INA, but I don’t know who got them.)

That means that Sadrists got 55.8 percent of the seat allocation of the INA. However, an examination of the numbers reveals that the total tally received by Sadrist candidates was only 32.4 percent of the INA total.

By now it is clear to most how the Sadrists did it: they spread out their votes among multiple candidates, propelling them to the top of the INA slate as the number ordering got reshuffled according to the highest vote earners. Then, the candidates highest on the reshuffled list got topped off from the total slate tally until they reached the threshold number of votes in each province, calculated as the total number of voters divided by the number of seats in parliament assigned to each province.

The way the Sadrists did that was to mobilize their ground operation for individual candidates based on locality. For example, they would ask their voters in certain sectors of Sadr City to vote for one candidate, while voters in other sectors would vote for some other Sadrist candidate.

Here’s a summary of how they performed in 11 of Iraq’s 18 provinces (I only considered the provinces were Sadrist candidates were competitive):

Wasit: Sadrist candidates (3) received a total of 44,746 votes out of an INA total of 129,188 (34.6 percent). 3 of the INA’s 4 MPs are Sadrists (11 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 11.8 percent of the overall vote in Wasit.

Diwaniyya (Qadisiyya): Sadrist candidates (3) received a total of 32,755 votes out of an INA total of 133,821 (24.5 percent). 2 of the INA’s 5 MPs are Sadrists (11 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 8.7 percent of the overall vote in Diwaniya.

Nassiriyya (Dhi Qar): Sadrist candidates (4) received a total of 78,994 votes out of an INA total of 244,818 (32.3 percent). 4 of the INA’s 9 MPs are Sadrists (18 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 13.8 percent of the overall vote in Nassiriyya.

Maysan (Amara): Sadrist candidates (3) received a total of 51,511 votes out of an INA total of 135,319 (38 percent). 3 of the INA’s 6 MPs are Sadrists (10 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 18.8 percent of the overall vote in Maysan.

Diyala: Sadrist candidates (2) received a total of 19,046 votes out of an INA total of 85,821 (22.2 percent). 2 of the INA’s 3 MPs are Sadrists (13 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 3.8 percent of the overall vote in Diyala.

Muthana (Samawa): Sadrist candidates (2) received a total of 15,490 votes out of an INA total of 71,699 (21.6 percent). 1 of the INA’s 3 MPs is a Sadrist (7 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 6.7 percent of the overall vote in Muthana.

Karbala: Sadrist candidates (2) received a total of 27,688 votes out of an INA total of 81,794 (33.9 percent). 2 of the INA’s 3 MPs are Sadrists (10 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 8.3 percent of the overall vote in Karbala.

Najaf: Sadrist candidates (3) received a total of 49,736 votes out of an INA total of 152,698 (32.6 percent). 3 of the INA’s 5 MPs are Sadrists (12 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 12 percent of the overall vote in Najaf.

Basra: Sadrist candidates (3) received a total of 65,039 votes out of an INA total of 237,010 (27.4 percent). 3 of the INA’s 7 MPs are Sadrists (24 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 8 percent of the overall vote in Basra.

Baghdad: Sadrist candidates (16) received a total of 221,533 votes out of an INA total of 561,659 (39.4 percent). 12 of the INA’s 17 MPs are Sadrists (68 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 8.7 percent of the overall vote in Baghdad.

Babil (Hilla): Sadrist candidates (4) received a total of 46,633 votes out of an INA total of 180,193 (26 percent). 3 of the INA’s 5 MPs are Sadrists (16 MPs represent this province in parliament). Sadrists received 8 percent of the overall vote in Babil.

The total number of votes received by the 45 candidates that the Sadrists fielded in the provinces above was 653,171 out of an INA total of 2,014,020 (32.4 percent). The total number of votes cast in these provinces was 7,015,008. So the Sadrist percentage of the overall vote in the Shia ‘heartland’ plus Baghdad and Diyala is 9.3 percent.

Those 653,171 votes Sadrists got from all the 11 provinces should be compared to the 622,961 votes Nouri al-Maliki got for himself in Baghdad province; so almost the same number of voters ticked off Maliki’s name in a single province as the number of Sadrist voters from all over. The proportionality doesn't seem quite fair: the Sadrists get 12 seats in Baghdad with 221,533 votes, while Maliki's Baghdad slate has 903,360 votes (four times as many) but only gets 26 seats in the province. That’s something to mull over.

Theoretically, the predominately Shi’a, pseudo-slummy districts of Sadr City, Shu’la, Hurriya, Washash, Baya’, Seydiyya, Ur, Sha’ab, and Husseiniya, where Sadrists claim their ‘stronghold’, should account for over 50 percent of Baghdad’s population. But the Sadrists only pulled off 8.7 percent of the vote in Baghdad.

Same goes for Basra (8 percent). And even Maysan (19 percent), which the Sadrists liked to portray as ‘their’ province.

It seems that some Western journalists (…and some strategists in Tehran) would like to think of the Sadrists as a Hezbollah-like organization, tailor made for Iraq; they seem to view the Sadrists as a dynamic, revolutionary movement that is supported by millions of poor, destitute Shi’as, or so the narrative goes. One even detects the same type of romanticizing of Hezbollah among some analysts and media people writing in English being applied to the Mahdi Army. ‘Armed freedom fighters against America, now savvy politicians’ and that all that noise. It is true that the Sadrists pulled off a neat political trick by turning minority numbers of votes within the INA into a majority seating. But their real appeal among Shi’a Iraqis has also been revealed: the Sadrists are a small minority of the Shi’a population (10 percent isn’t much, so who speaks for the other 90 percent of Shi’as?), and they can’t even claim to represent the Shi’a slums anymore.

I hope more journalists and analysts will pay attention to these numbers before they speak of a Sadrist ‘groundswell’.

Maliki Seems Confident

2010-03-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

I just watched Nouri al-Maliki's interview with Al-Sumaria TV's Dalia al-Aqidi, which aired yesterday. Maliki seemed to be breaking some news: He kept referring to the 'National Coalition' to describe a soon-to-be-announced parliamentary bloc consisting of his own slate(89), the INA (70), the Kurdistani (43) and Tawafuq (6). Oddly though, I haven't heard anyone from those other slates describing an imminent coalition.

He's also betting on denying Allawi a number of seats by enacting a second round of de-Ba'athification, activating arrest warrants against some of Allawi's candidates (three in Diyala, one of whom is already in custody from before the election), and disqualifying candidates who had forged their educational certificates (...one needs the equivalent of high school--I think--to run for parliament). If this does go through, Allawi stands to lose 6-8 seats; the votes those disqualified candidates got would be nullified completely.

Iraqi Election Analysis: First Take

2010-03-27T16:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote a piece on the PM prospects of Allawi and Maliki for the Long War Journal. You can read it here.

I'll have more to say later.

Election Day

2010-03-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

I voted. It felt great, but the greatest thing about it was how normal it felt; elections have become a ho-hum, commonplace occurance. That's quite a feat for a country with Iraq's past and current challenges. The voting procedure itself was very well organized and speedy. The election site had seven polling stations, with about 400 registered voters allowed to vote there. Everyone's name was posted outside, along with information about what polling station they were supposed to use. Once inside, IDs were checked against name lists, and one had to sign next one's name to indicate that this name has voted. All in all, there are reasonable mechanisms in place to contain incidents of fraud. Most complaints are the fault of voters, who should have checked their registration status and followed the Electoral Commission's instructions that were amply circulated beforehand in the run-up to the ballot.

The Western media is hyperventilating about mortars and katyushas, but what I found interesting is that the Islamic State of Iraq failed to carry out its threats of disrupting the elections in any discernible fashion. This was a logistical failure for the jihadists; hardly any successful suicide bombers or sniper attacks near the polling stations. Lobbing mortars indiscriminately around Baghdad is BS intimidation. It certainly didn't deter voters.

The fact that the security authorities allowed vehicular traffic around 11 AM was both surprising and bold. It showed confidence in their security precautions, and the fact that there were no car bombs shows that they were right.

As for the initial results, what I'm hearing from my own sources and what I'm seeing on TV point out, to me at least, that my predictions a few days ago (scroll down) were reasonably accurate. Maliki on top, followed by Allawi, and Iraqi National Alliance a distant third. Maliki has beaten the Sadrists in their own bastions in Baghdad. That says a lot.

Al-Dhari: We are not calling for a boycott

2010-03-06T00:33:00.000-08:00

I just appeared on Aljazeera (Arabic) versus Muthana Harith al-Dhari, of the Commission of Scholars of the Muslims, who spoke from Doha, Qatar. The Commission had been leading the call to boycott the elections, but I found it interesting that al-Dhari backtracked and denied that they are calling for a boycott. Which de facto means that they are calling for participation in the elections, a point that I clarified on the air. They must have sensed that Sunni participation and turnout will be huge, hence they didn't want to seem weak and irrelevant by standing by a boycott that Sunnis are ignoring. So at it stands, only the Islamic State of Iraq (Al-Qaeda) is calling for non-participation. This is a big development. So much for Western analysts who claim that the elections are marred by an alleged Sunni rejection.

Predictions

2010-03-05T00:34:00.000-08:00

It is very difficult to make predictions about these elections. The unknowns are too many to factor in. A more prudent approach would be to keep my head down until all this passes over, but when have you known me to do that?

None of the following is scientific, but it is my foggy assessment, primarily based on Baghdad Province, of where people’s sentiments are. The limitations of such an assessment should be clear, so take it all with a grain of salt.

The top vote earner will be current PM Nouri al-Maliki, followed by Ayad Allawi’s slate. Maliki will get 10-15 more seats than Allawi. Maliki is still deriving his stature from his move against the Sadrists; Shia Iraqis of all classes remember him as someone who put an end to the Mahdi Army’s reign of terror and chaos. The Da’awa Party’s Islamist ideology—the vast majority of Maliki’s slate are Da’awa apparatchiks—does not matter to voters. If anything, they see Maliki, oddly, as an anti-Islamist. The charges of corruption, soft on Ba’athism, and general ineptitude did not stick to him, even though voters are cognizant that most executive positions throughout the state are filled with incompetent Da’awa guys.

Allawi has locked up the Sunni vote for the most part. Specifically, the Mutlag faction and Tareq al-Hashemi (current VP) have sold their constituency on the idea that their slate is the Sunnis’ sole protector. This Sunni coalescence around Allawi has strengthened him, leading to an after-effect of secular Shias lining up with him against the Islamists as the strongest candidate who can check their power. Well-financed campaigns also give an impression of strength, and that played a factor in brandishing Allawi as a strong comeback candidate.

The Iraqi National Alliance (Hakim, Ja’afari, Sadrists, Chalabi) will get less than half of Maliki’s seats. Even though they boast many prominent candidates, there seems to be a slide in their support. Their biggest vote earner is anti-Ba’athism, but it’s not enough to put them over the top. Their loss may be the biggest surprise of the elections. That said, what they are saying according to their own polling is that they will get at least twice as many votes as Maliki. The INA is counting on the Sadrists in Baghdad and Basra, but it seems to me that even Maliki is stronger in supposed Sadrist bastions like Sadr City.

Bolani’s slate looks strong on paper, but there has been an erosion of support over the past couple of weeks. Their principal Sunni voices, such as Ahmed Abu Risha and Ahmed al-Samara’i, are not running, and their bases of support gave way to Allawi’s momentum. Bolani has personally failed to be persuasive as a leader in his TV appearances, even though he has publicly put himself forward as a contender for the PM post. At one point he seemed as if he’ll get 22-25 seats, but now has dwindled to 10-12, maybe even less than that.

The Kurds will get around 62 seats, with 4/5 going to Barzani/Talabani and 1/5 going to the Goran slate and the Islamists.

The Commies, Mithal al-Alusi and Ayad Jamal-Eddin will each get less than a handful. Even though they matter in conversations and debates, they are seen as weak adversaries to the Islamists.

The Sunni Islamic Party is in serious trouble, walking away on a good day with about 5 seats.

What remains to be known is how many individual candidates in the provinces may make surprise wins based on their personal reputations, irrespective of slates. If 20-25 unknowns win on such a premise, then the parliament would be further divided even though they may have been candidates on big slates. They will see themselves as a group apart, having won on their own credentials.

The Iraqi voter is emerging from a trauma. The elements that would usually influence voters—corruption, reputations, efficiency, platforms, ideology—don’t sway the vote. Sunnis want someone who can save them from the fate of becoming second-class citizens, and Shias just want peace and quiet. Allawi’s slate satisfies the former, and Maliki reassures the latter. I don’t think either of these guys will become PM, but that’s a different post altogether. I think it will be very difficult to form a government around any of the characters now seen as potential PMs. The next PM needs to come from outside the political process: a male, a gray-haired gent, Shia, background as an administrator in the Iraqi state, secular, and supported by Najaf and the Kurds. This man will head a weak cabinet of technocrats, pending early elections at a time in the future when the political players resolve for a rematch. Day-to-day government will devolve unto local councils. There are only three or four persons who fit this bill.

Maliki Advisor to be Iraqi Ambassador in DC

2010-03-02T01:10:00.000-08:00

Rumor has it that Sadiq al-Rikabi, Da'awa Party apparatchik and current advisor to PM Nouri al-Maliki will be the next Iraqi ambassador to Washington DC, replacing Samir al-Sumaida'i. This would fortify Maliki's position, given of course that he remains PM post-election.

Shahwani, The ‘Patriot’

2010-03-01T02:39:00.000-08:00

Former Iraqi Intelligence chief—a favorite of the Central Intelligence Agency and certain Washington Post columnists—Muhammad Abdullah al-Shahwani is running as a candidate for parliament (Baghdad Province) on his own slate, called Al-Neshoor Party.

Back in August 2009, at the time when Shahwani was forcibly retired (…the guy is 72), the CIA media mill went into overdrive warning that Iraq would become a colony of Iran’s in five years, and that the only man who was holding down the fort in the face of an Iranian attack was Shahwani. He was sold as Iraq’s truest patriot. Many journalists and columnists, as they usually do, swallowed the Agency’s story without questioning any component parts of it. It was also revealed on this blog that it was the Agency itself which took the initiative, on its own volition, of dismantling the anti-Iran shop it had set up within the newly formed Iraqi Intelligence Service.

So let’s get back to Shahwani’s new gig. His party is running in the provinces of Baghdad, Nineveh, Salahuddin, Anbar, Diyala and Kirkuk. Which means Al-Neshoor is only making a bid for seats in provinces with predominant or significant Sunni Arab constituencies. Shahwani is fielding 59 candidates in these provinces, and by my count, only one is a Shia. So at a time when most slates are scrambling to portray themselves as inter-ethnic and cross-sectarian, Shahwani, Mr. ‘Patriot’, is selling himself as Mr. Sunni Arab.

Another interesting touch is that his campaign materials showcase the old Iraqi flag, the one with three stars on it. Yeah, Shahwani is definitely reconciled with the reality of a New Iraq. Or maybe not.

Is it a wonder that the Iraqi executive branch was worried about Shahwani’s loyalties?

So this is the candidate who is supposed to be Iraq’s savior, if David Ignatius’ sources are to be believed.

It is unfortunate that the American message in Iraq has been reduced to being pro-Ba’ath, and consequently is easily interpreted by America’s detractors as anti-Shia. The Kurds can’t be encouraged either by that. One can’t really build a partnership between the US and the New Iraq on such a premise. Who is responsible for this policy failure? Is anyone asking?

And what use is it to publicly bemoan Iran's alleged influence in Iraq without doing anything about it, and not only that, but dismantling the anti-Iran arm that was in place? Doesn't that serve to only expose the Agency's weakness?

Impressions from Basra

2010-02-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

When it comes to electoral politics, Basra is indicative of what’s happening on the provincial level: voters are choosing local candidates that they are comfortable with. In Baghdad, the big names dominate politics, and thus the local voter’s attention would be drawn to names such as Maliki, Ja’afari, Allawi,…etc. But in Basra and elsewhere, these big names don’t feature on the campaign materials seen on the streets, so the voter is compelled to look into the backgrounds of the individual candidates rather than any broader political leanings.

For example, candidate no. 1 on the Iraqi National Alliance slate is Uday Awwad Kadhim, a 33-year-old Sadrist who has almost no standing on a national level. But he’s known in Basra City as a competent and hardworking electrical engineer throughout the time he served as an overseer of the province’s electrical grid. The subtext, of course, is that he would give more electricity to ‘those from ‘Amara’, a reference to the migrants from ‘Amara (Maysan) province who populate the slums of Khamsa Meel, Gzeizeh, Hayyaniyah and other such neighborhoods that form the bulwark of Sadrist support in Basra. He was arrested in the aftermath of Maliki’s clampdown on the Mahdi Army in March 2008.

Whereas candidate no. 1 on Maliki’s slate is Safa’ Eddin al-Safi, the current Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and the acting Minister of Trade. He’s an ‘old Basran’, which means he’s not from ‘Amara, or Nassiriya or any other province. But he’s characterized as the guy who misspent the 100 million dollars that Maliki had assigned to Basra after Operation Charge of the Knights. He doesn’t seem popular, but even though he’s disliked, I’d still wager that Maliki’s slate is still stronger the INA’s in the province. However, the choice of al-Safi as no. 1 must have cost Maliki some votes.

Maliki had been in Basra for a quick visit, and his whole spiel was laying the cornerstone for the new port in Fao, which is supposed to be built by an Italian company on a tract of land that is 1.5 million m2 on the side of Khor Abdullah, thus giving Iraq a deep water port. Such a port would change the economic dynamics of the Middle East, rivaling Dubai’s. The cornerstone reads, “The same hand that signed Saddam’s execution warrant will be the hand that rebuilds Iraq,” alluding to Maliki’s role in hanging the dictator.

The INA’s candidate no. 2 is secular MP (formerly with Allawi) Wa’il Abdel-Latif. His proposal for a separate federal entity in Basra failed primarily because the top clerics in Najaf opposed it, under the pretext that this would weaken and divide the Shias. He’s not too popular either. However, no. 7 is Amer al-Fayyez, the chief of the Banu ‘Amer, which is the main body of the Sheikhi sect, a marginal offshoot from mainstream Shi’ism, who has his own constituency in the province (…Al-Fayez received 24,000 votes in the provincial council elections). The Sheikhis, immigrants for the most part from Eastern Arabia some 200 years ago, have taken to voting as a bloc for one of their candidates, and it was smart politics on the INA’s part to bring them along onto their slate.

Bolani is relying on tribal names, yet one of his prime candidates, Sheikh Muzahim al-Kana’an of the Banu Tamim (…the Tamimis consider themselves ‘Old Basra’), was de-Ba’athified. Muzahim’s nephew replaced him on the slate (as candidate no. 2). Bolani spent four days in Basra, and a day in Zubair. He stayed at the new Mannawi Basha Hotel, where the lobby was crammed full of tribal headdresses. There was plenty of gripe on the street over his convoy of 68 vehicles. What’s interesting is that voters resent how public officials use public resources, like government cars and security, to advance their campaigns, with many voices demanding that Bolani reimburse the state for what he’s using.

Although the Fadhila Party is running as part of the INA, I didn’t see any indication from any of the INA’s candidates that they are using their Fadhila association as a positive. It seems that the Fadhila folks, only recently the top power in Basra, are ashamed of this association, since it was tainted with accusations of corruption and general thuggery. I got a kick out of watching the former governor, Muhammad Mussabih al-Wa’ili, skulking around in the Mannawi Basha lobby, trying to seem important. It is incredible that he’s not behind bars already; it just means he’s too smart for local law enforcement. The legacy of corruption that Fadhila has left behind in the local government won’t be easy to contain.

It’s difficult to tell whether Allawi has a significant standing in Basra, even though some of his candidates do. For example, one of his candidates is from the Albu Darraj (…from ‘Amara) some of whom are wealthy businessmen at the moment, and also vote as a tribal bloc. The Basran elite may vote for Allawi by way of voting anti-Islamist, but they are few in number. Allawi would get a portion of the Sunni vote in the province too.

The Communists seem to be better organized in Basra than in Baghdad, probably owing to their history with the families of dock workers in the 50s and 60s. Their campaign is far more visible, with young guys handing out leaflets at traffic choke points, than in the capital.

One of the weirdest things I saw was a ‘flex’ for Mithal al-Alusi in the severely depressed and run-down neighborhood of Old Basra. It’s in an alleyway where there aren’t any campaign materials, all on its own, in a place where one wouldn’t expect to see something like it. The fact that it’s there, flanked as it where by nearby Shia houses of worship, and hasn’t been defaced or torn down is an indication that al-Alusi has some support there. However, al-Alusi isn’t fielding any well-known candidates in the province, and his no. 1 candidate on his slate, Ali al-Musawi, identifies himself solely on campaign posters as “The political consultant of Mithal al-Alusi”—not very significant as a selling point on a political resume.

And then, of course, there are votes for looks: the chief beneficiary seems to be Faten Abdel-Rahman, no. 4 on the little-known ‘Advocates for Justice’ bloc. She’s pretty and I heard a number of guys saying that they would vote for her just to be able to see a nice face on TV for the next four years.

In the mixed Shia-Sunni Fao Peninsula, voters are mindful of local candidates such as Walid al-Sharifi (no. 21 on Maliki’s slate), or Zainab Sadiq Ja’afar (no. 43 on the INA’s slate). At least here, votes would cross sectarian lines, with Sunnis preferring a local boy (or girl) versus a candidate who isn’t from Fao.

Basra is decrepit beyond description; as I travelled around, the one thing that went through my mind is that local government should be ashamed of itself for leaving things as they are over the last seven years. The Saddam era hit Basra especially hard, yet even so, one would have expected more to be done since Saddam’s overthrow. The Brits take some responsibility for the mismanagement, and nothing says that clearer than the state of disrepair and dirtiness of the British Cemetery, where they buried their WWI dead. If the Brits couldn’t get that done (…compare it to the extremely well-kept one in Alexandria), then how would they be expected to have fixed Basra’s other mammoth problems. Incidentally, the prevalent conspiracy theory is that the Brits purposely mismanaged and damaged Basra on behalf of their Gulf allies, so that Basra would not emerge as an economic rival to the ports of Kuwait, Dubai and elsewhere.

A new law assigned one dollar from every barrel of oil for the province. That adds up to about a billion dollars for Basra in 2010. But it still isn’t clear who gets to spend it. The local provincial council is split between Maliki’s people, who want a stronger role for the central government, and those who want Basra to go its own way in running its affairs. One dollar per barrel sets the precedent for 30 dollars a barrel one day. Basra should have the right to demand a much larger share of the wealth that emanates from its soil. But the Saddam years smashed the province’s self-confidence, and a marked impression that I got was how cowed the local government was vis-à-vis Baghdad, even though the law could be interpreted to give them far greater powers, powers that they are too wary to exercise.

However, one person for watch out for is Sheikh Ahmed al-Sulaiti, the deputy head of the provincial council, who may eventually lead the drive to demand more autonomy for Basra. He’s combative, and even a tad bit extremist (…he’s a fan of Hezbollah, and even resembles a thinner version of Hassan Nasrallah). But he’s garnering a reputation as a no-nonsense anti-corruption crusader, who wants much of Basra’s money to stay within his province.

I’d like to make a point about Iraq-Iran relations in Basra, since at one point there were outlandish accusations made in the Arab press, repeated by Western commentators, that Farsi replaced Arabic as the lingua franca in the city. Basra is equidistant from Isfahan as it is from Baghdad. Basrans consider Arabic-speaking Ahvaz (Khuzistan Province) as part of their territorial continuity, and what has happened is that trade, smuggling and family relations (…some tribes straddle both sides of the border), have been re-activated, to the consternation of Iraqi and Iranian authorities that would rather tax and monitor such movement. There was an Iranian trade expo in Basra while I was there. It was a small event, showcasing cars, trucks, rock salt, foodstuff and bricks, but it was curious thing to watch two cultures colliding. The language of interaction was English, and on their off-time, Iraqis and Iranians didn’t mix. Basra has definitely not been in sucked into Iran’s sphere of influence; if anything, Basra has created its own sphere of influence and sucked into it the neighboring Arabic-speaking parts of Iran.

All in all, I’m beginning to think that on the provincial level, more voters will choose individual candidates rather than slates. In Baghdad, it would be the inverse of that, since the slates are identified by the big names running. Some Western commentators have deemed the Iraqi elections to be marred and besmirched already, but they would have said so anyway had it been cloudy on Election Day. I was personally surprised at how engaged Iraqis in Basra were in the political debate. Whether they intend to vote or not, individual Basrans—barbers, fishermen, government workers, businessmen—have taken a political position in the wider debate. It’s a sign of maturity, and it’s way beyond what is available elsewhere in the region. No one considers himself or herself a second-class citizen. Actually, their sense of entitlement is astronomical and unrealistic; it’s not where it is supposed to be (…responsibilities versus rights), but it is a start. The key words are awareness and debate, and both are available in huge supply.

Snapshot

2010-02-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

Election dynamics still look murky. I for one don’t think that anyone can call it at this stage. But there have been some discernable trends in the last ten days, but it is anyone’s guess whether these would stay in place all the way to March 7th.

What everyone seems to agree on is that the election campaign looks civilized and tidy, what with all the restrictions and stipulations put in place by the Electoral Commission on what is accepted and what is prohibited by way of advertisements in the streets. The other thing I was personally excited about is that one can enter one's family food ration number and the number of the ration distributor online at the Commission's website to find the ballot center where one can vote. Seeing my name with my electoral number on the computer screen, with directions to where I'm supposed to vote, made me feel a little more reassured that the process is reasonably organized, and thus it may be harder to fudge the results by those inclined to do so.

The De-Ba’athification stunt proved hugely popular for the Iraqi National Alliance (Hakim, Ja’afari, Sadrists, Chalabi), and at least for now, it seems to have galvanized Shias around this slate to Maliki’s detriment. Bolani’s slate, although very well funded and starring some household names (…or at least those made prominent in the last few years, especially on the Sunni side: Abu Risha, Mashhadani, Ahmad Abdel-Ghaffour al-Samara’i), isn’t having much traction. What seems to have stuck to Bolani is the assertion that the hand-held bomb detectors at checkpoints don’t really work; the Ministry of Interior is being held responsible. The problem with this accusation is that Iraqis remember it every time they are snarled in traffic due to checkpoints, which is most of the day.

Sistani told Shias today to go out and vote, and this is in the INA's favor, since many people who may have opted to skip the vote out of despair of achieving any tangible results in their lives, are now compelled by religious injunction to go to the ballot box. And it's no stretch to believe that those who listen to Sistani's orders may be default voters for the INA.

Sunnis have galvanized behind Allawi, but Allawi’s Shia standing is hemorrhaging because he’s associated with Mutlag, Tariq al-Hashemi and Dhafir al-Ani.

I predict that all this may change in a week’s time. Shias may begin to feel that the Ba’athist threat (…as characterized by the INA) has been neutralized with the exclusion of Mutlag & Co, and thus it may quickly cease to become an election issue. Apart from Hashemi, who isn’t popular among Sunnis to begin with, Allawi has been left without any significant Sunni partners, excepting Rafi’ al-Isawi, the current Vice Prime Minister, and this may lead Sunnis to drift away from Allawi’s slate and throw their support behind more formidable Sunni leaders.

Otherwise, plenty of issues may emerge in the next couple of weeks, notably corruption. I find it incredible that while Mutlag was ousted, the former convicted Electricity Minister Ayham al-Samara’i is being allowed to run in Salahuddin Province. He was a beneficiary of a general amnesty for criminals, but the law clearly states that a candidate for parliament may not be a former convict. What’s also surprising is that Tariq Khalaf al-Abdullah al-Halbousi is allowed to run in Anbar Province on Bolani’s list. Al-Halbousi is a businessman who was the first cousin of Muhammad Khudheir al-Halbousi, a top mukhaberat director once in charge of assassinations. Tariq al-Khalaf was seen by the Iraqi opposition as a key component of the mukhaberat’s front companies outside of Iraq’s borders, as well as a business partner of Uday Saddam Hussein.

Very soon, it may become open season to release all sorts of incriminating documents that the Public Integrity Commission has filed away against current and former ministers and parliamentarians, which were not acted upon due to issues of immunity and political expediency.

My sense is that nothing is set in stone. But if one takes a snapshot now, one would detect the exponential rise of the INA’s and Allawi’s fortunes, while those of Maliki and Bolani are in freefall. Odierno’s statements against Chalabi and Ali al-Lami today, accusing of them of collusion with Iran, are unfortunate. What they expose is America’s impotence to do anything about it, and that only fortifies the impression here that the Americans have played themselves out of the game. Even Sunnis, happy to see the Americans siding with them, are feeling increasingly helpless as they see someone like Odierno making caustic statements, only to have those he is accusing respond with equally caustic statements without any retaliation, which is impossible at this stage. This escalation helps Chalabi but weakens the U.S. role overall. It makes no sense to me that the Americans were so easily lured into this rhetorical trap during an election campaign. Chalabi was on Al-Hurra saying that he is eternally grateful for Odierno, who is forgiven for everything he does or says, since he was the U.S. general in charge of catching Saddam.

Although there is general anxiety, no one believes that sectarian tensions would get out of hand. Experienced hands don’t see a return to violence on any significant scale, not withstanding what a few frazzled and perennially mistaken Western journalists are writing these days. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi has promised to kill voters so that they do not fall into the sinful mistake of voting, which is a no-no with Allah, according to al-Baghdadi. But the Islamic State of Iraq is always trying to find excuses to kill people, so there’s really nothing new there.

I was surprised at how quickly people shrugged off Mutlag’s exclusion from the race, both by Shias (happy) and Sunnis (not too happy). That news cycle was swiftly superseded by Baha’ al-‘Araji’s quip against Abu Bakr al-Siddik, the first Sunni caliph, and Sunni calls to have the Sadrist MP excluded too. If anything, it shows that Mutlag failed to cement his credentials as the ‘leader’ of the Sunnis, and that this role is still vacant.

More will follow.

NB: Ambassador Chris Hill is on TV speaking live, and he seems to be backing away from Odierno's statements, highlighting all the positive elements of this election. He too is shrugging off the De-Ba'athification issue.

Update on Amb. Hill: says De-Ba'athification issue behind us, but agrees with what Odierno said about Chalabi. It seems Odierno is accusing Chalabi of colluding with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. I don't get it, if al-Muhandis is such a nefarious figure then why didn't the Americans arrest him when he was frolicking around Baghdad two weeks ago. He's an MP and is currently a candidate for the INA, no. 17 in Baghdad Province. His arrest warrant is still in effect, and his immunity can be revoked by obtaining the signature of the speaker of the parliament only, since parliament is out of its legislative session (see Article 63/2/c of the Iraqi Constitution). So why isn't he behind bars? Again, this only exposes American weakness. For more on al-Muhandis, see this post from 2006.

For those who need to be reminded: Who were the Ba'athists?

2010-02-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

I find it very funny that some U.S. analysts don't get why De-Ba'athification is such an emotional issue in Iraq. The video above was shown a couple of weeks ago during one of the ongoing trials against the leadership of the Ba'ath Party. I had never seen it before. I can tell you that it was one of the most poignant moments that I have had during the whole time I've done this; 'this' meaning since the start of my work against Saddam. I couldn't find the way it was originally aired, without the music in the background, so this version will have to do. While the video was being shown in the court as evidence (...one of the men seen cheering at the end is a defendent) the sobs of the mother of one of the victims, called to the court as a witness, can be heard. Then, out of nowhere, the judge lost it: he berated one of the defendents for averting his eyes, as if he could not stand the hideousness of the images. He asked, "Are you pretending that you didn't see what was happening then? That you didn't hear what was happening?"

To me, the judge's outburst should go down as an important moment in human consciousness, for the whole world to learn from, not just Iraqis. Let tyrants everwhere be on notice, you too may be shamed someday.

The images, gestures and clothing of the Fedayeen Saddam (...about 50 of the barred candidates for this election were members of Fedayeen Saddam) evoke what we later saw Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda doing, as they too cut off heads and held them up as trophies.

Just remember that a government, with a seat at the United Nations, was doing this to its citizens. That was the Ba'ath. Those were the Ba'athists. That is why people are still pissed.

Update: Confusion in Baghdad

2010-02-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

The Electoral Commission published today the names of the officially sanctioned candidates sans those barred by the Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC). This led to rumors that the Appeals Committee of the AJC has finalized its process of looking into the appeals from the barred candidates. What I understood is that those barred candidates cannot campaign at the present until such a time as they are allowed to run by the Appeals Committee. Thus, today’s list isn’t final, and the decision making process has been delayed. It should be noted that the list numbers of the barred candidates (those who haven’t been officially replaced by their coalitions) is still in effect, therefore the published lists today are not serialized but rather skip a few numbers where appropriate.

So, it’s still not over.

Update on Saleh al-Mutlag: I had argued that there is no legal statute barring Mutlag from running on the grounds that he propagates for the Ba’ath Party. However, I was alerted to Article 4/1 of the AJC Law that stipulates that the law applies to the relevant constitutional articles dealing with the Ba’ath Party, including Article 7/1 of the Iraqi Constitution. Seems like a stretch, but that is how the Appeals Committee is empowered to possibly punish Mutlag for mouthing off.

Furthermore, Mutlag is being associated with terrorist acts according to recent detainee confessions. Specifically he is being tied to Abu Jalal al-Fallouji (real name Hameed al-Jumeili), identified by the AJC as head of the Salahuddin Brigades, and Muhammad Hussein Ali al-Talabani. Talabani planned the attack on former Vice President Salam al-Zoba’i. Mutlag is accused, according to these confessors, of bankrolling these two individuals. However, what I know is that the Salahuddin Brigades (operationally part of the Islamic Army of Iraq) are effectively managed by former mukhaberat section chief Mahmoud Aziz al-Falahi (Abu Ali), who I have discussed here at Talisman Gate in the past.

Personally, I don’t like what Mutlag stands for, but I don’t buy these terrorist charges.

It’s Not Over

2010-02-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

As many of you may have heard, the Appeals Committee of the Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) has deferred looking into the cases of the barred candidates until after the election. This decision has no legal standing, even though it is being celebrated by some DC analysts and, of course, the would-be beneficiaries of the decision. In the interest of not having you all scratching your heads as this decision gets overturned by the Higher Federal Court and the parliament (gathering for an emergency session on Sunday) in the next few days, let me explain the legality of what is happening:

-Article 49/3 of the Constitution says that the requirements for candidacy to the parliament shall be legislated by a law, and that law was the Elections Law of November 2005 (amended in late 2009). Article 6/2 of the old and amended Election Law states that a candidate for parliament cannot run if he or she is barred according to the legal frameworks of De-Ba’athification.

-The AJC law does not cover, in any of the language, the procedures for vetting candidates for parliament. Article 6 is tailored to address the Ba’athist and security backgrounds of state employees, and nowhere does it address candidates for public office.

-The Appeals Committee is part of the AJC law, and it can only adjudicate on the cases of state employees barred according to Article 6. It gives 30 days for the employee to file a case against dismissal procedures or the such, and must respond in 60 days. This is where the decision to postpone barring the candidates until after elections comes from, but it has no legal standing: the Appeals Committee cannot look into the cases of candidates for parliament since that is not in the wording of the law, even though it may be in the spirit of the law.

-The Constitution trumps all other legal considerations, and it is very clear that it was meant to deny Ba’athists a return to public life. Since the AJC law does not give barred candidates any legal recourse, their only option is Article 165/6 of the Constitution that calls for forming a parliamentary committee to oversee and regulate the decisions of the De-Ba’athification Commission (and hence the AJC that replaced it on paper). This committee de-facto exists, and it is the De-Ba’athification Committee of the parliament that is headed by the hard line Sadrist, Falah Shanshal. By law, this is the only avenue available for appeals or to redress the decisions of the AJC as relates to candidates for parliament. The decisions of the committee can only be formalized by a simple majority vote in parliament.

-Saleh al-Mutlag is clearly in violation of Article 7/1 of the Constitution for glorifying, propagating and generally being an apologist for the Ba’ath Party (defined by the AJC law as the one that took power in 1968, but in the Constitution as the one that ruled during the “Saddamist” era beginning in 1979 to 2003). However, Article 7/1 stipulates that this ban should be legislated by a distinct law, and such a law was never written, discussed and/or passed by parliament. So technically, Mutlag has not violated a law, even though he has violated the spirit of the Constitution. Article 8 of the AJC law addresses those who propagate for the Ba’ath but punishes only those (state employees) who were beneficiaries of the AJC law, and this again does not include al-Mutlag. So, he’s in the clear. But the only body, by law, that can judge that he hasn’t violated any laws is the parliamentary committee that I mentioned above, not the Appeals Committee.

I’m in Baghdad, which is nice and empty since millions seem to have strolled down to Karbala for the 40th Day Commemoration of Ashura. No traffic jams, no undue waits at checkpoints. Will try to write more about what I’m hearing.

Quick Reaction

2010-01-23T13:51:00.000-08:00

I don't know how the U.S. papers are going to report this tomorrow morning, but what is clear is that as far as the Iraqi government (...after the late-night meeting here that brought together all the branches of the state) is concerned, the law must take its course. And as far as VP Biden is concerned, all he wanted to do in Baghdad was to express support for the Iraqi government during what the Iraqis are saying was a routine trip that was scheduled three weeks ago (i.e. before the crises).

So, all the needless nail-biting has come to this: the Appeals Committee will decide who get to run and who doesn't from the list of 511 'de-Baathified' candidates. Which is exactly what the legal mechanism was meant to do in the first place.

I think the U.S. government did the right thing here by dialing down their involvement from Biden's initial outbursts to a position that, to me, seems reasonable: to allow the Iraqis to sort this out through the legal mechanisms in place.

My hunch is that the INA scored a big win with this gambit at Maliki's expense, and I'd be very surprised if Saleh al-Mutlag is indeed barred from running.

To De-Baath or Not To De-Baath

2010-01-20T02:15:00.000-08:00

Watching the plotline of the forthcoming Iraqi elections unfold is like watching a soap opera: feigned drama, unforeseen twists, and all of it must-see, gripping entertainment. Personally, I am quite enjoying it.

In the latest episode, the Accountability and Justice Commission (…the reincarnation of the Higher National Commission for De-Baathification) did its job by naming 511 candidates for parliament as being ineligible to run according to Iraqi law. Standard operating procedure if one follows the Iraqi Constitution and the such.

But the shrillness and misinterpretation of U.S.-based analysts and commentators of what happened—nothing unusual—compelled me to make a few things clear. So here’s my brief interpretation of the plot twist before I get back to watching the show:

-The would-be candidates are being barred from running according to a new law that was passed by the sitting parliament. They are not being judged according to the old De-Baath law that was passed in January 2004 by the Iraqi Governing Council. The new law stipulated the formation of a new ‘Accountability and Justice’ Commission (AJC) to take over the duties of implementing the new law. Since parliament and the executive branch never got around to appointing a new chairman for the new commission, who in turn was supposed to suggest a new bureaucratic structure for the AJC, the old De-Baath structure, with Ahmad Chalabi as its chairman, is still in charge of running day-to-day operations for the implementation of the new law. Barring illegal candidacies is part of those day-to-day operations. Myself, I had qualms about messing around with the old De-Baath law that, being a hawk on these issues, I found to be already excessively lenient. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the new law could be interpreted by the legal authorities to bar more Ba’athists and former security and military personnel than its precursor, so that turned me into a supporter.

-The ‘Anti-Baath’ campaign is an election gimmick. I am very sensitive to anything to do with Ba’athists, but even I am convinced that Ba’athists no longer represent a strategic threat to the ‘New Iraq’, not even minimally. All I want the law to do now is to shame the Ba’athists for their past. I am disinterested in barring Ba’athists because I may harbor a fear a return to dictatorship, or watch them undermine the New Iraq. They are too weak and broken for that to ever happen again. The state, the New Iraq, is too hearty and strong to be undermined. In this respect, I can be amused rather than goaded by the Anti-Ba’ath campaign. I see it for what it is: a vote earner. The Iraqi National Alliance (…the latest incarnation of the UIA parliamentary bloc, once led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, and now by his son, Ammar) has one single election gambit: get the Iraqi voter to think that by not voting for us, he or she would be voting for the return of the Ba’ath, a boogie that is much hated by the majority of Shi’a voters, who are the natural constituency for the INA. They can’t run on integrity, since they were and are still part of a government accused of widespread corruption in the public mind, and they can’t run on efficiency, since they haven’t been able to deliver basic services. So they can only run against a boogie man: the Ba’ath.

-The main competitor of the INA is PM Maliki’s State of Law slate. The INA wants to create the impression that Maliki is soft on Ba’athists. This started with the rumors that Maliki had even contemplated aligning himself with the poster-boy of neo-Ba’athism, Saleh al-Mutlag, (true) and appointing many Ba’athists in the security services he controls (also true). Maliki has been playing catch-up for several months aiming, at least rhetorically, to come out on the hawkish right of the INA when it comes to De-Baathification. However, the damage, as the issue looms larger as an election point, keeps bringing Maliki down with Shi’a voters, 40 percent of whom gave him their votes in critical provinces such as Baghdad and Basra in last year’s provincial elections.

-Chalabi is no. 3 on the INA’s list for Baghdad. That makes him one of its principal movers and shakers, as he had been in the past before falling out with Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim. By using the De-Baath commission to nullify the candidacy of 511 politicians, especially from Maliki’s and Bolani’s lists, he scored a big victory towards placing the Anti-Baath issue at the forefront of electoral politics. I’m also sure that he knew that the American administration would rise to the bait: Joe Biden’s attempts to micromanage this crises only serves to make the issue bigger, and the bigger it is, the better for the INA running on this controversy as their sole ‘gotcha’ against Maliki. It is interesting that Basra’s Muzahim al-Kana’an, who in the last election got an exemption from De-Baathication because he was running on Chalabi’s 2005 slate, has been included in the latest AJC list. Al-Kana’an is running with Bolani this time (…note that Bolani also ran on Chalabi’s list back then).

-Biden’s plan to delay implementing the law until after elections is patently ridiculous. Stripping MPs-after-the-fact of their status should the AJC’s evidence pan out is procedurally done by a simple majority vote in parliament, which is just a bigger crises waiting to happen. American involvement is being trumpeted in DC as a means to ensure that the withdrawal schedule proceeds on time. But no clause in the SOFA agreement mentions the word ‘elections’. It is a made-up excuse to meddle in internal Iraqi affairs and compromises, the one thing that US analysts and commentators seeking to disentangle America from Iraq have consistently said should be done by Iraqis themselves. One Iraqi side leveraging American power against another Iraqi side is a recipe for continued political imbalance. DeBaath was smart enough to include more Shi’as than Sunnis on the list of barred candidates. Speaking of ‘sectarian agendas’ may make sense in clueless DC, but doesn’t compute in Baghdad; the INA can easily claim, with Sunnis such as the pretender to the Iraqi throne Sharif Ali Bin Al-Hussein and liberal democrat Nassir al-Chadirchi featured prominently on its slate, that it has no sectarian agenda. Remember, their target audience is Shi’a, so by claiming to be above sectarianism, which is what Iraqis in general would like to believe about their favored slates in the elections, while highlighting American meddling as a leg-up for the Sunnis, the INA can sell itself, subtly, as the guarantor of Shi’a rights. Banking on residual sectarianism was the raison d’etre of reconstituting the INA, even though other Shi’a leaders are betting on ‘patriotic’ Iraqi agendas. Therein lies the competition.

-Which brings us back to Saleh al-Mutlag. He’s the principal beneficiary of this drama given, of course, if he’s eventually allowed to run. The debarment was exhibited in the media as a move principally directed against him for his stated (and taped) Ba’athist sympathies. According to the new AJC law, his statements are illegal. But he could appeal by saying that he uttered at a moment of anger. While it is true that at one point the Ba’athist leadership supported his candidacy as a temporary front for their participation in Iraqi politics, they were agreed that they will put the word out that he is not to be supported in the upcoming elections. That was what was being said in the summer, and most Sunnis were remarking that Mutlag will fall flat on his face in the parliamentary elections. See what Mutlag did was rather than be a front, he decided to become the front man. He overreached, and decided that he will cast himself in the role of the leader of Iraq’s Sunnis, something that the Ba’athist leadership couldn’t believe that he’d have the gall to do given that he was a nobody during the Saddam years. The INA doesn’t care about the Ba’athist constituency, since they could never compete for it. So if Mutlag takes it this time around, it doesn’t detract from their game plan against Maliki. Better still, it would be against the expressed wishes of the Ba’athist command. If Mutlag runs, then the Ba’athist vote would go to him despite the designs of the Ba’athist leadership since his failure at the polls would be perceived as the failure of the Ba’ath. They must grudgingly support him because he is now, especially after the AJC’s move, seen as the face of the neo-Ba’athist vote. Mutlag is no dummy, he won’t allow the Ba’athist leadership to gain a footing at his expense: this victory will be all his, and he may just be able to become what he has always worked for, the anointed leader of the Sunnis in the next parliament.

So here's my advice: watch Iraqi politics, if you're interested, as one would watch a soap opera. The harbingers of doom would like to peddle the idea that Iraq is forever at the precipe; one small nudge and it will go teetering over the edge. That's BS. The state is too stable, the anti-state forces are too depleted to do anything about it. Bombings are a nuisance, not a strategic threat anymore. The New Iraq has weathered the passing storm, and survived. What's left is the Grand Bargain that forges an Iraq in which its constituent parts can find a way to live, and prosper, together. The drama of Iraqi politics at this stage is more about mindless fun, than about a return to violence. Watch it, and understand it, as such. It is quite a feat that after less than a decade of the monumental change, we can talk about the re-introduction of political competition, in all its roller-coaster thrills, back to Baghdad. Nothing spells out success as much as this most salient fact.

Wow: Khorasani was the suicide bomber...

2010-01-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

My mind is blown by this emerging story: Jordanian intelligence recruits a prominent jihadist writer to go to Afghanistan in order to track down Al-Qaeda's leadership, only for him to strap a bomb to his body, taking out his Jordanian handler (...a member of the royal family to boot) and several other CIA officers.

The jihadist writer is someone that many jihad-watchers have followed over the years: Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani. The Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zeid, was a few years older than me at school; I remember him as a nice guy.

For espionage buffs, this story is plain incredible. This is the sort of revealing drama that should compel certain reporters and columnists to become slightly less willing to believe the Agency's PR, about itself and about the Jordanians. I'm looking at you, Ignatius.

If all the facts here are true, then this is huge. Huge. This story's immediate effect is to give the jihadists a massive morale boost. They will mythologize this story into a recruiting tool that encourages more and more young men who sympathize with the jihadists to surmount their instinctual fear of the nebulous intelligence services of the Middle East, and to challenge the autocracies that supposedly keep a lid on jihadism. Khorasani has left a lot of hero-worship material, much of it very smart at manipulating emotions. Now, he himself is the hero in the eyes of jihadist wanna-bes. Many will seek to emulate him, or even outdo him.

Events like these allow us to appreciate how dangerous, and talented, the enemy is. Dropping one's guard, or becoming disdainful of the amount of fight left in the jihadists, can lead to many future instances where we are left standing, with our mouths agape, at the audacity and horror the jihadists are capable of.

Re-inventing Talisman Gate; Iran and Iraq’s Election

2010-01-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

I don’t get it. After six years of being in the news, why is Hazim al-Araji’s name still mangled in transliteration? Why does it become “Hazim al-Araaiy” on the front-page of the Washington Post today, especially when his Canadian residency spells it correctly in English?

What’s more, why is he misidentified as “a Shiite lawmaker who heads the conservative Sadrist bloc in parliament,” when he isn’t even a member of parliament. It’s easy to spot where the reporter, Ernesto Londono, who’s been covering Iraq for several years, went wrong: he conflated Hazim al-Araji with Baha’ al-Araji. Honest mistake, except for Londono’s track record, which has established him in my eyes as one of the worst of the lot of mediocre journos pushing anti-war agendas in their reporting on Iraq.

Londono, after all, is the kind of reporter that manages to find sorrow in a cemetery. No small feat. And then has the sublimely confident sense to write about it.

Part of this blog’s mission over the years was to ‘call-out’ Western reporters covering Iraq for dishonest bias or misguided comprehension of emerging trends.

As some of you old-timers have noticed, the fire’s out here at Talisman Gate. The passion is gone, mostly because whatever gets written by such reporters and analysts makes absolutely no difference to Iraq’s trajectory: Iraq is heading to safety, and the stories of that land are those of the boring, very local variety.

For example, the state of political flux in Iraq is beautifully bizarre and complex. It really is a work of art, made more aesthetically pleasing by the realization that as issues settle and sediment, they lay the foundation for long-term stability and civil peace. But I don’t understand why an American audience would need to read about how new politics is taking shape in the Iraqi countryside. What American audiences need to know is that last month, not a single U.S. soldier died in combat. Unfortunately, U.S. papers don’t seem to cover that.

The last hurrah of the activist reporters in Iraq has nothing to do with Iraq: they needed to hammer on the negativism—some even writing about how U.S. soldiers are ‘littering’ in Iraq—so as to influence the Afghanistan ‘surge’ debate. They needed to argue that Iraq was an unmitigated disaster despite America’s best efforts, ergo there’s no need to even attempt to fix things in Afghanistan.

I doubt that after the March elections there would be compelling reasons for any U.S. media outlet to maintain a bureau in Baghdad. And good riddance.

So let’s re-invent Talisman Gate as something else: not as a pulpit that argues that Iraq will make it, but a sounding board for ideas about how Iraq will transform its neighborhood.

And let’s get things started by asking, how will the protests in Iran be influenced by a successful and fair election in Iraq?

I must admit that it took a recent photograph of an Iranian demonstrator kicking a policeman to get me excited about the prospects of change in Tehran. I was resigned to the idea that Iran, much like Egypt, is a rotting carcass with no signs of life. I now believe I was wrong.

Keeping things simple, Iraqi elections occur on March 7, and we’d probably have the results in by the 17th. The Persian New Year is March 21st, and it is no stretch to predict that the Iranian opposition will attempt to hold rallies on that date.

The image of a democratic and predominately Shiite Iraq holding fair elections will be a stark contrast to Iran’s recent experience with ballots. I’d imagine that if I were a person with a stake in the Iranian ruling establishment, I’d be very worried about having Iranians draw the wrong conclusions from that image. The idea that the sages of Shiism in Najaf such as Sistani & Co., who are supposed to tend to business while the Hidden Imam is away (…the very premise of the ruling order in Tehran), giving the Iraqi election their stamp of approval is an existential threat to the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad/Revolutionary Guard order.

This would not be the first time that power in Iran was undermined by actors and ideas operating in Iraq; lots of that was happening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Set aside all the differing variables, and the very real hatred between Iranians and Iraqis, but it would be an easy leap for the Iranian opposition to draw inspiration for the stances of the aesthetics of Najaf vis-à-vis tyrannical power. Iranians might hold their noses up at the idea of being inspired by ‘locust-eating’ Iraqis, but Sistani’s thumbs up on behalf of the Mahdi for how things are unfolding in Iraq will be a powerful revelation.

So if I am threatened by such an event on the calendar, what would I do?

Well, I’ve heard that preparations are underway to protest election fraud. Whispers about tent cities blockading the entrances to the Green Zone, and busloads of bored teenagers decanted from Sadr City into them. Somebody is coming up with a non-violent action plan for the day after the election results are announced. They assume that they will do badly, and are determined to make an inelegant exit.

I’m not saying that the Iranians are behind this; any dominant political force, seeing its fortunes waning, must make the claim that a drumming at the ballots had more to do with fraud than voters turning against them. On the face it, such protests jump-start a period of noisy opposition by those ejected from power. But it is also clear to see how the Iranian authorities may benefit from such theatrics in Iraq: they can point to events there and say to their people, “The Iraqi elections are also tainted, and Iraqis are also protesting in the street.” This scenario is certainly better for them than Iraqi elections going smoothly, reaping benefits to the Shiites after centuries of injustice, under the auspices of the Great Satan nonetheless.

So mark your calendars folks: Iraqi elections may become a rallying cry for demonstrators in Tehran, and the rulers of Iran may point to, or provoke, protests in Baghdad to taint any positive images of purple fingers and content voters streaming out from polls in Karbala and Basra.

I must add that re-inventing Talisman Gate does not necessarily mean that the pace of posting will pick-up. So don't get your hopes up. However, I would like to thank the loyal readers who have been harassing me these past months to begin writing again; your passion about these topics compels me to respond and deliver.

I promise to convey some sense of election fever in Iraq over the next couple of months. Stay tuned.

The Biden Monologues

2009-10-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

Joe Biden once had a plan for Iraq. Many kept a distance from it. It was embarrassing. He didn’t even want it brought up during the campaign, and many pro-Obama journalists obliged. Consequently, I find the recent headlines that say that Biden is “the man with the alternative plan” for Afghanistan strange and worrying. First of all, I’d like to know who is bringing him into those grown-up strategy meetings at the White House? What’s next? Getting him a chemistry set? I worry, I really do.

Here’s what I imagine Biden saying at the meetings:

“We don’t need more troops in Afghanistan. General McCrystal is a fool. There’s nothing in his report about building a Death Star. Gentlemen, Hillary, we need to built a Death Star. That is the only way we shall be able to zap Al-Qaeda with an intergalactic laser. We should also ask Congress to allocate funds in the next fiscal year for a Drone Army. I put myself forward as the prototype for the clones, what with my awesome pectorals and head full of hair, I am the Warrior Knight personified.

“Otherwise, we must ambush the Taliban. Turn the tables on them. We shall wait for them to wade through a stream, and then, when they least expect it, we’ll drop a toaster in the water, with a really long extension cord, from one of our satellites. Zap, zap, bzzzzzztttt. No more Taliban. I am not wedded to this plan; I may contemplate exchanging an AM/FM clock radio for the toaster. Or a hairdryer. I own a hair-dryer that you can have. I have many hairdryers because I have a lot of hair. On my head. Here, look. Don’t touch.

“The CIA must recruit handsome pigeons. Otherwise, we can recruit ordinary looking pigeons and give them expensive plastic surgery treatments, feather-implants and what not. These pigeons will be trained to intercept and seduce the female carrier pigeons that work for Al-Qaeda. Once in the love claws of our feathery boys, they’ll lead them on and then break their little pigeon hearts. Al-Qaeda’s pigeons will be forlorn and crestfallen. That’s when we get all Manchurian Candidate on their tails. We’ll program them to lay Hellfire eggs, right inside the cavernous lairs of the terrorists.

“Afghanistan must be partitioned along elevational lines. High altitude Afghans cannot get along with low altitude Afghans, not with the valley people hogging all the oxygen. I propose three regions for the country: below sea-level to 2000 feet, 2000 feet to 4000 feet, and 4000 feet and above. We’ll build giant fans in the valleys, pointed upwards, to ensure proper circulation of oxygen to the mountaintops. Equitable distribution of oxygen will give the various segments of the multi-elevated Afghan people room to breathe. “But what about transportation for the ‘4000 & Abovers’ demographic?” you say. I have one word for you: circus acrobats. Those high wire performers can carry several 4000 & Abovers on their shoulders as they move from one mountaintop to another. I can anticipate your next thought: yes, we need to fund and train a Circus Corps, alongside our other military formations. Which brings up another point, do our intelligence services have enough highly experienced mimes in their ranks?

“We must reassure the American public. How about a headline: “White House: U.S. Will Not Pull Out of Afghanistan.” Get the Associated Press on the line. We should also add that U.S. troops will remain in Wyoming. And that rabbits will continue to be fluffy. Wait. Is there such a thing as carrier rabbits? Could Al-Qaeda be using rabbits instead of pigeons? Just to be on the safe side, get the CIA to breed extra-fluffy rabbits.

“I know how to fix this Iran pickle. We will give them nuclear weapons. That way they won’t go sneaking behind our backs, enriching uranium, and breaking the law. Once they have them, then they’ll get bored, and quickly get back to lighting kittens on fire. Oooh, those incorrigible little rascals!

“I shall challenge Putin to a bout of wrestling. We’ll get all oiled up, in the Turkish fashion. I shall establish my alpha-maleness. I am sure I will win. I have more hair than Putin. On top. Don’t touch."

It is at this point at the meeting when President Obama looks up and asks, "Muffins. Everyone likes muffins. I certainly do. How about a strategy of 'muffin engagement'? Would Chavez say no to a muffin? With colorful sprinkles?"

After all they'd heard, everyone in the room agrees that the president's plan is brilliant. Following an initial wave of disbelief, Hillary will shake her head, shrug her shoulders, and say, "Fuck it. 'Muffin Engagement' you said? Sure Mr. President, I'll get my Assistant Secretary for Baked Goods on it right away," grumbling under her breath, "It's not my f-ing presidency." Secretary Gates leans in and whispers to her, "Don't forget the sprinkles."

Teleprompter is switched off. Meeting is adjourned.

[Some humor is necessary from time to time. I really hope the Obama administration decides quickly on fighting the good fight in Afghanistan. Defeating Al-Qaeda and the Taliban is not America's sole responsibility, yet it is everyone's gain. Here's to hoping that the European allies don't wuss out. I may not want Obama re-elected in 2012, but I don't want to see America fail or weaken during his presidency. It may be easy to turn Biden into a caricature, but he's a man of experience and (some) smarts. However, I think his 'alternative' plan to disengage militarily from Afghanistan, while keeping Al-Qaeda on guard through airstrikes, is impractical. Obama will eventually have to follow his general's recommendation: 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Doing otherwise, or half-assing it, is not sustainable on any political level. I'm so glad that no such hard decisions need to be taken on Iraq, which is doing fine comparatively.]

This is outrageous: the Dalai Lama to be snubbed by Obama (smirk)

2009-10-05T09:18:00.001-07:00

So I’ve been waiting for that one event that would signal, beyond a doubt, just how different the new Obama administration is going to handle the democracy agenda, when compared to the Bush years. Little did I know that it would take the form of a callous snub of the most iconic and hip 'freedom' agenda that exists in America: President Barack Obama just isn’t that big on ‘Free Tibet’, despite all the celebrity endorsements.

Check out today’s write up in the Washington Post:

For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. Since 1991, he has been here 10 times. Most times the meetings have been "drop-in" visits at the White House. The last time he was here, in 2007, however, George W. Bush became the first sitting president to meet with him publicly, at a ceremony at the Capitol in which he awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest civilian award.

The U.S. decision to postpone the meeting appears to be part of a strategy to improve ties with China that also includes soft-pedaling criticism of China's human rights and financial policies as well as backing efforts to elevate China's position in international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund. Obama administration officials have termed the new policy "strategic reassurance," which entails the U.S. government taking steps to convince China that it is not out to contain the emerging Asian power.

Bush hands out medals, Obama turns a cold shoulder. If the Dalai Lama gets snubbed in such a way, then what chance do Iranian, Syrian, Cuban, Russian and other activists stand with the post-Bush administration? A ‘Free Tibet’ bumper sticker alongside an Obama ’08 now just looks plain wrong.

This event jogged my memory: back in the spring of 1998, a bunch of Iraqi activists were organizing a bus tour of about a dozen U.S. cities to highlight the crimes of the Saddam regime and to get regular Americans on board to support their struggle. The driving force was Los Angeles-based Iraqi-American Mazin Yousif [al-Eshaiker], now of Baghdad. He planned for a number of stops, beginning in California and ending up in Washington DC. I was one of many lending a helping hand. The planning coincided with a visit by the Dalai Lama to my alma mater, Brandeis University, so I wrote a letter asking the Tibetan holy man to endorse and support, in any way, the ‘Free Iraq’ bus campaign. The letter was personally handed to the Dalai Lama by Brandeis president Jehuda Reinhartz; we never got a response.

The bus tour brought back a flood of memories, prompting me to delve into my pictures trunk so that I can scan the mementos and write about them (see below). Many of the faces in those pictures became part of the story of the New Iraq. My friend, Mousa al-Fatlawi, left his home and business in Michigan to fight alongside U.S. troops as part of the Free Iraq Forces battalion. He now lives, and thrives, in Hillah. Abu Ibrahim, if I remember correctly, also joined up for the fight. Mousa’s brother-in-law, Sa’adi Kadhim, is also back in Hillah. Dr. Maha (Mazin’s sister) and her husband, both dentists in Connecticut, paid the travel expenses of a bunch of fighters from the marshes of southern Iraq so that they would have a voice at the General Assembly of the Iraqi National Congress that was held in New York City in October 1999. Safa, last I heard, was back in Baghdad, building highways after doing the same for two decades in Philadelphia. Shakir, of Boston, went back to Nassiriya for a visit, and was planning to move back permanently last time we spoke. Kanan Makiya, who did so much to publicize Saddam’s crimes in the West, went back to Iraq, grew disillusioned, and is back in Cambridge, Mass. Hamid al-Bayati is now Iraq’s ambassador to the UN in New York. Muhammad Alwan, who was forced to leave Iraq in the 1950s as a leftist activist, is still at Tufts, while another face in the pictures is that of Mr. Sheena, who joined us on the Boston leg of the trip; he was part of the Jewish exodus in the early 1950s, but still felt compelled to do his part in supporting liberty for a homeland that ejected him.

There were so many ‘annoying’ memories about that bus campaign: cancellations, getting bureaucrats to issue protest permits, clashing egos and political agendas, little interest from the target audience, never having enough money, …etc. We couldn’t even afford a bus, so we went with a rented minivan! Not only did the Dalai Lama snub us, but so did dozens of Arab and Muslim organizations whose help and support we sought. I still remember that quite a number of DC-based Iraqi opposition ‘poseurs’ didn’t even bother to show up to the concluding rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial; many of them went on to capture top positions in the New Iraq. We all had day jobs, but managed to find the time. Mazin’s efforts, in particular, were awesome. Despite all the hassles and disappointments, the clearest and most poignant memory that remains is that the tour happened anyway. We tried to get public opinion (and celebrity endorsements) but we failed. However, in the end Iraqis got their liberty from Saddam (…thank you W.) while the Tibetans still wait (…no thank you Mr. Obama).

Had we not had April 9, 2003, then I guess the ‘Free Iraq’ bus tour would have been an embittering episode. Now it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling; we did our part, however small.

As Tibetan activists continue their struggle for public awareness about the injustices they must endure, I hope their memories of bus tours, hunger strikes, and silent vigils, don’t turn bitter. But today’s headline in the WaPo couldn’t have been uplifting. ‘Change’? Well, this variety of ‘change’ sucks. I hope Obama is shamed enough (…’Richard Gere on Line 1, Oprah on Line 2’) to receive the Dalai Lama, however much those Chinese loan sharks may fume and threaten.

Here are the pics...Wow, this all happened over a decade ago. I had more hair, on top and around my ever-present smirk. (Click to enlarge)

I have nice things to say about someone, for a change...

2009-09-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

That someone is Ambassador Christopher Hill in Baghdad. He's been the target of a smear campaign as of late. Read it at Hudson New York.

Iraqi Madoff

2009-09-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

First there was Bernie Madoff, then there was the 'Lebanese Madoff', and now there's an 'Iraqi Madoff.'

Real name: Abdel-Zahra al-Shalooshi (from Nassiriyah). Damages: $25 million. Victims: allegedly 1,200 Iraqi families in Michigan. Scam: take your money and invest it in Iraq. Political affiliations: Nouri al-Maliki's office, Sherwan al-Wa'ili. Political Recriminations: Maliki's people allege this is a media plot by Adel Abdel-Mahdi to make the PM look bad.

I first heard about this in Baghdad a couple of months ago from a Michigan-based Iraqi. Now the story is out in the open on Iraqi websites. There's to be a demonstration in front of the Iraqi Consulate in Detroit by the victims on October 2.

I don't know when the local American press in Detroit has written about this, but it does seem like a juicy story. 25 million may seem paltry by Madoff standards, but it is a very big deal for a mostly southern Shia Iraqi pool of investors (some Chaldeans got hoodwinked too) who came to the US as refugees in the early 1990s. Lots of talk of home foreclosures and the such.

Islamic State of Iraq Undergoes Government ‘Reshuffle’

2009-09-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

This is the new line-up from the self-styled ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (ISI):

-Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (‘Abdul Mun’im al-Badawi), First Vizier (Prime Minister) and Minister of War

-Sheikh Abdul-Wahab al-Mashhadani, Minister of Shari'ah Commissions

-Sheikh Muhammad al-Dulaimi, Minister of Public Affairs

-Sheikh Hassan al-Juburi, Minister for Prisoners’ and Martyrs’ Affairs

-Sheikh Abdel-Razzak al-Shimmeri, Minister for Security (PhD)

-Sheikh Dr. Abdullah al-Qaissi, Minister for Health

-Sheikh Ahmad al-Ta’i, Minister for Information (PhD)

-Sheikh Eng. Usamah al-Lheibi, Minister for Oil

-Sheikh Yunis al-Hamdani, Minister of Finance (PhD)

So that means that ‘Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Falahi’ is no longer the prime minister of the Islamic State of Iraq, and he’s been replaced by al-Muhajir. The point being that while al-Falahi was presumed to be an Iraqi, al-Muhajir isn’t. It is interesting that al-Muhajir’s name is given in brackets as “Abdel-Mun’im al-Badawi”—first revealed by al-Muhajir in 2006, but not many took the name seriously at the time. It is probable that al-Badawi is his real name; now I’d like to know whether the man U.S. intelligence authorities thought was al-Muhajir, who went by the pseudonym ‘Abu Ayyub al-Masri’, is one and the same as al-Badawi. The other indication that al-Badawi is his real name is that all the other names in the cabinet are seemingly given as their real names, rather than pseudonyms. When a ‘cabinet’ was first announced by the ISI in April 2007, shortly after its formation, all the names for ministers (including al-Muhajir’s) were given as pseudonyms, except for one, Mustafa al-‘Araji, of Agriculture.

Having a spokesman announce the names on behalf of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi follows precedent; that’s what they did the first time around. It’s a 10 minute video, with the face of the spokesman blurred out. It begins with an old audio snippet from Osama Bin Laden extolling jihadists to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi, followed by old footage from Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi giving shout-outs to the ISI.

The spokesman is shown seated behind a desk with a little ISI flag before him, and a gun (...a Tariq, an Iraqi-made Beretta, from what I can tell). He makes a concise case for the ISI’s legitimacy, in Islamist doctrinal terms. “The enemy admitted that we are back to our former form, our attacks hit [the enemy’s] heart and shook their throne, and [the enemy said] that a state is behind [the attacks], and [the enemy] was truthful, a state was behind it, the Islamic State of Iraq,” alluding to the ‘Black Wednesday’ attacks in Baghdad that Maliki claimed the Syrian regime was behind, and which the ISI took credit for. It is possible that the presenter’s pronunciation betrayed non-Iraqi roots, especially when reading out the names of the so-called ‘ministers’.

Again, the important take-away from this is that the ISI wants to make one point and one point only, and it is a point directed at what remains of its rank and file: “We are still here.”

The portfolio for Minister of Unicorns and Dragon Control remains vacant.

Chief Syrian Propagandist Welcomes anti-Bush Shoe-Thrower

2009-09-16T20:27:00.000-07:00

I guess that it should have been expected, that Marc Santora would author a hagiography rather than a news story about Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the "shoe-throwing journalist," in the New York Times today. But I only wish that "journalists" of Santora's "caliber" and shoe-size, would better fact-check items like "There was even an offer from a wealthy Saudi to buy one of the shoes for $10 million." At the time, some Arabic-language journalists tracked down the Saudi offerer, and found that rather than being wealthy, the guy couldn't even make the rent on his home.

Here's another thing that Santora missed as he set about turning al-Zaidi into an icon: the Syrian Minister of Information welcomed al-Zaidi at Damascus Airport on Tuesday night (which means that Santora could have still gotten this tidbit into his story by deadline had he bothered to actually report it). Now why exactly is a Syrian minister, the one in charge of regime propaganda no less, waiting at the airport to receive al-Zaidi? Doesn't it seem like a protocol infraction?

Would al-Zaidi dare to throw a shoe at Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, whose regime enabled jihadists and Ba'athists to wage the bloody insurgency against the New Iraq?

The other guy in the pictures is 'Awn al-Khashloog, the Iraqi businessman who owns the Baghdadia TV station where al-Zaidi worked. Why haven't any of these western journalists, who are clearly enamored of al-Zaidi, ever taken the time to figure out how al-Khashloog made his money? Here a hint: he worked with the Saddam regime.

It seems that al-Khashloog has been generous with the Kitabat website on which the pictures of al-Zaidi in Damascus were posted; the proprietor of the site is openly groveling for the "businessman"'s attention. As we can see, this whole thing reeks of the high standards expected in today's journalism, both U.S. and Iraqi.

[Note: a reader pointed out that pictures seem to have been taken at two different locations. So maybe the Syrian minister received al-Zaidi someplace other than the airport. Gee, wish that some reporter would have clarified all this confusion for us.]

Coalitions

2009-09-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Just thought I’d fill you in on what I’m hearing from Baghdad. The following is not necessarily set in stone, and some of it is hearsay, but there’s hearsay and then there’s hearsay, and it doesn’t hurt to share this sort of gossip.

-Maliki will not join the new UIA. He’s taken to calling the UIA the “al-khatt al-irani” (‘The Iranian Line [Faction]’) in recent weeks. UIA is putting out that they have a sex scandal on Maliki.

-Maliki and Saleh al-Mutlag had their final exploratory meeting over forming a coalition on Monday, and decided that such an alliance, with Ayad Allawi on board, would be politically unfeasible and hurt them with their constituents.

-Right now it is Maliki plus Ahmad Abu Risha plus Abid Mutlag al-Juburi plus Mahmoud al-Mashhadani’s group. The latter also consists of Nadim al-Jaberi (formerly of the Fadhila Party). Also in the Maliki mix: Nawaf al-Jarba and Qaiser Witwit. Mithal al-Alusi is also supposed to be in there too, but hasn’t been confirmed to me. Maliki had a meeting with Ali al-Hatem, and chewed him out over supposed mismanagement of funds. Ahmed Ghaffour al-Samara’i, Tareq al-Hashemi and Abdullah Hmeidi might join too.

-Saleh al-Mutlag plus Ayad Allawi. This can be called the neo-Ba’athist list. Jawad al-Bolani was supposed to join but he is having second thoughts and might join the UIA; the Sadrists supposedly demanded that Bolani becomes the next PM at the most recent UIA meeting.

-Many liberals are coalescing around Dhia al-Shakarchi.

-The Islamic Party folks, even after the change of leadership, are being treated like lepers. No one wants to play with them.

-The Kurds have signaled that they are not interested in interethnic coalitions, although Noshirvan Mustafa has stated that his slate will compete in the national election.

Acknowledging Good Reporting

2009-09-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

I feel compelled to issue a fatwa: Whereas in the past, the only New York Times reporter writing about Iraq that was worthy of praise, in my erudite opinion, was Sabrina Tavernise, I must say that the recent (...that is, past few months) bylines by Sam Dagher, Rod Nordland, and Campbell Robertson, have indicated a far more sober and reasoned reading of what is going on there. They sometimes write stuff that I take issue with, but on the whole it is very, very good. Certainly far better than what the paper gave us in the past.

Marc Santora, also of the NYTimes, does not measure up, and don't get me started on Ernesto Londono of the Washington Post, and pretty much the rest of the WaPo's coverage which lends itself to sensationalism and cynicism. The Los Angeles Times has never really registered with me as a must-read on Iraq, probably for good reason.

Even though I disagree fundamentally with his blatant activism, I would also take Nir Rosen's reporting (as opposed to his opinionating) very seriously. It is good to know that Hannah Allam (McClatchy) is back on the Iraq beat: depite a few misses, she's a stellar and highly credible reporter, which is why an error on her part gets magnified in my view. I can also trust that Eli Lake, over at the Washington Times, will always report the heck out of an Iraq story, and do it very well.

I don't watch much TV, so I don't know how the Iraq story is being reported there. I'd imagine it is shallow and superficial, given the target audience and air-time constraints.

Kenneth Pollack's most recent piece in the National Interest is thoughtful and compelling, even though I disagree with some of its key insights and recommendations. I always had good things to say about Colin Kahl, but unfortunately he has joined government (DoD), and his views will be far more guarded. Micheal O'Hanlon at Brookings is another person I disagree with often, but I'd think long and hard before refuting his well-contructed arguments.

Furthermore, I have a sense that as the Iraq debate becomes less of a shouting match, important nodes in the US government, even in such hopelessly partisan institutions such as the State Department and the CIA, are beginning to look at Iraq with calm and wise reflection. I've noticed a significant change in my daily interactions, and I am far more hopeful that this will result in a nuanced, far-reaching policy that understands what the New Iraq means to the rest of the region.

Among Iraq-focused Western bloggers, I haven't seen much improvement, or humility. Although Michael Collins Dunn at the Middle East Institute blog never fails to alert us to excellent arguments. Another emerging authority is Joel Wing (Musings on Iraq) who does a masterful job of compiling a narrative about Iraq that makes sense.

Most established Op-Ed writers don't seem to get it. The notable exception, of course, is Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal, who's skill, insight and wit make me fume with envy. Moreover, one should always pay close attention to the writings of Salameh Nematt at The Daily Beast; no one has a better feel for emerging trends in the region than he does.

Needless to say, the beautiful words of Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis should be learnt by rote. What they offer is scripture, and I see myself a lowly disciple. There are also a crop of young academics writing about Iraq who I have very high hopes for. They shall revolutionize the field, and bring back honesty and modesty to scholarship. Andrew Exum (Abu Muqawama) comes to mind, as does Thomas Heggehammer, Truls Tonnessen and the rest of the Norwegian Mafia. Thankfully, there are many other to keep an eye on.

I'm issuing this fatwa because I don't see this blog surviving beyond the upcoming January elections. And so begins the process of me recommending other commentators for the loyal readers who'll continue to have a need for an Iraq kick. That doesn't mean that I will stop writing, rather I will be writing in Arabic for an Iraqi audience on another website.

It's a mixed bag, but at least the tone has changed in an important publication such as the NYTimes, and it can be relied upon to get a balanced story on Iraq in the future.

Fingers crossed.

Note: sometimes one takes for granted some of the people one admires, and in that vein, I like to include Bill Rogio (Long War Journal), Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Lee Smith in this fatwa.

Chalabi Aide Linked to Terrorism

2009-08-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

Important story with excellent reporting by Eli Lake in the Washington Times today: Chalabi, Iran, Asa'ib Ahl Al-Haq.

Jihadists Draw First Royal Saudi Blood

2009-08-27T19:41:00.000-07:00

News from Saudi Arabia: a suicide bomber slightly injured Prince Muhammad bin Nayif, the Deputy Minister of Interior who is the son of the Minister of Interior.

To my knowledge, this event marks the first time a jihadist has come close to killing one of the Saudi royal brood. If I'm right, then this is big; very, very big. A turning point, I'd add.

It is like a taboo being ruptured, a point of no return. Let's how the jihadist forums take to the news.

دولة القانون ام دولة الشريعة؟

2009-08-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

A new column in Arabic, in which I warn of the creeping application of Islamic law, the shari'ah, in Iraq by Maliki's acolytes. Sorry, don't have time to translate.

عن موقع اتجاهات حرة

ائتلاف دولة الشريعة

Ignatius on Shahwani and Iranian Influence in Iraq

2009-08-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

David Ignatius published a column in the Washington Post today under the title ‘Behind the Carnage in Baghdad’. It is so rife with disinformation and error that one is at a loss as to where to begin.

The premise of the column is that Gen. Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, who was appointed by Amb. Jerry Bremer as head of the newly resurrected Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) in 2003 while the Coalition Provisional Authority was still in place and who has recently submitted his resignation, was one of the last remaining bulwarks against Iranian hegemony in Iraq and that his absence from power is a grave setback for Iraq’s sovereignty. Missing from Ignatius’ narrative is the fact that Shahwani’s contract expired in May 2009; the CPA had included him among several security and financial officials who were guaranteed a five year contract to stay in their positions when sovereignty was handed over in 2004, and these appointments could only be annulled by a parliamentary majority.

Also missing from the narrative is that the dismantling of anti-Iranian intelligence bulwarks in Iraq was the doing of the Americans. First reported in a column here, the intelligence unit whose job it was to monitor Iranian movements inside Iraq and to conduct counter-espionage operations inside Iran and elsewhere against Iranian interests was disbanded in November 2008 by a decision taken by the Central Intelligence Agency. The unit was established even before the new INIS was cobbled together under Shahwani, and consisted of 25 former Iraqi intelligence officers with experience on Iranian issues, who were paired up with a like-number of CIA officers. The unit never grew beyond this size and was housed in a building separate (but adjacent) to the new INIS headquarters. Shahwani had absolutely no jurisdiction over this unit and was barred from reviewing its product. Whatever anti-Iranian successes can be attributed to this unit have nothing to do with Shahwani’s tenure as head of the INIS; it was fully independent and secretive, and the decision to dismantle it was not one taken by the Iraqi government.

This information hasn’t been reported on previously, and no reporters have looked into it.

Furthermore, the leadership and rank and file of the chief Iranian terrorist outfit in Iraq, the so-called ‘League of the Righteous’, are now being released as part of a deal brokered by the Americans and the Brits. Again, this decision had very little input from the Iraqi government.

Muhammed Shahwani

Shahwani, a native of Mosul with Afghan heritage, was a former pilot with the Iraqi Army who had very little background in intelligence work. His 1996 coup attempt in conjunction with the CIA, as reviewed in the documents of Saddam’s mukhaberat of which I have copies and had a hand in locating, reads like amateur hour. As his conduit to fellow conspirators in Baghdad, he chose an Egyptian national of dubious mental stability who went off and volunteered his services to Saddam’s spies after Shahwani recruited him. Tens of officers, including Shahwani’s three sons, were executed because of this foolish mistake. The 1996 fiasco should have gone down in history as one of the agency biggest f*ck-ups, but the CIA found no one more qualified to appoint as nominal figurehead of the INIS than Shahwani in 2003. Shahwani had left the Iraqi military in 1984 and left Iraq in 1990. From 2003 through to 2007, the CIA provided the annual budget of the INIS, which peaked at 80 million dollars a year.

Even when supposedly running the new IIS, Shahwani was mostly on leave for treatment in Amman, Jordan. Day to day management of the IIS was left to his chief aide, Zuheir al-Ghreibawi (identified as Zuheir Fadel in the Ignatius piece), another former pilot that Shahwani had recruited and likewise lacking in an intelligence background. In recent years, Ghreibawi has ingratiated himself with Maliki in order to secure Shahwani’s job when the latter’s contract was up. It is still far from certain that Ghreibawi will get the top job. Other serious contenders are Nouri al-Badran (estranged brother-in-law to Ayad Allawi and former Minister of Interior), Qasim Daoud (Gulf-backed MP who is now part of the new UIA), Najib al-Salihi (former Iraqi officer and opposition figure), Gen. Abdel-Aziz al-Kubaisi (current head of personnel at the Ministry of Defense) and Gen. Farouq al-Araji (Maliki’s chief military advisor). Maliki has discussed these names, and none of them can be pegged as Iranian acolytes.

Shahwani was primarily useful for the CIA in conducting political black-ops and rumor campaigns against Iraqi politicians that the agency found to be a nuisance. Shahwani was sighted arriving in London a couple of days ago, and at this time may be back in the US where his family resides.

As for the threats against the officers of the INIS, which number 2,400 and not 6,000as Ignatius claims, some are really emanating from Iran but most of the hits they have gotten came from the jihadists or from internal score-settling, as certain networks of the INIS got involved in organized crime cartels. The cases involving Ayad al-Ubeidi, Rejeb al-Mashhadani and Amer al-Hashimi (VP Tareq al-Hashimi’s brother) come to mind.

As for the claim that Maliki travels around in an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew, attributed by Ignatius to an “Iraqi intelligence source who is close to Shahwani,” well, that is blatantly untrue and can be easily checked. The source also claims the Iranians promised Maliki a near-parliamentary majority, which can only be chalked up to bombast.

There is Iranian influence in Iraq, just as there are U.S. and other regional actors who have a say. But over-stating Iranian influence is an exercise in malicious myth-making, geared towards papering over mistakes, policy failures and casting doubt on Iraq’s sovereignty, a thing that many of Iraq’s Sunni neighbors, with close ties to the CIA, would like to underline for a variety of purposes. I’d like Iraq to be completely devoid of regional influence, but that is a fantasy at this stage. Truth is, the general trajectory of foreign influence in Iraq in on the wane, which is great. Hey, I’ve always argued that the reverse should be true: a democratic Iraq should be actively meddling, through its security agencies, in the internal affairs of its neighbors, empowering dissidents and doing, y’know, other stuff. Let’s see what the future has in store in this regard; I’m optimistic that it will happen.

In the vein of myth-making, the same source tells Ignatius that, in five years, “Iraq will be a colony of Iran” absent American help. But only briefly, for the Martian landing is expected soon that will put an end to the human species.

Mr. Ignatius is sourced-up at Langley, and it may be a stretch, as some claim, that he has been used by the agency for its own myth-making purposes over the years. Be that as it is, Ignatius should call up his sources and ask them why was the anti-Iran unit shut down in November 2008? Did that count as the absence of “American help”? The CIA spin would likely be another round of “Iranian influence” and that would be yet another serving of hogwash: Maliki never envisioned having the authority to shut down the outfit. In 2007, when he toured the INIS building, he was only allowed to see the first three floors and barred from touring the rest of the facility. Even Shahwani wasn’t allowed to set foot in the anti-Iran unit building. That team was seen as untouchable, even though the paramilitary arm associated with the unit, the so-called ‘Dirty Brigade’ then under Gen. Fadhel Jamil Barwari, was involved in all sorts of ‘extracurricular’ crime and political score-settling against Iraqi politicians and was the subject of angry recriminations (Note: the ‘Dirty Brigade’ is now under Maliki’s control). But no one dared to go after the unit, and everyone was surprised when the Americans suddenly pulled the plug on it.

Irrespective of the excesses of the INIS, I liked the idea that Iraq had a bad-ass unit dedicated to stamping down on Iranian toes. But it was an American decision to disable it, not an Iraqi one. I’d like to hear some answers that attempt to make sense of that stupid decision. Getting those answers, rather than splattering spin across the WaPo’s editorial pages, should be the job of someone like Mr. Ignatius.

Jihadists Behind Baghdad Attacks (Updated)

2009-08-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

The self-styled 'Islamic State of Iraq' that is led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi took responsibility for the multiple terrorist attacks in Baghdad last Wednesday in a statement released today by 'Ministry of Information' of the ISI on the Al-Falluja jihadist forum. These attacks included the near simultaneous suicide truck bombs against the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance, even though that latter bombing was attributed by the Maliki government to a wing of the Ba'ath Party per a televised confession.

The ISI called the attacks "Ghazwet [Raid] of the Prisoner" and can be read here (Arabic text).

They will probably release a more extensive video of the operations at a later date, with statements by the suicide bombers, as is their custom when taking responsibility for big, dramatic attacks.

I had appeared on Alhurra TV on Sunday and when asked who was behind the attacks I said that it was the ISI, even though the other guest, Kamal al-Sa'idi MP from the Da'awa Party, kept insisting that it was the Ba'athists.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Alhurra interview. I can't figure out why I can't embed!?

Announcing the 'New' UIA

2009-08-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

So the revamped United Iraqi Alliance was finally announced today, and if you’ve been reading this blog for the last few months, this marks a seminal moment in Iraqi politics. The big news is not who was on stage as the announcement was made, but rather who was absent, namely Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Da’awa Party.

Negotiations proceeded at a feverish pace right up to the moment when the main actors began heading out to the conference hall, with the Da’awa Party pleading for a delay. However, these pleas fell on deaf ears since Maliki’s representative to the preparatory meetings, MP Hassan al-Sineid, had already agreed on the 24th (today) as the final date for the launching of the new UIA. Needless to say, the refusal to postpone the announcement took the Da’awa by surprise, believing as they did that they had far more leverage given Maliki’s popularity.

Yet Maliki’s political fortunes have been sinking as of late, as his claim to fame for bringing an end to violence, especially in Baghdad, was dramatically torn asunder by Wednesday’s multiple bombings aimed at high value targets. The political atmosphere is so poisonous that Da’awa apparatchiks had been insinuating, with Maliki in the lead, that the bombings resulted from the “strained political atmosphere,” implicitly accusing the Islamic Supreme Council headed by the Hakim family as the main culprits.

The Iraqi government for its part has been putting out conflicting stories about the bombings. The Defense minister claimed that the bomb parts were Iranian-made, again casting aspersions on the Hakims, who are perceived as close to the Iranians. But ‘Baghdad Operations Command’ released televised confessions from a Ba’athist who claimed responsibility for the truck bomb at the Finance Ministry, adding that he answered to the splinter Ba’athist wing headed by Mohammad Yunis al-Ahmad. (Note: a New York Times story today by Steven Lee Myers mistakenly attributed the confession to the Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri wing of the Ba’ath Party.)

This move by the new UIA effectively splits the Shia Islamist vote, and would naturally mean that the Sistani establishment in Najaf would be forced to pick sides.

The mathematics behind the announcement has to do with the notion that the principal parties of the new UIA got more votes in total than Maliki in last January’s provincial elections (Hakims 11 percent, Sadrists 7 percent, Ja’afari 4 percent, versus Maliki’s 19 percent). The chief power brokers are Ammar al-Hakim and Ahmad Chalabi, while Sunni representation is simply garnish, with Hamid al-Hayess of Anbar Province (former Iraqi National Congress bureau chief in Ramadi) taking the podium to give a Sunni face to the show. Former Allawi ally Qassim Daoud is there too, as are a smattering of non-aligned tribal leaders such as Hatim al-Sultan of the Banu Tamim.

Both Ja’afari and Adel Abdel-Mahdi said that they had hoped that Maliki and the Da’awa would have been on board, and kept the door open for a future realignment, but that is very unlikely at this stage. The chief stumbling block in the negotiations was that Maliki demanded assurances that he would remain the UIA’s sole candidate for the PM job post-elections, which the Hakims were not prepared to commit to.

The Bombings:

I didn’t want to comment on the bombings, since it involved a personal fright. But the headline in the Washington Post the following day (Aug. 20) was simply shrill and ridiculous: ‘Iraq Carnage Shows Sectarian War Goes On’. The write-up by Ernesto Londono was equally hyperbolic, but I’m used to by now his attempts to over-dramatize events in Iraq. The Iraqi ambassador to the US has a letter to the editor published in the paper today addressing the WaPo’s headline and shoddy reporting.

Yet the most disturbing aspect of how the bombings were reported upon by the US media were the quotes by current and former U.S. officers in Iraq, as well as U.S.-based analysts, commenting on what happened. These statements reeked of what seems like gloating; they sounded like a jilted ex-wife taking pleasure that the younger bride for whom she was dumped ran away with the mailman. The ‘Blame The Iraqis’ crowd among America’s military and security classes are taking great pains to bleach-out their blemished legacies; they did nothing wrong and it was the always the Iraqis who screwed everything up. It is the common refrain of the insecure and the recognition-hungry. The atmosphere between Iraqis and Americans has been poisoned, by careerism and activist reporting, far beyond the effects of whatever antidote may be available. To me it is high time for full disengagement: leave the Iraqis to sort out their own problems without the snide commentary, and let’s see what those folks can do to ‘win’ in Af-Pak. U.S.-Iraqi relations should be restructured towards private sector investment and energy security. There’s very little other ground for ‘feel-good’ cooperation.

Lastly, check out a story in today’s NYTimes about beach life in Habbaniya Lake. This piece of reporting by Duraid Adnan and Timothy Williams is a far clearer reflection for how life goes on, and going well, in Iraq. At the end, it’s all about boys and girls flirting and creating happier memories.

No wonder counter-insurgency is faltering in the Mosul area...

2009-08-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

Chalk this up to the "Do you know the enemy?" syndrome. From the New York Times today, 'Minorities Can't Escape Fury of Northern Iraq's Ethnic and Religious Maelstrom,' Sunday, August 16, 2009:

Maj. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., commander of American forces in northern Iraq, told reporters on Tuesday that the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had now teamed up with another militant group, the Islamic State of Iraq.

I'm guessing that Gernal Caslen and his briefers are not regular readers of Talisman Gate. This guy is supposed to be battling the jihadists in and around Mosul, yet he manages to get a critical piece of information so wrong, which makes me wonder, what else is he getting wrong?

'Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia' created the Islamic State of Iraq in October 2006, nearly three years ago. It subsumed itself into the new organization, and there hasn't been something called 'Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia' since that time. Kindly update your briefing folders.

Have the jihadists found their own Amr Khaled?

2009-08-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

Amr Khaled is a popular, telegenic Islamic revivalist from Egypt who has a wide following for his entertaining, sometimes jovial, discussion of Muslim morality. Al-Qaeda's As-Sahab Media has released a video by Sheikh Khalid bin Abdul-Rahman al-Huseinan under the title 'A Quiet Discussion with Obama' (approx. 35 mins, Arabic video). Al-Huseinan's mannerisms and style closely mimic those of Khaled's, even at times his voice becomes squeaky like that of the Egyptian's when excited. This video is a far cry from Zawahiri's dry lectures, or the dour faces of some of the other scholars or spokesmen that Al-Qaeda has put forward in the past.

Is this a conscious strategy on the part of Al-Qaeda to rebrand its image by giving a man like al-Huseinan, who I haven't seen before, a platform? Al-Huseinan is certainly engaging, and speaks almost as if colloquially. The whole point seems to be to make jihad fun; he's having a blast fighting the Cross-Worshippers, why shouldn't you?

Al-Huseinan, according to bits and pieces gathered from the web, is a Kuwaiti cleric who also goes by the name 'Abu Abdel-Melik'. In the video, he claims to be in Afghanistan at this time. The video is dated Rejeb 1430 AH, which indicates that it was made last month.

Poem: "We will never give it up"

2009-08-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

This is a powerful poem in Iraqi colloquial Arabic by Detroit-based poet and journalist Falih Hasoon al-Daraji. It is reflective of the grit and determination that one senses on every level of how talk of rehabilitating the Ba'athists goes down among Iraqis. The poem is addressed to Ba'athists, and the basic premise is "Never, ever think of coming back to power"...No matter how many bombs, no matter how many casualties..."We will never give it up"...Setting it to the Star Wars soundtrack makes even more dramatic...The rebels have defeated the Evil Empire and destroyed its Death Star...

Catching Up on Iraq Stuff

2009-08-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

-UIA announcement delayed: As expected, the declaration of a ‘new’ United Iraqi Alliance list, due compete in the next national elections in January, was kicked down the road until August 24. The declaration was supposed to occur today, but continuing ‘negotiations,’ or rather political brinkmanship, resulting from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s refusal to sign on just yet, delayed what was pegged to be a spectacle of Shia Islamist unity.

Maliki wants guarantees that he will be the UIA’s sole candidate for the PM job post elections, and that the candidacy of the current Minister of Interior, Jawad al-Bolani, be publicly quashed. Bolani’s momentum was buoyed by what one source called Ammar al-Hakim’s nod towards him, and a judgment that the Hakim family’s preferred candidate, current Vice-President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, would never be marketable to the rest of the UIA as PM material. To bolster this trend, Bolani seized on the gruesome incident at the Rafidayn Bank-Zawiya Branch on July 27 which implicated one or more of Abdul-Mahdi’s bodyguards, to cripple whatever hopes the latter had of ever becoming prime minister. The bank heist, in which eight employees were killed, has severely wounded the Hakim family in their traditional Baghdad bastions, Karrada and Jadiriya. For now and for the foreseeable future, Abdul-Mahdi is simply too radioactive for any important role in Iraqi politics.

Of course, Maliki isn’t getting any guarantees because almost no one among the major Shia players, not to mention the Kurds and the Sunni Islamic Party, wants to see him back as PM. Which naturally leads to Maliki’s continued tease: “give me what I want or I will go it alone.”

Maliki’s stance enjoys the realization that without him, the UIA is dead in the water. The fortunes of all the Islamist parties seem to be sinking, a fact reflected to a certain degree in the provincial election results and anecdotally. What Maliki doesn’t realize is that his little flirtations with the UIA, and with a broad coalition of anti-UIA forces, ends up pissing everyone off. When he eventually makes up his mind, the blowback will be severe and damaging: if Maliki goes it alone then the component parts of the UIA will accuse him of collusion with Ba’athists, while if he rejoins the UIA he will be accused of sectarianism. Either way, he shall bear the brunt of the popular gripe regarding corruption, poor services, and mismanagement of the economy. Maliki's current PR strategy of scapegoating others (..."parliament is delaying everything") doesn't carry much water: it is his name that Iraqis curse when the electricity goes out.

-Rehabilitating the worst of the Sadrists: I find myself in agreement with Muqtada al-Sadr: rehabilitating the Asa’ib al-Haq (‘League of the Righteous’) terrorist group is immoral and dangerous. Maliki cynically thinks that they should be brought back into the political process, much like his policy of rehabilitating Shia Ba’athists while shunning Sunni Ba’athists. Maliki thinks that such micro-constituencies of able enforcers or thugs can be turned into his own arm of political intimidation against others. The Americans and the Brits have played along, hoping to cut a drug deal with the Sadrist offshoot in return for a couple of their hostages and several corpses. Towards that end, they have been releasing the leaders of Asa’ib al-Haq. In a story on August 4 in the New York Times, it seems that Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a written statement condemning such moves. Of course, al-Sadr is worried that these former Sadrists whom he has excommunicated will get back in the game and will turn their energies, and guns, against him. Either way, neither the Iraqi state nor coalition forces should be in the business of rewarding bad behavior; they should just rough it out until such groups are eradicated and weeded out of Iraqi society.

-Even the 'Dining' section is politicized: The New York Times carried a story by Steven Lee Myers about the culinary tradition of masguf (grilled fish) in Iraq. The author and his editors clearly were trying to follow the agenda of saying “Life goes on in Iraq, but just barely, and it could unravel at any moment, and we may just yet remain credible harbingers of doom.” I don’t have the patience of running through all the crap in this particular piece, but three things stand out: the assertion that under Saddam liberties were looser, that selling alcohol is still done clandestinely, and that the “guts” of the fish are fried and served as an appetizer. First, Saddam closed the bars, liquor shops and ‘cafes’ of Abu Nawas Street as part of his ‘Faith Campaign’ in the 1990s. Second, every little grocery store on and near Abu Nawas Street has turned itself into a liquor store, which is something that any pedestrian can clarify for oneself. Third, the fried “guts” is actually the roe sack (carp eggs) which can be bought at Whole Foods. The sack is fried in the oils that ooze out of the fish, and that’s the whole point of masguf and why it is yummy (…missed in the article): the oil from the top of the fish slowly streams down to cook the rest of the fish.

-Stories about Kirkuk as a A-bomb about to detonate: Rod Nordland, ‘Now It’s a Census That Could Rip Iraq Apart,’ The New York Times, July 26; Anthony Shadid, ‘Worries About A Kurdish-Arab Conflict Move To Fore in Iraq,’ Washington Post, July 27; Andrew Lee Butters, ‘Why Kurds vs. Arabs Could Be Iraq’s Next Civil War,’ TIME, July 22. All these stories are ridiculous, but Shadid quoting Hamid al-Hayess of Anbar to say that if the Kurds try to take Kirkuk then “we will wipe it off the face of the map” takes the cake. Quoting a clown like Hayess on Kirkuk is like quoting Marion Barry on the Skip Gates arrest. Anyone can find crazy quotes, but it is up to the reporter and the editor to decide whether they run or not. When crazy quotes are run, as they do in Western press stories on Iraq, then it reflects a continuing agenda. Anyway, Hayess publicly stated to Iraqi media that he never said such a thing, so Shadid should check his notes.

I didn’t plan to write about Kirkuk, but with the degraded level of what’s being written about the place, and the expectant glee of imminent doom as reflected in the press accounts, I may just have to pour some cold water on this type of dribble. But not today, for I have work to do.

-The Reese memo debate: I agree with Col. Timothy Reese’s memo (see text here) that the Americans should declare victory and go. Although Reese may have been miffed by the fact he can’t boss around Iraqi officers any more like interns and hence was motivated to fire off a screed against those who won’t get him his coffee anymore, the reality is that America’s presence in Iraq is devoid of strategic direction. In a nutshell, I believe that direction should be safeguarding Iraq’s democracy from a drift towards authoritarianism (…which some Americans and Brits on the ground are encouraging), and arming and developing Iraq’s military and security forces to act as America’s principal strategic ally in the region (…which isn’t happening). Washington is unclear about what it wants to do with Iraq, while it irrationally blows assets and money on Afghanistan, a country that has very little of the long-term strategic potential (political, military and economic) that Iraq enjoys. The Obama administration’s cluelessness about Iraq’s future is merely a continuation of Bush’s second term, and it is too late to fix this structural flaw in America’s strategic design. There is no violent agenda that the current Iraqi Army and police, even with all their shortcomings, can’t handle, so sure, pull the plug and off you go.

The 'New' United Iraqi Alliance, and Bolani for PM

2009-08-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

My new piece for Hudson NY today deals with the persistent delays in announcing the 'new' UIA, and why some are pushing for Jawad al-Bolani to be Maliki's replacement.

Excerpt:

These delays cannot be chalked up solely to finding the most auspicious and PR-friendly date possible; these delays mask a failure by the chief architects of the new UIA to sign on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They know fully well that without Maliki, the UIA would be a desperate stunt by washed-up parties that have been battered at the ballot box, and continue to sink at the polls.

For now, UIA sources are putting up a brave face, “Everything is fine, Maliki is on board.” But they must have been a little rattled when Ali al-Adeeb, the most enthusiastic supporter for a resurrected UIA within the Maliki camp, was quoted a couple of days ago as saying to an Iraqi news agency that “It is a matter of who joins who,” that is, does Maliki join the UIA or does the UIA fold under the wing and leadership of Maliki, the latter an impossible prospect for the inflated egos of the UIA’s key players.

It is at such times that one must tune into Baghdad’s rumor mills. Rumors may not be true, yet they do reflect a state of mind and may influence the multiple showdowns of political brinkmanship accompanying the negotiations for a new alliance. One particular rumor must sound upsetting to Maliki: the consensus candidate for the prime minister’s job after the election is the current Minister of Interior, Jawad al-Bolani. According to the rumor mongers, most of the components of the UIA—spooked as they are by Maliki’s rising fortunes—as well as the Kurds and the two dominant Sunni camps, the Islamists and the neo-Ba’athists, want any credible alternative to Maliki to be agreed upon before going further, and that candidate is Mr. Bolani. In other words, the UIA is a trap for Maliki so that his adversaries can tether him down and replace him with another.

Continue reading...

Suleimaniya Rejects Barham Salih

2009-07-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

The Western media narrative so far, when commenting on the dramatic win earned by the Goran slate in the Kurdish elections, attributes what happened to a vote against corruption. That is only a fraction of the story.

In mid-June, senior KDP officials were telling me that Noshirwan Mustafa, who is heading the Goran list, may secure, on a good day, four to six seats in the 111 member regional parliament. By mid-July, a source close to the Barzani family revealed that their secret and internal polling showed that Mustafa may walk away with 20 to 23 seats. As it stands, Goran may have won 25 to 30 seats as the results come in.

So what happened?

I believe that the city of Suleimaniya, long wary of Arbil’s and by extension the Barzanis’ rising influence, had two native sons from whom to choose from: Mustafa and Barham Salih, currently the Deputy Prime Minister in Baghdad (…who resigned, or didn’t resign, it’s still not clear). Salih was President Jalal Talabani’s designated successor, but he was thus chosen for a number of reasons; submissive, obedient, and lackluster on his own. It was on these criteria that he was rejected by Suleimaniya, for he wasn’t seen as somebody with the vigor it may take to hold Arbil at bay.

Mustafa is not a very convincing candidate. He’s a drab ideologue, with lousy political skills, who comes off as haughty, incomprehensible and aloof on TV and in meetings. He is certainly no match for the colorful and charismatic Talabani, who head the PUK. But Mustafa wasn’t running against Talabani, he was running against Salih, whose face adorned all the Kurdistani posters in Suleimaniya, in silly poses like doing an ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’.

Mustafa is a 'fighter' while Salih isn't.

Five years ago, when political chatter was rife about the need to find a successor for the visibly aging and ailing Talabani, the name of Salih would be accompanied by expletives in Suleimaniya. When I was there ahead of the elections, the same people who were saying mean things about Salih years back had now acquiesced to his status as heir apparent, but without conviction. Salih was all that Talabani had left after outmaneuvering his rivals within the PUK ‘pride’—emasculated, meek and would protect the corrupt financial empire that Talabani’s immediate family had erected. So he was heir by attrition, and by default.

Western reporters adore Salih. He provides access and urbane, proper English conversation. He collects art, and dishes out gossip about the elites of Baghdad and Washington DC. He even Twitters. Needless to say, these topics don’t carry far among the ‘Blue Label’-infused soirees of the PUK old guard, grizzled and jaded 50-somethings who had seen fighting in the mountains since their teenage years.

It is my opinion that the only matter holding the Kurdish political front together is Talabani’s life expectancy. One should not rule out defections from within the Kurdistani slate to Mustafa’s favor if Talabani is out of the picture. The smaller Islamist and leftist parties that also won a number of seats owe their staying power to subsidies—cash, offices, contracts—from the PUK and the KDP. But if Mustafa accrues a significant number of defectors, they may also opt to join him. In this scenario, the Kurdistani slate may be reduced to a parliamentary minority, and things will get interesting.

Talabani’s demise may also influence the future of the Kurds in Kirkuk, who may opt to stay out of the competition between Arbil and Suleimaniya for domination by going their own way for a negotiated status for their city separate from the KRG. Right now, they look upon Talabani—originally from Koy Sanjak but the Talabani clan is an integral part of the Kurd-Turkuman matrix of Kirkuk—as one of their own. But in a choice between Barzani and Mustafa, they may have little sympathy for either.

Salih was supposed to become the new Prime Minister of the Kurdish region. President Barzani may have looked upon this outcome as a neat way to sideline his nephew, Nechirvan Barzani, the current PM. Nechirvan is the chief rival to Massoud's son and designated heir, Masroor, and Nechirvan wouldn't be able to go to Baghdad to fill the space that Salih is supposed to be vacating, mostly because Nechirvan would be out of his element there seeing that he doesn't even speak Arabic. Political exile for Nechirvan would be political death, something he won't be able to recover from. But Nechirvan may not ride off into the sunset just yet, and he will argue that the deal to appoint Salih in his place is null and void given the election result. This may complicate life for the senior Barzani and his designs for succession.

Furthermore, what is happening in Iraqi Kurdistan must be understood as an extension of the changes across the political landscape of the rest of Iraq. Old lions wither away, and new contenders emerge, fundamentally changing long-established loyalties that carried over from the days of opposition to Saddam. A new political elite is emerging, and with it arrives a new brand of political consciousness. The issues have changed, so naturally will the symbols change too.

Cultural Oddities: The Day of the Prophet Zechariah

2009-07-26T14:35:00.000-07:00

Today marks the Day of Zechariah, a Holy Day that is very close to the hearts of the inhabitants of Baghdad, especially the women. I don't think that this is done anywhere else in the Middle East, and certainly not with the same mass participation that marks it as a distinctly Baghdadi (...errr, sometimes pan-Iraqi) celebration.

The whole idea revolves around fertility, for Zechariah's wife was able to conceive even though she was very old (...or something like that). The child that was born grew up to become John the Baptist, a saint venerated throughout the Middle East.

The celebration itself involves a day of fasting on the 1st day of the lunar month of Sha'aban, and it even means fasting from talking, which is a welcome relief since only the women do it.

A tray is placed in the home with a number of lit candles corresponding to the number of family members. There are also bowls of sweets and nuts and a particular kind of plant and flower.

Anyway, just wanted to highlight this cultural marker that all Baghdadis, from every sect and religion, celebrate, and to wish you all a Happy Zechariah Day.

This is a picture of a Zechariah tray that I found at an Iraqi website:

Iraq Policy: Who's in Charge?

2009-07-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

I have a new post out today on Hudson-NY about PM Maliki's visit to Washington, and the confusion over who really controls the Iraqi file within the Obama administration.

I also put in something that I don't believe anyone has reported on:

It is in this vein that Washington’s decision to quietly shut down a key intelligence operation to keep tabs on the Iranians in November 2008 seems so misplaced and astonishing. The intelligence operation partnered up twenty five Iraqi intelligence agents with a like number of CIA agents. It began in late 2003, and its size remained the same. They were headquartered in a building separate from the Iraqi Intelligence Service HQ, and operated independently of any Iraqi oversight. Their chief mission was to track and, where possible, to offset Iran’s intelligence and operational footprint inside Iraq, and to follow leads back across the border into Tehran, Damascus and Beirut. As can be expected with such operations, some of its work is questionable; it partook in Iraqi politics, even exercising violence through a separate paramilitary arm, at times in an illegal and unethical manner. However, its work was crucial in keeping the Iranians—specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guard which took the lead after mid-2004—on their toes.

Read the whole thing here...

I was hosted on Alhurra TV on July 22 (episode # 1395) to discuss these issues, and it can be watched (in Arabic) here. The big story, of course, is that US intelligence had signed a protocol for negotiating with an insurgent umbrella group this spring in Istanbul, and the Iraqi government is up in arms over this revelation, first made on July 15 by the General Secretary of the 'Political Council of the Iraqi Resistance' Ali al-Juburi during an interview with Aljazeera. I'll have more to say about this over the next few days.

Bits and Pieces

2009-07-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

-I’ve written two pieces for Hudson-NY. The latest (today) is about what the politicians are talking about in Baghdad:

The Iraqi political class is preoccupied these days with the word ‘alliances’. Parliamentary elections are seven months away, yet everyone is scrambling to form exploratory committees to cobble together a viable slate, sometimes leading to a gathering of the strangest bedfellows. This activity is occurring against the backdrop of an unresolved mechanism for how the next national ballot is going to be held: closed slates, open slates, provincial slates, or a single national slate.

A new election law is supposed to be tabled on the parliament’s floor but it remains to be seen whether coalitions will coalesce before that happens, thus shaping the final outcome of the bill, or whether the law will take shape, and in light of its content coalitions, will come together in a way that best take advantage of it.

Continue reading…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the departure of U.S. troops from the remaining Iraqi cities and towns.

-Abu Omar al-Baghdadi issued his eighteenth speech a little over a week ago. I’ll get around to it at some point.

-I had an interesting time in Kirkuk, and I thought that I’d write about it. But I think a better study of the situation there would encompass the towns and villages around the city that are an essential part of the story. Since I didn’t get the chance to do any serious traveling in the area, I’ll save the post for another time.

-I was interviewed for Aljazeera International from Suleimaniya. Here’s the Youtube of it:

What Remains: The Shrine of Gurgur Baba of Baghdad

2009-07-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

I had been snooping around the alleyways of Old Baghdad, trying to figure what the scope of a multi-billion renovation and gentrification of the area would look like. Of course, the billions required are still far from being allocated, but one can dream, right?

The challenge is to first identify what remains, and what is worth preserving. I was running by a map prepared by Captain James Felix Jones in the mid-1850s of Old Baghdad, the contours of which—alleyways, where the walls used to lie, some of the more important landmarks—can still be matched with the images from Google Earth.

Much of my quest was heartbreaking, for very little remains or can be rehabilitated. I zeroed in on several tasks, one of which was to locate the Bektashi tekkyas (plural of tekkya, a Sufi-leaning house of worship), which I first took note of after corresponding with a Turkish graduate student at Harvard conducting research on the heritage of Bektashism in Iraq.

There were two or three tekkyas on the Karkh (Western) side of Old Baghdad. According to anecdotal evidence, one used to be located near the former site of the statue of Adnan Kheirallah (now removed) in the Shawwaka neighborhood. A historian told a friend of mine that it had been recently blown up by Al-Qaeda who used to control the area, but asking around about the former site of the tekkya or a landmark that had been blown up by the jihadists only drew blank stares. There is a tekkya, which according to the people there only came into use four years ago, and has since been abandoned. There’s a family living there now, and I could be mistaken, since I didn’t take a picture of it and since I had seen quite a lot of stuff that day (…and it was hot and dusty), but the newly made sign above the doorway may have said that it was a Rifa’iyya tekkya. This does not rule out that it was indeed the Bektashi tekkya I was looking for (…even though it was a couple of alleyways off from the directions I had been given), for many Bektashi tekkyas were awarded and re-awarded to other Sufi orders throughout history.

The second tekkya’s history is more grounded in documented fact. It used to be located near the Shrine of Khidhir Ilyas on the water’s edge of the Tigris. It is not clear whether the tekkye itself was located on the water, or whether it was merely nearby. The immediate area around the shrine is now an empty lot, but a short distance away from the water is another Rifa’i tekkya. I was told that there are seven tombstones within this tekkye, but I couldn’t get inside since the family that lives there was out for the day. Had it been a Bektashi tekkye at one stage then one could determine that from the inscriptions and motifs on the tombstones.

The third tekkya was on the water’s edge where the Beiruti café now stands. No trace of the old structure remains. In the past it was located outside the city gates, on the road to Kadhimain.

The most important tekkya in Baghdad though, was on the Rusafa (eastern) side of the city. It was part of a complex around the shrine of Gurgur Baba (sometimes rendered ‘Baba Gurgur’…of the ‘eternal flame’ fame near Kirkuk). Satellite imagery wasn’t reassuring, since much of that area had been built-up or modern roads were cut across it. The other point was that historians of Old Baghdad seemed totally unaware of the existence of this shrine/tekkya. But I set out anyway, since I saw a dome that could have been what I was looking for.

This was the area behind the Ahmadi Mosque, bordered on the north by the street that takes you to the Haidarkhana Mosque, and on the east by the Maidan and the Ministry of Defense. To the south lies the Qishla, the old Ottoman barracks. The whole area is marked in Jones’ map as the ‘Gurgur Baba neighborhood’.

I found the dome, but it turned out to be a Shiite shrine; the burial place of one of the representatives of the Mahdi. I was momentarily crestfallen, but then some busybody across the street, probably suspecting that I was showing too much interest in the shrine at a time when such places get blown up, came up to me and asked what I was looking for. I said I was looking for ‘Gurgur Baba’ and he matter-of-factly told me that it was the next alleyway down. I didn’t know what to make of it, since I’ve received so many directions those days that gave me some hope but turned out to be false leads.

I went into that alleyway and again asked for ‘Gurgur Baba’. This was a closed alleyway, as in it was roofed, and consisted of several upholstery workshops. Another guy told that it the shrine was just down the alleyway, but I could barely hear him with the generator and several saws operating at full throttle. I overshot the place and came to a small empty lot. I thought, oh well, yet another empty space in the landscape of what went missing over the centuries. But then, a workshop owner that I had passed motioned to me and I walked back to him. He asked me what I was up to and after hearing me out said, “Oh, Gurgur Baba is right through here.”

We walked into his shop, full of furniture being stuffed with sponges, and furniture that will be cannibalized for parts, and at the very end was a half-opened metal door, with debris mounded behind it. The guy said, “That’s Gurgur Baba,” motioning for me to climb over the debris of sponges, metal springs, bricks and wood beams. Surely enough, a wooden casket with it top broken in by a fallen roof could be made out. A small epitaph engraved in stone marked the spot where Gurgur Baba was buried.

I was ecstatic. Something remains! Or at least enough of it that can be rebuilt! A small part of the heritage of Baghdad was there, waiting to be resurrected. The winds flooded into my sails, and I was propelled forward, full of hope for more finds.

The tekkya was built in 1670. It mainly served the Janissaries who were housed in the Ottoman fort nearby, many of whom were adepts of the Bektashi order. The tekkya was also frequented by one of the most important Ottoman personages to rule over Baghdad, the modernizing Vali and statesman Midhet Pasha. At some point, it fell into disuse, and the Awqaf department that oversees religious sites, divided up the tekkya into workshops and rented them out. Within recent memory, the roof over Gurgur Baba fell in. The last group of Turkish pilgrims to visit the shrine are said to have come by in the 1970s.

I don’t know much about who Gurgur Baba was supposed to be, but I’ll keep researching, and I’ll fill you in. I’m hoping that this post would encourage other Baghdadis to seek out their heritage and to figure out ways of preserving it. The point is that every single religious and ethnic group in Iraq has a symbolic foothold in the capital, Baghdad. I could go through a long list, but our immediate topic, Gurgur Baba, could be significant for the Shabaks near Mosul, and the townspeople of Taza near Kirkuk, where a Bektashi tekkya is still operational.

Here are some pictures from the site:

click to enlarge

Did I mention that I'm trying to put together a 'Rebuilding the Gurgur Baba Shrine' fundraiser? A roof can be put up for a couple of grand, but doesn't Gurgur Baba deserve a turqoise-tiled dome? That comes with a 40,000 USD price tag...ahemmm...

Appearance on Aljazeera

2009-06-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

iI appeared live on Aljazeera Satellite Channel this morning to comment on the U.S. troop withdrawal from the remaining Iraqi cities along with 'Ibrahim al-Shimmeri', the spokesman for the 'Islamic Army in Iraq' insurgent group, and Liqa' Makki, an Iraqi analyst based in Qatar, who seems sympathetic to the insurgents.

The fourth guest was supposed to be 'Abu Muhammad', the spokesman for the Ba'ath Party, but he pulled out for some reason.

Al-Shimmeri was introduced as speaking from Baghdad, although I doubt it. Together with Makki, the two other guests tried to chalk up the withdrawal to the victory of the 'resistance'. They are even under the impression that the 'resistance' brought President Obama to power.

Whereas I said that the troop withdrawal today is the result of a U.S. and Iraqi victory against the 'mutinous' insurgents (...yeah, it sounds worse in Arabic). I added that groups like the Islamic Army, contrary to groups like Al-Qaeda, didn't have an agenda other than bringing back a system that gives Sunnis unrepresentational power. The violence they unleashed was designed to twist the arm of the Americans so as to negotiate. The end result is that the demands were too unrealistic and the insurgency was militarily depleted, diminished and defeated. The story of the Iraqi insurgency and its end is one of defeat by attrition, more than any other factor such as political reconciliation.

Anyway, I thought it was funny that I was openly speaking from Baghdad, from Abu Nawwas Street, while the mouth organs for the 'resistance' were in exile or in hiding. Oh, and I got a free PhD to boot, 'Dr. Nibras' this and 'Dr. Nibras' that. Grad school is for suckers.

UPDATE: My mom made this point about the four U.S. soldiers who were killed last night: it's extra saddening because they were so close to finishing up their duties in Iraq, and their families were expecting back home soon. I'm not sure whether this is the same event, but there was a 15 minute fire fight yesterday in the Binook area (northeastern Baghdad) after someone opened fire on a congregation of American soldiers. They were there to check out a site where only the day before a car bomb had gone off targeting a U.S. vehicle patrol. I know this place very well. On one side of the street are long established middle class residents, while on the other is an illegal slum built up within half-finished apartment blocks that were supposed to be distributed to academics. The slum is rife with organized crime rings (drugs, kidnappings, prostitution) associated with the Mahdi Army. The Americans had conducted several security sweeps of the area in the past few years, but the only solution is to mass evict the squatters.

UPDATE (Wednesday, July 1, 2009): I received some more information about the incident at Binook and it seems that it was not the spot where the four U.S. soldiers were killed. The incident occurred after an elderly civil servant living in a row of houses opposite the slum spotted some movement on a nearby rooftop which he took for a burglary, so he started shooting in the air to ward off what he believed were thieves. It turned out they were U.S. soldiers who began to shoot back, and this lasted for a while. The man was arrested.

Baghdad, Impressions After a Long Absence

2009-06-28T14:06:00.001-07:00

Baghdad, and most other places, experienced its second severe sandstorm today in as many weeks. The dust finds its way into every nook and cranny, the bane of housewives throughout the land. Once the municipality decides to turn the water on, multitudes are prompted to wipe, wash and spray. But only a downpour can really wash out the layer of beige that coats every wall, every pavement, and every leaf. At least face masks are readily available, sold at traffic chokepoints at about 20 cents a piece; a sizable proportion of the population, of every class, dons them on.

The pleasant surprise is that the solar panels that feed street lights with power still work through the coating of dust. Yes, you got that right: we’re environmentally sound in the department of finding alternative power. Al Gore, how about a shout-out?

Even traffic lights, newly in place, are powered by the sun. Yet it still takes a burly and scowling traffic officer to keep the unruly drivers in check. “Put it in reverse and get behind the crosswalk” they warn, and people comply. It’s not the gun that intimidates, but the ticket book. Failure by the driver to buckle up could cost up to 25 dollars, doubling if unpaid within a month. The ticket is posted online within 24 hours. That’s one of the ironies of the new Iraq: park illegally and you’ll get digitally fined, yet a national ID card is still registered on voluminous ledgers by pen. (link to a piece I wrote about Iraq's bureaucracy...)

The Iraqi police and army are everywhere. Security vehicles—Chevy trucks, Korean 4x4s, Humvies—are as ubiquitous as taxis. Many checkpoints are equipped with handheld explosives detection devices that are even sensitive to perfume and deodorant. A common and funny sight to behold is that of soldiers holding purses away from cars to see if the device would still beep. However, a pretty girl riding would also warrant a longer than usual search, perchance for a young buck to strike up a conversation and discreetly pass off a mobile number. To all intents and purposes, the Americans have been out of Baghdad for some time; it is rare to find an American patrol out and about.

The hassle and wait at a checkpoint run smoothly, which is remarkable considering that a car lacking air-conditioning and prone to chock on fumes at every brake can turn an otherwise nice and decent chap like yours truly into a poster child for road rage. The vast majority of vehicles are as broken down as my own, yet the vast majority of people are civil, although sullen. It is all taken in stride, patience being a commodity not lacking in a country that requires tons of it.

Security is fine. Things are safe until they aren’t, which is rare nowadays. The recent spate of bombings feel a lot like late 2003 and early 2004: if you can hear it then you’re still alive, and if you’re still alive then nothing else matters. The violence provokes no more than a shrug for those lucky enough not to be directly touched by it.

Moving around is another matter. The fear is still fresh in most people minds, and it isn’t surprising to hear of people who are making forays from east to west Baghdad, or in reverse, for the first time in years. Going to places like the Jam’ia neighborhood, until recently a ghost town terrorized by Al-Qaeda, manages to draw looks of bewilderment coupled with sincere, unsolicited advice against doing so again. But Rabi’ Street, the main thoroughfare there, has come back to life, and it is remarkable that not a few Shiites never left. I have an elderly relative there from my dad’s side there who is protected, catered for, and driven around by the four young sons of her Sunni neighbor, a family itself displaced from a Shiite neighborhood. For good measure, the relative still displays the name of her late spouse, unmistakably Sunni. It seems to me that a lot of these social links never broke, and counter intuitively got strengthened despite the sectarian battle lines.

Every house in Jami’a bears a mark in bright red spray point. An ‘X’ means that the house has been forcibly taken over. A check sign (…like the Nike logo) with a line through it means that the family now there is legally renting the home. A check sign alone indicates that the owner still lives in the house. In the balance of power, it is clear that the government’s security forces are in control of the main roads and neighborhood entry points. Deeper into the residential areas, one finds Sons of Iraq checkpoints, with armed men who seem bored out of their minds.

Roaming the residential side streets is restricted by immovable road blocks. While some main roads, closed since 2003, are being re-opened around Baghdad, greatly easing traffic, it seems that the concrete barriers will be in place for a long time. It is very disorienting for someone who had been away to find one’s way around this new reality, but like everything else, one’s gets used to it. However, in some places, there is significant popular resentment against the seeming permanence of these barriers since they effectively choke off mercantile activity. The road blocks and the security gates in Kadhimiya are probably the best managed of their kind in the whole country, but it also means that while the suburb had become Baghdad’s primary hub for all sorts of economic activity since the 1970s, now the markets are empty and customers go elsewhere to get their goods.

To say that people have moved beyond sectarianism is inaccurate. One can have a spouse, a business partner, a relative, a friend or a neighbor from the opposite sect, but when it comes to perceived political power as a guarantor for present and future wellbeing, everyone reverts to their sectarian identity. This had been the case for a longtime before and after liberation, and it will continue to be the basic instinctual motivator in how Iraqis arrange their political loyalties. What’s important is that no one thinks that violence can change the balance now in place, and only the last vestiges of the ancien regime and cooks like the jihadists would wield it in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to turn back the clock.

Iraqis, it seems, have issues in mind far beyond sectarianism and security. Which is why the departure of US troops in a couple of days isn’t a major conversation starter. The heat, the dust, getting things done, petty corruption, and so forth is the stuff that gets their attention.

Among regular people, any social face-to-face interaction that lasts more than 30 seconds must bring up the issue of electricity. Nothing riles up Iraqis, understandably so, than the recurrent cuts in power. Almost everyone runs lines from privately-managed generators to get a few amperes here and there, not enough, except for the super-affluent, to run power-hungry equipment like air-conditioners. When the ‘national’, that is government supplied, electricity comes, there’s a moment of euphoria that never gets old as the legions of the sweat-drenched amble around their homes switching on the ac.

Every phone conversation invariably brings up the word ‘shabaka’, or network. Cell phones are notoriously unreliable. Conversations are held in 10 second increments before voices get scrambled and calls are dropped. That is, if the call gets through in the first place.

Petty corruption seems to have abated to a large extent. There’s a palpable fear, reinforced by anecdote, among state employees that getting a bribe for a signature or a stamp may land one in prison, and to a large extent one would be hard pressed to see the kind of unabashed sleaze so common and in full view just six months ago.
High caliber corruption, the kind that involves millions of dollars, is still in vogue though.

For all their daily woes, Iraqis are lucky enough to be able to vent, and vent they do, vocally and colorfully. The state’s television station is still lacking in sophisticated graphics and able presenters, but two shows caught my attention and truly impressed me. The first one is called ‘A Copy for Archiving’ and the premise is that the host goes around the country and gathers a town-hall audience and faces them off against a representative of the legislature, whether local or national, and a representative of the executive branch. In a rapid-fire exchange, citizens cite specific issues or neglected projects and reforms, and the officials must reply, with brevity, whether it is doable or not. At the end, a representative is elected from the audience who signs a ‘document of honor’ with the officials, witnessed by the TV host, that will be retrieved in six months time to see if the officials had managed to deliver on the issues and projects they said were doable.

The other show is called ‘You Are the Minister’. The host takes a minister along for a walkabout, and hands over the microphone to a citizen who is asked, ‘If you were the minister, what would you do?’ It makes for great television, with some smart and feasible ideas put on the air. The minister is then forced to explain why these ideas haven’t been put into effect yet.

Generally, people are very hopeful. Sure they curse Maliki every time the electricity goes out, and lament the fact that Iraq doesn’t have Istanbul’s weather, but there’s a sense that things have stabilized and will improve, quickly. There’s a lot of money in the country, a direct result of pumping oil profits into salaries. New cars are everywhere despite the needed ‘look’ of frugality that people affect to ward off the attention of organized crime rings and kidnappers for ransom. The nightlife, as has been reported, is back and with force, mostly of the lewd variety. Social clubs like the Hunting Club and Alwiyah provide islands of normality whether upper middle class teenage girls and boys can dress up like their age and class peers anywhere in Amman or Beirut. Leftie intellectuals and artists have found a spiffy oasis at the Dar Al-Mada on Muttanabi Street. Even on weekdays, the main street of Karadeh stays vibrant until 11 PM; compare that to DC that shuts down at 10 PM. Thursdays and Fridays brings the whole city out to the streets, and I even saw families picnicking on rotaries in some of the scariest areas of Old Baghdad, no go areas even in Saddam’s time.

Baghdad is coming back to life, that’s the sum of it.

Well, that’s enough for now. The electricity is out, and you lot should be thankful for technological marvels such as backlit keyboards and internet connections that keep going despite the power cuts, making it possible for me to write something, anything at all. It’s too hot for any more writing tonight, but I’ll put up some more posts over the next few days.

Here's something else I wrote about Baghdad's main library to lay you over.

Traveling, Again

2009-06-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

As the oldtimers visiting this blog would know, these long lulls between posts usually mean one thing: I am traveling and can't be bothered to write. I'm currently in a place that is hot and dusty, with intermittent electricity. Hopefully in the coming weeks I'll have interesting things to say from various parts of the country.

Al-Baghdadi and Obama

2009-06-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

I reviewed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi's seventeenth speech in this week's piece for Hudson NY in light of President Obama's address.

Excerpt:

Obama is due to the address the Arab and Muslim worlds in Cairo. His speech, and his recent visit to Saudi Arabia, are being hyped up as the ultimate rapprochement between the West and Islam. Not a few people in the president’s audience will have al-Baghdadi’s words ringing in their ears, and it those people, the ones who have taken the time to stop by a jihadist internet forum to download the caliph’s speech, who are the most likely to turn jihadist, if they haven’t done so already. They have been primed to judge Obama to be a walking, talking insult to their faith. How would one go about undoing the effects of such venom?

Continue reading...

Late Weekend Read

2009-05-31T16:37:00.000-07:00

Anthony Shadid writes 'safe' stories: features that would get him awards, but nothing groundbreaking or revealing, seemingly fleshing out ideas that are already in circulation. And when his work is good, then it is very good in the 'safe' sense. His piece today on America's legacy in Iraq falls under this category.

I felt that it echoed something I had written earlier, Remembering the Americans.

The Abu Omar al-Baghdadi Backgrounder

2009-05-30T16:17:00.000-07:00

Thought I’d make it easier for new visitors to the blog clicking forward from this piece in tomorrow's New York Times on al-Baghdadi by gathering together all the relevant links. I’ve been hard on the reporting of the NYTimes on Iraq, but since this story by Campbell Robertson quotes me then all I can say is that it’s perfect.

The alleged ‘al-Baghdadi’ capture (in chronological order): here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Why I think al-Baghdadi is the new designated caliph of Islam, here (published July 2008, PDF file).

Baghdadi’s speeches: His seventeenth speech, excerpts from which were first heard on Al-Jazeera on May 22, was only posted in full today on the Al-Faloja jihadist forum. It is titled 'The Aqsa [Mosque] Between the Falaciousness of the Christians and the Malice of the Jews'. The speech itself runs for about 30 minutes. It is directed primarily against the Pope's visit to the Middle East, and in it he calls President Barack Obama a "black slave who apostacized from Islam". He also mentions the fighting in the Swat Valley.

First speech: December 22, 2006

Second speech: February 2, 2007

Third speech: March 14, 2007

Fourth speech: April 16, 2007

Fifth speech: July 9, 2007

Sixth speech: September 15, 2007

Seventh speech: (don’t have the date)

Eighth speech: December 28, 2007

Ninth speech: February 14, 2008

Tenth speech: April 13, 2008

Eleventh speech: September 9, 2008

Twelfth speech: September 24, 2008

Thirteenth speech: November 7, 2008

Fourteenth: about the war in Gaza, January 2009

Fifteenth speech: March 17, 2009

Sixteenth speech: May 12, 2009

End of an Era

2009-05-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

So, ‘Ammu Baba has died. He was a soccer player and coach who had attained the highest rungs of Iraqi celebrity. I can’t pinpoint when exactly were his glory days, but his colorful personality, and reputation for on-the-field profanity, turned him into a media star of the past few decades. For a while in these last few years, it seemed that there was an Ammu Baba interview every other week on an Iraqi satellite channel. And not only that, but politicians would trip over each other claiming to paying his medical expenses abroad. Then there's the other narrative that the Iraqi state had failed to take care of a 'national treasure' or the 'sheikh of the trainers' as he's been called.

As a kid, I used to be confused by his name which translated into ‘Uncle Father’. It was much later that I realized that ‘Ammu was short for ‘Amanuel (‘Emanuel’, he’s an Assyrian Christian, born in Anbar Province).

Baba was the Sistani of Iraq's cultish sports world, and soccer fanatics are out in full force marching in mourning processions. He died yesterday in Dehok at the age of 65. It is alleged that he’ll be buried at the Sha’ab Stadium (…Iraq’s principal soccer field) since that was his last request. I think Baghdad just gained one more shrine.

Press Junket to 'Al-Baghdadi's' Village

2009-05-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Iraqi government is intent on flogging the dead horse of the Abu Omar al-Baghdadi capture, and this time they’ve taken an Al-Arabiya TV crew to film the abandoned village of the man in custody, Ahmad Abid Ahmad Khamees al-Majma’I, who is being depicted as al-Baghdadi. You can watch the footage here (Arabic report).

It seems that Al-Arabiya has been given this scoop in retaliation for its rival Al-Jazeera airing al-Baghdadi’s last speech.

A few things jumped at me in this report:

-The village shown is being called Bazaiz Buhriz (approximately 5 Km south of Baquba). But Bazaiz Buhriz is an area with several hamlets, and the sectarian fault line dividing Sunni and Shia tribes in Diyala runs through it. It was the scene of many jihadist attacks (some of the tribes of the area sided with the Hamas-Iraq insurgent group against Al-Qaeda), as well as retaliation by Mahdi Army squads. The report claims that it was deserted before the Iraqi Army began controlling the area. There are only about six or seven houses in this hamlet, and it did seem as if it had been deserted for some time. A very small ‘bunker’ (nothing more than a concrete basin with a lid, looks like 7 meters by 2 meters) was identified as al-Baghdadi’s private prison. The lid looks as if it had been hit by a projectile. However, it seems to be a ‘mild’ hit, likely a mortar. These areas were heavily mortared by rival groups.

-Bazaiz Buhriz is inhabited by Majamma’ clans, many of whom had been the victims of jihadist attacks and kidnappings. However, the ID cards for Ahmad al-Majma’i’s children (shown in the report, his wife’s ID is blurred by one can still make out her name as Nada Yaseen) list the family name as ‘Al-Ja’afari’. I find that very interesting since the captured man said that his last name is al-Majma’i in the taped confessions. But the Ja’afirah clan in Diyala (who’d use the last name Ja’afari) are very few in number and distributed around the province. They descend from the ‘Abdeh branch of the Shammar Toqah (…just to clarify, it means they are not Qurayshis). There’s a small village in Diyala that recent reports claims that has been abandoned and is called Ja’afirah, and it could have been the hamlet depicted in the report. This is important since a man belonging to a small tribe wouldn’t take it upon himself to lead attacks on the much larger Mujama’a tribes. It stands to reason that the man shown in the confessions would assume the name al-Majma’i since smaller clans usually get subsumed into larger ones, but the people of the area would always know that he was from the Ja’afireh.

-The Al-Arabiya report also claims that it had been contacted by al-Majma’i’s wife (…who could have supplied them with the IDs) who categorically says that while her husband had worked with jihadist groups, he was not Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

-There was one unidentified man from the area shown in the report who seemed skeptical about the claim that al-Majma’i was al-Baghdadi.

-The older man shown in the report, and who makes the connection between al-Majma’i and al-Baghdadi is identified as Yusuf al-Haylan. If I’m not mistaken, then his full name is Yusuf Haylan Kareem of the Banadirah clan, a subsection of the Rifa’aat clan, which is a subsection of the Majama’a. But he’s a resident of Tikrit (his ancestors had migrated there several generations in the past) who had been given land in the area by Saddam and proceeded to establish a village bearing his name ‘Yusuf al-Haylan’. Ownership of this land was disputed by Shi’a tribes in the area, and there were clashes reported a few years back. It would serve his interests to be advocating the government’s message in order to secure his land, and furthermore, he may have clashed over similar land disputes with the residents of the village to which al-Majma’i belonged.

Again, the government’s case that the captured man is Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is unconvincing. But it’s clear by now that they don’t intend to drop the issue for its media value.

However, more and more information will begin to peter out of the area about al-Majma’i that may undermine the government’s narrative, making it more unlikely that he’s al-Baghdadi.

Quick links for the weekend...

2009-05-24T10:50:00.001-07:00

-Another episode of Chalabi vs. the CIA: Dueling defamation law suits in the Iraqi courts, via IraqSlogger.

-Hariri assassination being blamed on Hezbollah, via Der Spiegel. Although this would seem to validate my initial hunch about the culprits, but the story has plenty of holes. Clearly the author, Erich Follath, got this from Lebanese sources--identified as "sources close to the investigation," and later "...According to the Lebanese security forces"--with the goal of influencing the outcome of the parliamentary elections next month. This circumstancial evidence (...nowhere in the article is there a direct link between the two cell phone networks) cited seems to have been kicked up to the investigators under Bellemare "about a month" ago. If Wisam Eid uncovered it, then why wasn't the evidence handed over earlier? (Eid was assassinated in Jan. 2008) First problem is that the story says that alleged Hezbollah operative Abdel-Majid Ghamlush was identified as the buyer of the mobile phones, but it doesn't tell us if he was the one who bought the first set of eight that were directly tied to the assassination, or the phones were the twenty mentioned in the "second circle of hell". It would stand to reason that Hezbollah operatives were in downtown Beirut monitoring things, but that would be routine, nothing with 'clear' criminal intent. Then there's the clincher: "They have apparently discovered which Hezbollah member obtained the small Mitsubishi truck used in the attack". There's no qualification for the word "apparently" and this tidbit, the only one talking about a direct link, is unsourced. To me, this is propaganda. Also note that chief investigator under Mehlis, Gerhard Lehmann, is now working for the Saudis. I've always maintained that there are plenty of reasons to denounce the Iranians, the Syrians and Hezbollah, without pegging the legitimacy of these outfits on a purported role or lack thereof in the Hariri murder.

The scourge of the cell phones...(Updated)

2009-05-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

Technological advances are changing the shape of Middle East politics, or at least they've added a new dimension to how scandals get depicted to the viewing public. From Junbulatt's embarassing utterances to scenes of mob violence, images and videos taken by cell phones are a never-ending source of scandal to the gossip-whisperers of the region.

And now, a video surfaces of the brother of Iraq's minister of trade ~~getting a lap dance from a hooker somewhere in Iraqi Kurdistan. He's the guy who appears at the end of the clip~~. [The person at the end is the media advisor of the Ministry of Trade, Muhammad Hanoon, who was arrested on the same corruption charges involving the minister's brothers. The assertion is that one of the brothers was at this party]. The clip starts with someone yelling, "Yirohlich fidwa al-Maliki", which roughly translates into "I'd sacrifice Maliki for you." I think this is the same brother who got arrested last week in Samawa carrying 150,000 dollars in cash, who then tried to bribe his way out. He's accused of skimming profits from sugar imports into Iraq. The Iraqi parliament last week was the scene of a serious grilling of the Trade Minister, Falah al-Sudani, a member of the pro-Iranian Da'awa Party-Iraq Organization (...headed by Abdel-Karim al-'Anizi), over this and other issues. His brothers are also members of the same party.

In other news, Maliki's office has sent out directives punishing businesses that sell alcohol. There's also a move in parliament [led by party-pooper MP Layla al-Khafaji of the UIA, a Canadian citizen] to ban alcohol imports. Boy, that's going to put a damper on the partying. It is also clear that much of the partying is being done by the nouveau riche Islamists.

Here's the video, which I'm posting strictly for educational purposes:

UPDATE (Monday, May 25, 2009): The Minister of Trade submitted his resignation today.

ابو عمر البغدادي والشريط المنشور في الجزيرة اليوم

2009-05-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm getting plenty of hits from the Middle East following my interview on Al-Jazeera regarding the Abu Omar al-Baghdadi tape, so I'm reposting the translation of the study I did on the Islamic State of Iraq (PDF file):

المحاولة الجهادية لإحياء الخلافة: دولة العراق الإسلامية وابو عمر البغدادي

More Twists in the ‘al-Baghdadi’ Saga

2009-05-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

Al-Jazeera aired a new tape today in which Abu Omar al-Baghdadi accused the Iraqi government of “outright lying”. In the brief excerpt that I had heard form Al-Jazeera—the original tape has not been posted yet on jihadist forums—al-Baghdadi responds to the recent televised confessions of Ahmad al-Majma’i, who the Iraqi government claims is the real al-Baghdadi.

In the new tape, al-Baghdadi highlights the “contradiction [among] the leaders of the security forces”; a likely allusion to what Sherwan al-Wa’ili had claimed about the captured man’s name and background, and the story given by the Baghdad Operations Command.

Al-Baghdadi believes that this is a “ploy” to force him to come out in a video recording that would reveal his real identity. He claims that he is known by “name and face” to many of the leaders of the jihadist groups.

'Artist's rendition' by a jihadist sympathizer on al-Faloja forum of what an 'Islamic State of Iraq' banknote would look like; note the images of Bin Laden and the Twin Towers

Al-Baghdadi adds that the voice that we’ve been hearing on his speeches is his own, and not of a spokesman or someone reading in his stead. He claims it is easy to verify that it's been the same voice all along.

This latest Al-Jazeera recording—al-Baghdadi’s seventeenth speech by my count—is likely to further embarrass the Maliki government that has made a very big deal of the alleged arrest, and have further used the ‘confessions’ to skewer the Islamic Party, the largest Sunni bloc in parliament that has been working to undermine Maliki through the threat of a no confidence vote.

Yesterday, Maliki’s press advisor Yassin Majid claimed in an interview with Radio Nawa that al-Baghdadi’s arrest was “more dangerous and more important” than Saddam’s capture. Majid called al-Baghdadi the “head of evil” and tied the arrest to the prowess of the Iraqi security forces that gives the lie to anyone who says that the Iraqis are unprepared for the aftermath of the proposed American withdrawal.

Da’awa Party MP and Maliki ally Ali al-Adib raised the stakes by stating that al-Baghdadi’s confessions tying the Islamic Party, the Ba’ath Party and Al-Qaeda together are likely to realign politics in Iraq.

And for more of the media circus surrounding this whole event, Tariq Harb, the ‘celebrity lawyer’ has announced that al-Majma’i’s wife is trying to hire him to defend her husband.

Furthermore, local officials in Diyala province now claim that the man who was shown in the confessions served as a member of the municipal council of the town of Buhriz in 2005 under the name “Ahmed al-Ahmadi.”

I just want to remind you all that I don’t buy the claim that the man who has been arrested is Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Maliki’s people are digging themselves into a deeper hole with every passing day, ending up with what is potentially a major political embarrassment for a government that’s built its name and credibility of the issue of security.

I'd even go so far as saying that is episode may be an election game changer, since it will begin to sow doubts as to whether Maliki really has a handle on the security situation, not to mention the tension unleashed by accusing the Islamic Party of complicity with Al-Qaeda. This last point could be the trigger for a no confidence vote in parliament.

More Mass Graves

2009-05-21T15:16:00.001-07:00

This week's piece for Hudson-NY carries the title 'Iraq: Landscape of Mass Graves',

On May 13, news filtered out from the southern province of Diwaniya that the local authorities there had discovered a mass grave in the eastern end of the province containing what is projected to be 100 corpses. Initial reports, based on items of clothing and the state of decomposition, indicate that the victims, mostly women and children, were Kurds who had been transported from the north of the country and killed and buried there during the genocidal Anfal Campaign (1987-1988).

On Monday, the local bureau of the Ministry of Human Rights in Najaf declared that it will begin to exhume bodies from a single mass grave in the Qadissiya district, in the desert west of Najaf. It is estimated that 3000 victims of the Saddam regime, again mostly Kurds, will be found there, and there are expectations that some of the several hundred still missing Kuwaitis, who were abducted by the regime during its 1990 invasion, may be found in the vicinity too.

Continue reading...

Why Cairo? Why Not Baghdad?

2009-05-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama is slated to give a speech on June 4th that is being billed as his message to the Islamic ‘ummah’—the worldwide community of Muslims. He has chosen to send this message out from Egypt, and word is that the venue is to be the Al-Azhar University and Mosque.

If you’re confused and saying to yourself, “Didn’t he just make a speech to the Muslims like a month ago?” well, that didn’t count since he delivered it at the Turkish National Assembly of Ankara, which is, symbolically-speaking, as potent an anti-Islamic symbol as you can find.

Egypt was ostensibly chosen for its symbolic value, which somehow trumps whatever negative connotations of such a locale lending legitimacy by proxy to the authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak, or so the argument goes.

But it got me to thinking, what’s so symbolic about Egypt for the rest of the Muslim world?

Setting aside the snide historical association made on a pro-jihadist discussion forum between Obama and Napoleon, then sure, Cairo holds plenty of symbolism if one is an Arab Nationalist of the Nasserist type, but why would Muslims in South Asia or Africa or the Far East look towards Cairo for spiritual guidance?

The short answer is that they don’t, since Cairo’s Islamic symbolism is a modern fabrication, probably pulled off by the Brits where they controlled the place. At the time, the British needed to create a new center of Islamic gravity to undermine any influence the Ottomans made have on Britain’s colonial Muslim subjects. But that’s a long story, so just take my word for it.

Cairo as we know it is city that was built long after the heyday of classical Islam. When the Arab conquerors first arrived brandishing their new faith, they chose to camp to the northwest of what came to be known as Old Cairo, a mixed Coptic and Jewish town.

Old Cairo holds more symbolism for Judaism (…think Moses) and Christianity (…think Virgin Mary and Jesus taking flight) than anything of comparable value to Islam.

After much urban sprawl northwards, the Fatimid ‘renegades’—heterodox Shi’as—conquer most of Egypt and begin building a royal court/town and call it Al-Qahirah, or Cairo. They’re the ones who founded the Al-Azher Mosque. The Fatimids continue to expand their empire, prompting a Sunni orthodox backlash led many decades later by Saladin, who nonetheless chooses Damascus over Cairo as his final resting place.

In this light, one cheeky enough would say that Cairo holds more symbolism for the Druze than the Sunnis.

Sure, al-Shafi’i—one of the founders of the four main Sunni sects—is buried in Cairo, but then again Baghdad boasts two other founders, Abu Hanifa and Ibn Hanbal. I can’t think of any notable Sufis who are buried in Cairo. Tanta has al-Badawi, but c’mon, Tanta is Tanta.

For many centuries, it was thought that whoever held Egypt also held the Hijaz, the birthplace of Islam. But that’s just a logistical reality, since the ports of the Red Sea would furnish the arid environs of Mecca and Medina, and the multitudes of pilgrims congregating there, with grain. Egypt did not become holier for Islam by being the breadbasket of the Hijaz; just as Saudi Arabia importing U.S. cereals does not sanctify Kansas in the eyes of Muslims.

Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem are all problematic for Obama, for obvious reasons. Two are no-go zones for an ‘infidel’ and one, let’s just say, is slightly disputed.

Damascus is a far better choice than Cairo as a Sunni symbol: it was a seat of a Sunni Islamic empire, the Umayyad; it was visited twice by Muhammad (…although he didn’t enter the city proper); the great Sufi mystic Ibn al-Arabi is buried there, so is an important 19th century Sufi propagator, Khalid al-Naqshbandi.

But it is ruled over by heterodox Alawites, and if you thought the Mubarak regime was cruel, then the Asads and their Ba’athist cohorts most certainly take the cake.

Which leaves us with Baghdad. Not only was Baghdad the seat of the Abbasid Empire, it contains the shrines for a great line up of Sufis: Al-Hallaj, al-Junaid and Abdel-Qader al-Gilani.

When it comes to Shi’a symbolism, and after all, some twenty percent of Obama’s intended audience is not Sunni, then Baghdad boasts two of the twelve imams.

And guess what, Iraq is a democracy, despite all the naysayers. It is light years ahead of Egypt, that’s for sure.

Oh wait, I’ve forgotten that America wants to forget all about Iraq.

Look, I’m one of those people who adores Cairo for all the things that many people hate about it. That’s probably because I don’t have to live there. I think Cairo’s greatest story arc revolves around its 19th century narrative of generations-long Westernization and liberalization that for the first time in a 1,000 years (…or even longer) incorporated the original Egyptians into the ruling elite (see my column, Egypt’s Faded Elegance). All that came to an abrupt end with Nasserism, a tale epically recounted in the movie The Yaqoubian Building, which is far more compelling than the novel it was based on.

But Cairo ain’t an Islamic symbol. And it was not a wisely chosen venue for Obama’s speech.

Al-Azhar gave us Hassan al-Banna (…the Muslim Brotherhood), Taqi al-Din al-Nabahani (…the Hizbul Tahrir), Seyyid Qutub (…modern jihadism, and yes, Dar Al-Uloom was part of Al-Azhar), and the prominence of the Zawahiri family. It also produced a long list of kowtowers for whoever was in power.

Choosing Al-Azhar is not a public diplomacy coup; there plenty in its past to sully any reflected luster.

Obama could have done a lot better with Baghdad, or even Delhi.

But it is too late to reschedule the presidential agenda.

‘Al-Baghdadi’ on TV

2009-05-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, the spokesman for the Iraqi Army’s ‘Baghdad Operations’ command, held a press conference today during which he presented footage of confessions made by the man the Iraqi government believes is ‘Abu Omar al-Baghdadi’.

In the excerpts that I’ve seen, ‘al-Baghdadi’ identifies himself as a 40 year-old former employee of the Saddam-era Commission for Military Industrialization, with the rank of technical assistant at the al-Karama facility, and that his name is Ahmad Abid Ahmad Khamees al-Majma’i, from Diyala Province.

Ahmad al-Majma'i

Al-Majma’i claims that he joined Al-Qaeda in 2005 and became the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006. In the clips shown, al-Majma’i claims to receive foreign funding through charity fronts from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt.

Al-Majma’i also claims that the Ba’ath Party and Al-Qaeda act in concert via officials in the Islamic Party.

As noted earlier, the Majma'is are not from Quraysh.

Where does this leave Sherwan al-Wa’ili’s leak to Al-Hayat Newspaper on May 10, 2009 that the arrested man’s real name is Ma’ad Ibrahim Muhammad, a former Colonel in the Republican Guard?

Last week, the Al-Furqan Media arm of the ISI released Abu Omar al-Baghdadi’s sixteenth speech, in which he denied being arrested.

Look, you all know how happy I’d be to implicate the Ba’athists and the Saudis in what Al-Qaeda has been up to, but the man shown on TV today is not convincing. This looks like shoddy coaching, with a glaring disconnect between the messages put out by Baghdad Operations command, and al-Wa’ili’s office.

Maliki has signed off on the accuracy of the information, and any retraction would be deeply embarrassing as he weathers wave upon wave of political attack in an election cycle.

I should note that one piece of info about al-Baghdadi that I had heard five months ago asserted that he had worked at Military Industrialization, but that he was from Tarmiyyah, not Diyala.

Some excerpts from the taped confession are available via Fayhaa TV (Arabic):

Quick links for the weekend

2009-05-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

-Adam Lichtenheld citing Talisman Gate throughout a story on Nehru Kasnazani, who is now promoting himself in Washington as a candidate for Iraq’s presidency.

-t-desco citing Talisman Gate on the Hariri assassination. Time to re-read my analysis of the Faisal Akbar confessions.

-Anthony Shadid’s piece Thursday in the Washington Post on the arrest of Mullah Nadhim al-Juburi is illuminating since it validates a point often made on this blog: the unfolding story of the ‘Sons of Iraq’ is less about Shi’as beating upon Sunnis but rather more about intra-Sunni rivalry. There’s one thing off about the piece: it claims that Mullah Nadhim joined Al-Qaeda “by August 2006.” That’s inaccurate, for by Mullah Nadhim’s own account in Al-Arabiya (Arabic link), he participated alongside Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi in the preparatory meetings for the Shura Council of the Mujaheddin, which emerged in January 2006.

David Rose, Vanity Fair and the Hamdani Myth (Updated)

2009-05-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

David Rose, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, has authored a prime example of ham-fisted revisionism and misguided self-promotion in this month’s issue of the magazine. The basic message of this article is that had Washington—then occupied by the evil ‘neocons’—only listened to General Raad al-Hamdani in 2004, then the whole Sunni insurgency could have been contained. It features a cast of unsung, busy-body Americans who feel compelled to tell the story of their nearly heroic opportunity to redeem the war in Iraq.

It’s a cute narrative of ‘shoulda-coulda-woulda’, one that nonetheless is full of holes and adds up to baloney.

Rose is a reporter in the same category as that of George Packer: a prototype of journalists who once thought that liberating Iraq was a noble cause, but have since recanted so that those who used to invite them to cocktail soirees in Manhattan would put them back on their invite lists.

Rose begins his first paragraph with “The history books will record…” and his second paragraph with “What history books should also record…” Quoting a former Rumsfeld aide who features plenty in this revised historical account, Rose writes ““From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. [killed in action] in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error.”

What is this fatal error?

Not listening to Talal al-Gaaod (I spell it Gaoud).

Enter Ken Wischkaemper, a Texas businessman who believes he discovered al-Gaoud in December 2003. Wischkaemper—who volunteers that he has no political or military experience—claims that al-Gaoud told him during his initial meetings that “We are totally disenfranchised, and we have no contact with the Americans. The country is being turned topsy-turvy and we have no voice. We have no connections in Washington. Will you help us?’”

That is not true. In late February 2003, before the war, Talal al-Gaoud was already meeting U.S. officers in Amman and discussing his plans to pacify Anbar Province. I would know since it was I who arranged the meetings. At the time I was working with Gen. Saadoun al-Dulaimi, who went on to become Iraq’s Minister of Defense under ~~Allawi~~ Ja'afari, as part of an Iraqi National Congress cell for operations in Anbar in cooperation with DoD. Al-Gaoud was al-Dulaimi’s contact, and the two of them, together with Dr. Jabir al-Khalaf, now chief advisor for Deputy Prime Minister Rafi’ al-‘Issawi and Gen. Nabil Salih held several meetings with two officers of an arm of U.S. intelligence. What al-Gaoud claimed to bring to the effort were channels of communication with Saddam’s top military commander in Anbar, Gen. Muhammad Jasim al-Dulaimi, and the regime’s foremost Ba’athist there, Ahmed Hamash al-Juburi.

I had refused to meet al-Gaoud, believing that a meeting would lend legitimacy to a former intelligence cut-out of the regime that has yet to prove his loyalty to the New Iraq. I knew that al-Gaoud had leadership potential, and I knew that he was non-sectarian (his wife was from the Abu Gullel family of Najaf), but there was a still long way to go to prove to skeptic like me that someone as closely affiliated to the Saddam regime as al-Gaoud had repudiated the ethos of that tyranny.

As it happens, the whole INC enterprise out for Anbar was shut down because the CIA liaison at CENTCOM had put his foot down, insisting that Western Iraq was the CIA’s turf, and by extension, Ayad Allawi’s too. (For more about my experiences with Anbar, check out Of Tribes and Men.)

So that’s the first point, al-Gaoud already had channels to the Americans before meeting Wischkaemper. His associates, Sa'adoon al-Dulaimi and Jabir al-Khalaf, were hired by the DoD as consultants for the Coalition Provisional Authority during that same period; they could also have plugged him into the Americans. Here, I’d theorize that al-Gaoud’s previous channels were shut down either because he had proven himself unreliable, or probably because he was red-flaged as a cut-out of another intelligence agency, this time around, the Jordanian mukhaberat.

In April 2004, Wischkaemper meets John Jones, the Rumsfeld aide, who is quickly won over to Wischkaemper’s talking points lionizing al-Gaoud. It should be noted again that Wischkaemper is a businessman who had a staked interest in promoting his business partner, al-Gaoud.

By July 2004, al-Gaoud organizes a conference in Amman which is attended by the aforementioned Americans, and James Clad, then a consultant for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who is quoted throughout the piece railing against the neocons.

Enter General Raad al-Hamdani, a subject of recent discussion on this blog. At the conference, al-Hamdani rails against the Americans and sobs at the retelling of his arrest by American troops. Clad is so moved that he walks up to al-Hamdani and apologizes on behalf of America, without taking into account that there may have been a perfectly good reason for the arrest. Clad is described in his Hudson bio as a Southeast Asia expert who is fluent in Spanish, Italian, Indonesian and Ethiopian Amharic. Like many who had no background or experience in the Middle East, he was posted to Iraq. I’m not sure whether knowledge of Indonesian is that helpful in, say, Hillah, but here was a man prepared to embrace al-Hamdani as Iraq’s Great Sunni Hope at the drop of a hat, or rather a tear.

Not only that, but Clad goes on to play the role of pamphleteer on behalf of the Sunni insurgency. A couple of days after the conference, we find him holed up in a hotel room with three representatives of something called the ‘Iraqi National Resistance Council’. (Note: this was not Monotheism and Jihad, not Islamic Army, not Army of the Mujaheddin, not Ansar al-Sunna, not 1920 Brigades; what al-Gaoud was peddling was an outfit that at the time no one had heard of.)

The self-styled ‘insurgents’ had a list of demands written in poor English, so Clad offers to redraft the demands on their behalf. The end product of eleven demands is described by the article as “benign” and hence palatable. Really? Was the Sunni insurgency in July 2004 neglecting to make any political demands other than calling for a ceasefire, garrisoning U.S. troops, reconstituting the Iraqi Army and reigning in the Kurds? Was that it? Wasn’t there a part about releasing Saddam? Or at least rehabilitating the Ba’ath Party?

Maybe Clad left much of what may be controversial on the editing floor, or he could always claim to have misunderstood the Arabic being spoken, since it wasn’t, y’know, Amharic. Whatever way one cuts it, the demands drafted by Clad did not reflect the end-goals of the Sunni insurgency, which its non-jihadists component at the time still clutched at the idea of recapturing Sunni hegemony in Baghdad.

I think Dahr Jamail, interviewing an insurgent ‘leader’ as late as 2007 better reflects the untenable demands of the Sunni insurgency:

1. All parts of the Iraqi resistance should be the exclusive representatives for Iraqis.
2. An immediate withdrawal of American forces without conditions.
3. Full compensation for both Iraq and Iraqis for those who have been killed since the sanctions starting in 1991 until now. During the sanctions, 1.7 million Iraqis were killed. And according to the Lancet report, 655,000 have been killed, and by now possibly even one million.
4. The release of everyone in prisons.
5. Canceling all the current political procedures and all the 100 Bremer Orders legislation done during the Iraqi Governing Council because according to international law, it is illegal to make any political and legislative action while the country is under occupation.
6. Canceling the UN legislation that has been passed since the sanctions.
7. Putting all the traitors, those who betrayed Iraq, and those who are allies of the Americans into trials.

These are the rights of the country and if the Americans and their allies respect these rights, we can sit together. Not to negotiate these rights, but to plan the withdrawal and discuss the implementation of these rights. Also, the resistance will go on no matter how long it takes or how much it costs, until there is a withdrawal.

But there should have been a couple of things that would make the American interlocutors uncomfortable about their newfound buddies in Amman, had they known what they should have looked out for. For example, the chief insurgent negotiator, referred to as ‘The Messenger’ or ‘Dr. Ismail’, claims to be an MD and a lawyer, according to the article, but that combination is exceedingly rare in Iraqi higher education. It may be normal in the U.S. to have a JD in addition to a host of other degrees, but mixing up disciplines in Iraq is bureaucratically difficult and culturally unknown. Or maybe the guy was one of a dozen cases in the whole country who’d fit such a category, who knows?

Secondly, the insurgent leaders proposed to prove their bona fides by standing down their fighters. Great, that’s exactly how one proves whether the other side can actually speak on behalf of the insurgency. But wait a minute, they also demanded that the stand-down coincide with suspending patrolling by U.S. troops. So essentially the Americans would not be able to verify that a stand-down is in effect since they are not out and about. The article rightly asserts that this demand is ‘unacceptable’—not to say ridiculous.

That last demand alone should have been enough to question whether these representatives were indeed speaking on behalf of the major insurgent factions.

Then in August 2004, al-Gaoud presented al-Hamdani’s grand plan to gather together 5000 fighters and 100 officers to form the ‘Auxiliary Security Force’ that would battle the terrorists. It would have a budget of $108 million and would be armed by the Americans.

Rose writes:

“We could have solved several problems at once,” al-Hamdani told me when I met him last November in Amman. “Many of the security problems America faced would never have existed if they had listened to us in 2004.” Besides fighting al-Qaeda, the force would starve the insurgency of recruits, many of whom had been driven to fight for lack of better options. “The people from the old army were without any job, any control,” al-Hamdani says. “The insurgency was paying them, and there were guns everywhere.”

Al-Hamdani’s paper was received by the Marines with enthusiasm, and with the blessing of Lieutenant General Conway, Walker went to Amman at the end of August for a two-day “security conference” to discuss the proposal. Accompanying him was Colonel John Coleman, Conway’s chief of staff.

Lt. Gen. James Conway? Col. John Coleman? Where have I seen these names before?

Oh yeah! They were the Marines who masterminded the Falluja Brigade. Remember?! It was April 2004, and they picked Maj. Gen. Jassim Muhammad Salih al-Muhammadi, a former Republican Guard division commander (…just like al-Hamdani!), to head a 1,100 force of former military men and tribesmen, and proceeded to arm them. When a ruckus was raised in Baghdad over this, they just appointed a commander more senior to al-Muhammadi and called it a day. The commander’s name was Maj. Gen. Muhammad Latif al-Adhami, and by August of that year (…the same month than Hamdani submitted his plan for the new force), he was stating on the record that there were no foreign fighters in Falluja. We all know how that ended.

We do know how it ended but it seems that Rose wasn’t aware how two of his most featured protagonists, Conway and Coleman, had authored a fiasco during the same timeline being discussed. Seems relevant to the topic, n’uh? I mean it provides background as to why so many people thought al-Hamdani’s proposal was full of holes, right? I mean the Fallujah Brigade did turn their guns on their American benefactors, remember?

Hence the formula—recruiting the old army to police Anbar—was put into effect four months before al-Hamdani made his proposal. And it failed. Miserably.

I think it is odd that this episode is missing from Rose’s narrative. I guess it is more convenient to blame the neocons.

Another reminder: remember the Marines intelligence report in November 2006 that threw up its arms in exasperation and concluded that Anbar is Al-Qaeda territory? The one that came out a few months before Al-Qaeda was trounced? The one that I thought was full of it?

Moving on, Rose discusses the events of July 2005 in the border town of Al-Qaim and claims that al-Gaoud was involved. This is a revelation for me since I’ve never been able to fully understand what happened there during that time. There were two factions in Al-Qaim, one led by Usama al-Jaryan of the Karabila tribe (supported by the Iraqi government, he was assassinated by Al-Qaeda in May 2006 in Baghdad) and another led by Sabah al-Shergi of the Albu Mahal. Both tribes were competing over smuggling, as they’ve always done, and were miffed that Al-Qaeda had cornered the smuggling market. Al-Shergi was based in Amman and it has long been thought that his fighters were part of a Jordanian intelligence operation. Now that we know that al-Gaoud was involved, the picture is getting clearer. It also reinforces the idea that al-Gaoud was an asset of Jordanian intel.

Of course, all this nuance and granularity is missing from what Rose has written.

My final thought on Rose’s narrative is that had the Gaouds, al-Hamdani & Co. really made inroads among the insurgents, then why didn’t they seize upon the change of policy in 2006 and 2007 when the Americans began sponsoring the Awakening Councils and the Sons of Iraq? Why didn’t they leave Amman and begin organizing the men that supposedly answered to them into anti-jihadist militias, and why didn’t they attempt to compete for political standing in provinces like Anbar?

If the Gaouds and al-Hamdani were that well-regarded by their constituencies, then they’d be active political players in Baghdad by now. But they are not, while others are. Rose never addresses this big gaping hole.

Rose intended for his piece in Vanity Fair to enter the historical record. Too bad for him I’m also around to highlight the many weaknesses of his reporting.

On a completely different note, I was struck by what Iraqi Mojo posted on Tuesday. He had dug up a 1993 documentary made by Michael Wood that had left a deep mark on me when I first saw it. Iraqi Mojo has a brief and apt description to go with the re-posting.

I watched it in 1993 when I was 17. It was being passed around a dozen Iraqi families in Amman as if it were contraband. I remember feeling that, in a sense, it was great that someone was explaining to the world what Saddam was doing to the Iraqi people, and also, that I somehow have to do something about it.

I hadn’t seen the documentary or thought about it intently since being a teenager. Seeing it now, I’m glad that I eventually contributed to doing something about it.

Watch it and remember why bringing down the tyrant was a just and noble cause. Watch to know what roles these 'hallowed' Republican Guard generals played in protecting that tyrant. David Rose, you should view it too, to rediscover that part of you, the one that endowed you with moral clarity, that was misplaced during the years of handwringing, recantation and ideological self-flagellation.

UPATE (Saturday, May 16, 2009):

It’s one of the little ironies of life that I’d cite George Packer to make my point; my point being that the demands drawn up by James Clad did not reflect the reality of the insurgency’s politics.

Through the good graces of a former Ba’athist embassy official who had been close to Uday, I met a group of Sunnis from Anbar province who were vaguely connected to the insurgency. Two were tribal sheikhs from Ramadi; the third being a young businessman rumored to have been one of Saddam’s bagmen. We met in the offices of his holding company on a quiet Amman street. The businessman, Talal al-Gaaod, had a master’s in construction management from USC, wore jeans and suspenders, and was up on the latest op-eds from the American press. All of them presented themselves as anxious to build a democratic Iraq. They had nothing against Americans; they had long dreamed of the good things America could bring to Iraq, and they had welcomed the overthrow of the regime. “I am a believer in the Americans’ good intentions,” Gaaod said, “but something happened on the way from Washington to Baghdad.” The whole guerilla war was a terrible misfortune that needn’t have happened if only the Americans had listened to people like him instead of invading their houses and dishonoring their women and compelling the Iraqis to seek revenge. Gaaod admitted that some of the insurgents were living in the Middle Ages, extremists who gave the rest of them a bad name. But the legitimate resistance, as they called it, was an Iraqi resistance against occupation. It included two hundred thousand people, and if elections went ahead, Gaaod said, it would increase tenfold. The civil war would become quite real. They were hardly the masked cutthroats of my imagination. They were recognizable Iraqis, the tribal sheikhs traditional, the businessman modern, and they had far more connections to my world that I had thought possible.

Then the underside began to emerge. One of the sheikhs, Zaydan Halef al-Awad, claimed that the Sunnis were the majority in Iraq—63 percent, in fact. “If Sunnis settled in America, they would rule America,” the sheikh said. “We always carry the stick in the middle. We can move it any way—we control it.” The politicians running for office in Iraq, Kurdish and Shiite, were illegitimate pawns of the Americans and the Iranians, and if they happened to be assassinated, too bad for them.”

George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, 2005, pp. 416-417

‘Zaydan Halef al-Awad’ is actually Zaidan Khalaf al-Awad, brother to al-Gaoud’s friend Dr. Jabir al-Khalaf (see above), who was profiled by another of Packer’s colleagues at the New Yorker, John Lee Anderson, in November 2007. I critiqued this article at the time, highlighting the fact that al-Awad was not as prominent as al-Gaoud and the New Yorker claimed he was.

Another interesting angle on the David Rose piece is that it had all the events that he describes had been reported previously by David Ignatius in a column he wrote for the Washington Post in September 2007. Rose does not cite this column at all.

Ignatius writes:

A Sunni tribal leader who pushed bravely for an alliance with the Americans was Talal al-Gaaod, a leader of one of the branches of the Dulaim tribe. Looking back through my notes, I can reconstruct a series of his efforts that were mishandled by senior U.S. officials: In August 2004, he helped arrange a meeting in Amman between Marine commanders from Anbar and tribal leaders there who wanted to assemble a local militia. Senior U.S. officials learned of the unauthorized dialogue and shut it down.

Gaaod tried again in November 2004, organizing a tribal summit in Amman with the blessing of the Jordanian government. Again, the official U.S. response was chilly; the U.S. military launched its second assault on Fallujah that month, and the summit had to be canceled. In the spring of 2005, the tireless Gaaod began framing plans for what he called a "Desert Protection Force," a kind of tribal militia that would fight al-Qaeda in Anbar. The proposal was gutted by U.S. officials in Baghdad who derided it as "warlordism."

A despondent Gaaod e-mailed me in July 2005: "Believe me, there is no need to waste anymore one penny of the American taxpayers' money and no more one drop of blood of the American boys." His despair roused the new American ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, who began meeting with Gaaod and other Iraqi Sunnis in Amman in hopes of brokering a deal with the insurgents. Gaaod died of heart failure in March 2006.

BTW, I'd wager that Ignatius, Anderson, Packer and Rose all shared the same fixer in Amman, who led them onto the al-Gaoud story. That's how journalism works.

Resurrecting '169'

2009-05-14T07:48:00.001-07:00

This week's piece for Hudson-NY begins with:

Efforts are underway to hold together the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) coalition—the largest Shia bloc in the Iraqi parliament—in preparation for the forthcoming national election set to be held in February 2010. Baghdad’s power brokers seek to keep the coalition from splintering into its various Islamist groups, and to add liberal Shias and independent Sunnis to give it a non-sectarian luster, much like the first incarnation of the coalition that ran in the January 2005 and carried the ballot sheet number ‘169’; this list was officially blessed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani at the time. In fact, the euphemistic term being given to these efforts is being called “resurrecting 169”.

Yet the power brokers are faced with two stumbling blocks: convincing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to stay within the UIA, and recruiting credible Sunnis.

Continue reading...

Al-Baghdadi’s Sixteenth Speech

2009-05-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

Al-Furqan Media Productions, the propaganda arm of the self-styled 'Islamic State of Iraq', released a 12 minute speech attributed to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi today, refuting Iraqi government statements that he had been captured last month. The speech is titled 'Lying Agents'.

To my ears, it is the same voice that we’ve heard all along since December 2006, and which is presented as that of al-Baghdadi’s.

Speech highlights:

-Al-Baghdadi says that he thought that the Iraqi government’s claim of his capture was only a ruse to hold them over for a few hours until they had absorbed “the blows of the mujahidin” but was surprised when they took it further and released a photo claiming that it was of him. Al-Baghdadi claims that the jihadists do not know who the man in the photo is supposed to be, and add that he must have been tortured into confessing.

-The speech for the most part is a sermon about the honesty of the Sunnis versus the perfidy of the Shias. Al-Baghdadi asks the Sunnis, “How is it that you have acquiesced to being ruled by those who take lying as a religion? ...Oh Sunnis, the [Shias] are your enemies, and their past and present is full of their betrayals and conspiracies against you. Do not trust them…”

-Al-Baghdadi sees that the pinnacle so far of the ‘Harvest of Blessings’ Offensive that the jihadists have launched was to force the Iranian government to shut its borders with Iraq after dozens of Iranian pilgrims were killed by suicide bombers.

-Al-Baghdadi promises his fighters that “within a few months” they will witness tangible aspects of their victory.

The speech doesn’t have much meat on it, as it was meant to show the jihadists that al-Baghdadi is still around, and that he can be recognized by his voice and his style of delivery. Apparently that is all jihadists need to know, as they trust their leadership blindly.

One needs to note again that the person of al-Baghdadi is not a random security decoy or a publicity stunt intended for show towards non-jihadists; for jihadists, he’s the candidate caliph—the Qurayshite ‘Prince of the Faithful—who is tasked with resurrecting the Muslim empire.

Obama’s Proposed Speech in Cairo is likened to Napoleon’s Famous Pamphlet

2009-05-11T19:36:00.000-07:00

A pseudonymous writer on the Al-Faloja jihadist forum calling himself Gharib Min Al-Ghuraba’ put up a post today comparing President Obama’s proposed speech on June 4 to the one that Napoleon made upon his arrival in Egypt.

Excerpts:

History repeats itself:

The Crusader West is employing the same trick and deceit that Napoleon Bonaparte used in 1789 to control Egypt and the entire Muslim world. For in 1789 Napoleon reached Alexandria and succeeded in occupying it.

Napoleon released a pamphlet to the people of Egypt discussing in it the reason for his arrival to invade their land and that is to rid Egypt of the tyranny of the Mamluk Begs who dominated in the country of Egypt, and he stressed in his pamphlet his respect for Islam and Muslims, and the pamphlet began with the recitation of the two shahadas, and he fraudulently insisted on showing his Muslim [credentials] and [that] of his soldiers…

…And today Barack son of Hussein son of Obama wants to repeat the same trick and the same deceit, and he wants to give a speech to the Muslim ummah from Cairo, the land of Al-Azhar…

Al-Waili on al-Baghdadi (Updated)

2009-05-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

Shirwan al-Waili, Iraq’s State Minister for National Security and Maliki ally (…and potential replacement), fills in Al-Hayat Newspaper (London, Saudi-owned) today on some alleged biographical details concerning Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, or at the least the man the Iraqi authorities believe is al-Baghdadi.

First, the man’s name is Ma’ad Ibrahim Muhammad, according to al-Waili, and not Ahmad ‘Abid Ahmad Khamees al-Majma’i as first revealed by Iraqi government officials.

Al-Waili claims that Mr. Muhammad was a former staff colonel in the Iraqi Republican Guard until 1990, and was sentenced to be executed for membership in a Salafist Jihadist organization. His sentence was later commuted to expulsion from the army. He then left Iraq to Syria in 1991, bouncing around in places like Algeria and Morocco, and finally returning to Iraq in 2004 to join the Abu Musa’ab al-Zarqawi outfit.

However, three things stood out for me in al-Waili’s account:

1-The account is too Kirkuk-centric: “The pledge of allegiance was declared in all the mosques of al-Adheim.” Then, the associates of Mr. Muhammad named by al-Waili are all part of a Kirkuk-based network.

2-Mr. Muhammad was arrested by U.S. troops in 2007 and held at Camp Bucca for one and a half years, according to al-Waili. But that timeline conflicts with the frequency of al-Baghdadi’s speeches. One thing that is noticeable about the speeches is that they were all done with the same voice and the same manner of speaking. When jihadist speeches are given by others apart from the person the speech is attributed to, then that is usually mentioned. In al-Baghdadi’s case, the assertion was always this was him speaking.

First speech: December 22, 2006

Second speech: February 2, 2007

Third speech: March 14, 2007

Fourth speech: April 16, 2007

Fifth speech: July 9, 2007

Sixth speech: September 15, 2007

Seventh speech: (don’t have the date)

Eighth speech: December 28, 2007

Ninth speech: February 14, 2008

Tenth speech: April 13, 2008

We’ve heard from al-Baghdadi a total of 16 times by my count, the latest speech being his fifteenth on March 17, 2009. For al-Waili’s narrative to fit the timeline, it would have to mean that al-Baghdadi was recording his speeches while in U.S. custody, which entails large and unnecessary security risks that the jihadists wouldn’t undertake.

3-Al-Waili claims that after Mr. Muhammad’s release from Bucca, he was rearrested by the 19th Battalion based in Al-Adheim, and he was later released after the jihadists managed to bribe the commander. However, the name “Ma’ad Ibrahim Muhammad” appears on a list of detainees in Diyala Province who were beneficiaries of the Amnesty Law (enacted in February 2008), so it means that a man by that name was held in Diyala (Adheim lies between Diyala and Kirkuk) under Iraqi custody and released, according to this list (he’s number 196) issued by the Diyala Federal Appeals Court sometime around February 2009.

It is very likely that the man on the list is the same one being referred to by al-Waili.

I have a sense that something is still a bit off in this account. To me, this sound a lot like the arrest of a local Islamic State of Iraq emir in the Adheim area, rather than the big guy, al-Baghdadi, himself.

To date, there has been no official confirmation or refutation of the arrest by the official media channels of the Islamic State of Iraq.

I’d still wait to see how this spectacle pans out before celebrating or getting dejected.

UPDATE: The Al-Faloja jihadist website is claiming that it will have a new speech (as an audio file) from Abu Omar al-Baghdadi up in a few hours under the title 'Lying Agents' sourced to Al-Furqan Media Production, one of the Islamic State of Iraq's official propaganda arms. The ISI's Ministry of Information has also put out a press release today denying al-Baghdadi's arrest, and claiming that they do not know the man in the photo released by the Iraqi government.

Secretary Clinton and the word 'Democracy'

2009-05-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

My piece for Hudson-NY: Dodging 'Democracy' in Iraq.

No one in the press or in the analytic quarters seems to find it odd that Hillary and Richard Holbrooke are competing over who gets to call the shots in places like Iraq. They were both hurrying to 'pee' on the country, marking their territory. Clinton was late; Christopher Hill, Holbrooke's guy and the new ambassador, rushed to Baghdad a day before she 'unexpectedly' arrived.

Something to watch out for.

Hamdani Pal Reinvents Himself as ‘Opposition’

2009-05-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Saudi Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper today features a longish interview (Arabic link) with Staff Lt. Gen. Abdel-Aziz Abdel-Rahman al-Mufti, yet another of those Amman-based officers in the orbit of Gen. Raad al-Hamdani, who's been a topic of discussion here on this blog lately.

Al-Mufti actually refers to “my friend” al-Hamdani three times in the course of the interview, claiming that there are another 400 Iraqi officers above the rank of Brig. Gen. residing in Amman, and many more in Syria.

Al-Mufti echoes al-Hamdani’s denunciations of Maliki’s government by questioning their loyalty to Iraq, and claiming that there are unserious about reconciling with ex-officers.

Al-Mufti’s story is interesting since he was one of Saddam’s high ranking officers who was returned to active service after 2003 and was made commander of the Fourth Division of the Iraqi Army (based in Kirkuk). He was ostensibly returned because he was a Kurd, and hence wouldn’t be a Ba’athist (…Kurds were exempt for the most part from membership, since they are, err, ethnically Kurdish and that is usually an impediment towards being an Arab chauvinist).

Al-Mufti left the army after he was transferred to headquarters, and now refuses to return so as not to give the Iraqi government a media victory, or so he claims.

Another claim he makes is that the Americans used “small nuclear weapons” in the battle of Baghdad, a thing one hears often from unrepentant ex-regime kooks who still glorify the good old days of Saddam. Had the Republican Guard fought from within the city, al-Mufti adds, then they could have held out against the Americans for five years. Such is the military genius that Iraq now lacks, and with which we’re expected to reconcile. Ahemmm.

But there’s more to the story: first of all, he says he was “discovered” by the Americans after someone handed a CD with names of Iraqi officers for 3,000 dollars. That is code for “I was recruited by the CIA through the Kasnazani brothers.”

Secondly, and more importantly, he was transferred from his command post in disgrace, a point understandably not mentioned in the interview. On October 21, 2006, the Kurdish newspaper Hawal published pictures (Kurdish link, PDF) showing al-Mufti at a farewell ceremony for what is identified in the article as the 101st “unit”. The ceremony took place on September 2, 2006, according to the expose. He’s the one near the podium wearing glasses. Then, a bunch of gypsy dancers (kawliya, also a byword for prostitution) were brought in, who proceeded to grind up against the Iraqi and American officers, stuffing their faces in their hefty bosoms.

It was a big scandal at the time, and al-Mufti was yanked out of his command.

But he’s in Amman now, pretending to be the voice of martial rectitude while whiling away the days with his former brothers-in-arms, such as that other paragon of soldierly conduct, Gen. al-Hamdani.

Amazing Pictures: Overpowering a Suicide Bomber in Kirkuk

2009-05-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

This comes via nahrain.com which in turn takes it from something called 'Turkuman News Bureau'. The events allegedly happened today at the Zahra Husseiniya (Shia house of worship) in Kirkuk; the husseiniya belongs to the Turkuman Shia community.

A 16 year-old suicide bomber, carrying a fake ID card under the name 'Muhammad Hussein Jawdet' fired a shot at one of the husseiniya's security guards, wounding the guard, and then tried to enter the site while shouting 'allahu akbar' ('God is great'). He was overpowered by the other guards, and prevented from detonating his suicide vest.

Startling and life-affirming pictures. The boy appears a bit drugged, or he may have been roughed up (...no signs of bruising and blood though). Jihadists usually pump up their bombers with sedatives so that they can go on with their missions.

We've heard of dozens of stories in which brave Iraqi Army, Police and private guards have put their lives at risk by tackling suicides bombers, many of whom died while saving others from the full impact of the blasts, but this is the first time I've spotted pictures of such acts of heroism.

Had the boy succeeded, and killed a few dozen worshippers, then the western press would have harped on about one more bombing highlighting the "the rapidly deteriorating security situation." Analysts and 'experts' would have salivated at the expanding death toll, seemingly validating their bleak assessment of Iraq's future. These pictures speak to how regular Iraqis are refusing to succumb to terror, choosing life for others even though it may mean the end of theirs.

Few societies have ever witnessed the unique horrors visited upon by the Iraqi people in the last three decades, and yet, rather than be broken, every day brings more evidence that this a people who refuse to bow down to their circumstances. But how can that story be told when the press corps is burdened with cynics and nihilists, who can't even imagine what it would take to embrace a suicide bomber so that others may live?

Lebanon: Jamil al-Sayyid Released From Prison

2009-04-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

Former Gen. Jamil al-Sayyid was released from prison today. He had been held, along with three other officers, since 2005 for an alleged role in the assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. I met him shortly before he was arrested, and my gut instinct told me that he wasn't involved.

This is what I wrote at the time.

Note: al-Sayyid should be thought of as a possible future challenger to Hezbollah. Secular Shi'as may be able to coalesce around him; other candidates, especially those admitting Saudi funding, are simply not credible. It's a long term project that some people should start thinking about. If al-Sayyid aspires to national standing, then he'll also begin to sound anti-Syrian, which is always a plus.

...And he was supposed to be one of the 'reconcilable' ones

2009-04-28T15:21:00.000-07:00

The following footage (via sotaliraq.com) showing a man, allegedly identified as Adel al-Mashhadani (...looks very much like him) giving what appears to be a recent speech in Al-Fadhl. Mashhadani was the 'Sons of Iraq' leader who was arrested late last month by Iraqi forces. He had been on the U.S. payroll, who had hoped that he would be one of the former insurgents they could reconcile with, and then force the Iraqi state to put him on payroll.

I couldn't figure how to embed without the video automatically playing when the page is loaded, so kindly follow this link.

The crowd begins by shouting "Cheers to the resilient Ba'ath". Mashhadani then gives a pep talk saying that Iraq belongs to the youth of Iraq and "at their head is the Martyred Leader Saddam Hussein."

Then there's a funny, carnival-ish bit with a trumpet, concluding with the crowd shouting "With our souls, with our blood, we will [relinquish them to you] Oh Saddam." Mashhadani finishes up with a line of poetry: "We the youth will climb the scaffold [to be hanged], and for the sake of the Ba'ath and Saddam we will never waver."

You can find my recent commentary about Mashhadani here and here.

The Face of Al-Baghdadi?

2009-04-28T09:21:00.001-07:00

Mug shot of 'Abu Omar al-Baghdadi '

The Iraqi government released this picture today of the man it arrested last week and who the government still insists is Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. The Prime Minister's officer also released a statement today confirming that the arrested man is al-Baghdadi.

Oddly enough, neither the government spokesmen or Maliki's office offered a real name for the suspect. Earlier accounts had suggested that the arrested man's name is Ahmed al-Majma'i, but that could have been the name on a fake ID that he was carrying on him when arrested, if that is indeed the case.

I haven't spotted anything yet on jihadist websites either identifying or dismissing the man in the photo as al-Baghdadi.

‘National Reconciliation’: By the Numbers

2009-04-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

This is what the New York Times failed to report on in its front-page story yesterday.

According to Order No. 34 (issued symbolically on April 7, the founding anniversary of the Ba’ath Party), the following numbers give an idea of how far the Iraqi government went in order to rehabilitate members of the former regime:

Number of officers returned to the armed services: 1,259

Number of officers accepted into the armed services: 316

Number of soldiers returned to the armed services: 3,517

Number of soldiers accepted into the armed services: 1,640

Number of officers who requested retirement, are ineligible for return, didn’t pass the medical exam, or do not wish to return to active duty, and who will be awarded pensions: 9,935

Number of soldiers who requested retirement, are ineligible for return, didn’t pass the medical exam, or do not wish to return to active duty, and who will be awarded pensions: 63,557

Total number of beneficiaries: 80,224

The beneficiaries will be getting generous salaries and pensions unimaginable under the former regime.

These spread sheets with the names and addresses of the officers and soldiers who stand to benefit from Order 34 can be downloaded (Arabic Excel files) from the unofficial site of the ‘National Reconciliation Committee.’

The vast majority of the names, as indicated by last names and geographical areas, are Arab Sunnis.

To give a sense of how big a leap of ‘good faith’ this is for the Iraqi government, the former commander of the Special Republican Guard and close relative of Saddam Hussein, Lt. Gen. Kamal Mustafa, is being awarded a pension. He was one of the 55 Most Wanted regime members. In addition to being a close male relative of the tyrant, Mustafa’s younger brother, Jamal, was Saddam’s son-in-law. Mustafa’s first cousin, Gen. Khalid al-Abdullah, was head of the internal security of the Iraqi intelligence service, the mukhaberat, and was appointed head of the mukhaberat during the war when the previous head escaped. Even though there is footage from the quelling of the 1991 Uprising in Nassiriya that shows Kamal Mustafa beating and killing civilian detainees, all three were probably dealt with leniently because they had cooperated with the Iraqi opposition (specifically with the Iraqi National Congress) in the years leading to the war. Jamal Mustafa and Khalid al-Abdullah were persuaded by the INC to return from Syria and hand themselves over to U.S. forces.

If anything, these lists serve to show that the Iraqi government has been doing its part in reabsorbing former officers of the regime.

However, the sob story being peddled by persons such as General Raad al-Hamdani (see NYTimes story yesterday) and the American-led Force Strategic Engagement Cell, as well as the CIA, is that the Iraqi government is uncooperative. That’s plain bunk. But the underlying issue here is that officers such as Hamdani are not interested in being rehabilitated as individuals, rather they want to be rehabilitated as Ba’athists, which is a no-go area under the constitution. The Ba’ath Party cannot, by law and by any moral standard, be rehabilitated in Iraqi politics or society.

The political demands of the Ba’ath Party are simply unacceptable to the Iraqi public, the vast majority of which were directly victimized by the former regime.

Raad al-Hamdani in uniform

The Ba’athists want to pretend as if there is no shame in their past association with the Saddam regime, and they have been consistently encouraged to do so by several American interest groups. They seek to maintain their previous organizational network, with an eye towards an eventual overthrow of the democratic order. There is no U.S. policy to rehabilitate Ba’athism, so why are these State Department and CIA bureaucrats following their own cavalier policies, without being held to account, neither by the White House (under Bush and Obama), the Congress, or the media?

As a further sign of accommodation, the Maliki government has frozen the administrative duties of the De-Ba’athification Commission staff pending their reassignment or retirement as government employees, and word is out that the ‘National Reconciliation’ executive branch will be headed by Zuheir Chalabi, a former INC member from Mosul (no relation to Ahmad Chalabi).

The context of Order 34 should be critically relevant when placing Ba’athist talking points, justifying their intransigence vis-à-vis the government, on the front page of a newspaper.

But the caliber of journalism being what it is; be thankful that I’m around to give perspective.

FURTHER READING: Just a follow-up: When the Iraqi government published the 'National Reconciliation' Law in the official gazette, as mandated by Iraqi law, they purposely left out the article that would have barred thousands of serving officers from government jobs. It was sneaky, not to mention illegal, trick in contravention of what the parliament passed, and it was orchestrated and encouraged by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, according to a couple of sources. That is why several thousand officers in the security services who otherwise should be out on their asses are still at their jobs 15 months after the law was enacted. Again, why are U.S. officials subverting Iraqi democracy? By what mandate?

When the law was passed (January 2008) I had a few decidedly 'undiplomatic' thoughts on the matter, which I jotted down in a post. What I wrote at the time still reflects how I feel about De-Ba'athification, an issue that is admittedly both emotional and ideological for me.

Maliki on al-Baghdadi

2009-04-26T15:29:00.001-07:00

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki insisted in an interview today that the man arrested last Thursday in Baghdad, identified as "Ahmad al-Majma'i" (full name: Ahmad 'Abid Ahmad Khamees al-Majma'i, as reported here first), is indeed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

He claims that the arrested man was positively identified by another captured jihadist who had directly pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi.

Maliki is touting the two-month operation as a wholly Iraqi one, but this carries the political risk of baseless grandstanding if its turns out that the arrested man in not al-Baghdadi. Maliki's political opponents have already claimed that the PM is trying to inflate the al-Baghdadi capture to demonstrate that he still has a firm handle on the security situation following the most recent spate of bombings.

Personally, I'm still skeptical of the claim. I would wait to see what 'official' response comes from the Islamic State of Iraq's media outfits, which have remained silent so far. But silence is not an indication in and of itself, since in recent months the ISI's statements have considerably lagged behind the actual events.

The Folly of Attempted Rehabilitation

2009-04-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

Sam Dagher has an interesting story on the front page of the New York Times today regarding the rehabilitation of the Ba’athists. There are several problems with this account, but I’ll give Mr. Dagher the benefit of the doubt as to why an otherwise well-informed reporter fell into such misinformed snags. Regardless of what the intentions of those who leaked the story to him were, the write-up suffers from a failure to contextualize the subject, and provide the proper legal framework over the issue.

With some hyperbole, Dagher claims that the failure to rehabilitate the Ba’athists “could become one of the biggest obstacles to stability in Iraq.” As Nir Rosen’s recent piece suggests, that may be a case of much ado about nothing.

Dagher frames the story around Lt. Gen. Raad al-Hamdani, but fails to identify his past affiliation, which was with the Republican Guard, the elite corps tasked with defending the regime, primarily against internal enemies. Perhaps this translated transcript of an interview with Hamdani conducted by Rusiya A-Yaum (Russia Today) last April sheds light on Hamdani’s intransigence when it comes to his own unrepentant past in the service of the regime. Note how he reverentially refers to Qusay Saddam Hussein, adding “may God bless his soul.”

Hamdani was one of the candidates for the post of Minister of Defense put forward by the Sunni bloc in 2006.

Raad al-Hamdani

Ostensibly, the Maliki government opened talks with Hamdani so as to broker the rehabilitation of former Iraqi Army officers, as part of the Justice and Reconciliation Law (passed in January 2008). Dagher is patently mistaken when he claims that the law has “not been put into effect”; earlier this month, the Iraqi government signed off on Order 34 that pertains to the law, reabsorbing thousands of officers and soldiers into the Iraqi armed services, and placing many other thousands, quite a number of them high-ranking officers, on the retirement payroll—which was their demand in the first place. All in all, there are probably 15,000 beneficiaries of this order, the vast majority of them Sunnis who served under Saddam. The NYTimes piece makes no mention of this relevant milestone.

Hamdani, encouraged by the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, had expanded his portfolio (and demands) to incorporate the rehabilitation of the Ba’ath Party, in its entirety. The article only clarifies what Hamdani’s demands are towards the end of the piece, without fleshing them out. This is where his fool’s errand was stymied with political and legal realities.

Dagher fails to report on the past failures of the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, which he describes as “a secretive unit” of American and British officials. Talisman Gate had done so, with what I believe to be ground-breaking accuracy, back in November 2007. So, it took no extraordinary powers of deduction to conclude that the ‘Cell’ would entangle Hamdani in yet another of its follies.

It should be noted that the two gentlemen representing Izzet al-Douri who met with Hamdani two months ago, according to the NYTimes article, were the same ones making the rounds among Iraqi politicians (…they were a trio back then) as early as October, trying to establish communication channels between Douri and influential actors on the political scene. It struck several observers as odd and dangerous that these gentlemen had independent access into the Green Zone, even though they were there to arrange for face-to-face meetings with al-Douri in an area near al-Khalis in Diyala Province. In other words, Hamdani’s channel is not unique, and the same certainly goes for whatever channel he has with the Mohammad Younis al-Ahmed faction (sometimes based in Hasaka, Syria) for which any Tom, Dick and Harry seems able to speak for.

The article implies that the anti-Ba’athist backlash was driven by an Iranian agenda, whereas anyone who had been paying attention would have understood that it was voter-driver. Maliki was doing damage control after his initial forays into reconciling with the Ba’athists were faced with widespread rejection among his constituency. Dagher fails to explain that the ‘bygone-are-bygones’ approach when it comes to the Ba’ath is deeply resented among the vast majority of Iraqis. Maliki backed-off because it would cost him votes, and this is, after all, an election year.

Political context should matter, and the article is hobbled by adopting an extremist Ba’athist narrative that has it that all anti-rehabilitation efforts are orchestrated by Iran (…sometimes I feel Dagher needs to overcompensate for his ‘suspect’ Shia Lebanese roots). The Iraqi voter matters, no matter what the NYTimes editorial line says.

Finally, the piece ends with a quote from a Ba’athist commander in hiding who claims that whatever constitutional impediments there may be to rehabilitation can be overcome with a simple re-write:

“…if the government were to become serious about reconciliation, it would seek to amend the Constitution and let the party resume its role in public life, like the Communist Party after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“The Constitution is not a holy book — it can be amended,” he said.

It isn’t as simple as that, folks. Article 7 of the constitution banning the ‘Saddamist Ba’ath’ falls under Section One, which, according to article 122 cannot be amended until 2018 (at the earliest, only after ‘two parliamentary election cycles’), and only then after surmounting the obstacles of a two thirds majority of parliament, followed by a national referendum, followed by a presidential approval.

In other words, it ain’t gonna happen.

The Political Magic of the Number '153'

2009-04-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

This week's piece for Hudson-NY carries the title: Maliki in Trouble.

Opening paragraphs:

Ayad al-Samarrai was elected speaker of the Iraqi parliament on Sunday after garnering 153 votes. There are 275 members in the Iraqi parliament, and 138 votes were all Samarrai would have needed to pass the threshold. The ‘yea’ votes in Samarrai’s favor spell trouble for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, since the same number could be arrayed to yield a vote of ‘no confidence’ in his cabinet.

The ‘153’ bloc is an anti-Maliki coalition, rather than a pro-Samarrai faction. Those who backed Samarrai did so with the tacit understanding that his election would be the opening act in the drama to unseat the prime minister. Some sources even claim that there is a written document bearing the signatures of the anti-Maliki conspirators, and that the plan involves mustering political momentum by mid-summer to pass the ‘no confidence’ resolution—the votes are already there, but the political atmosphere in Baghdad needs to be prepared for a showdown with Maliki, who remains popular for now.

Nir Rosen: End of the Sunni Insurgency

2009-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

I've had my issues with Nir Rosen's past reporting, but his piece slated for tommorow's issue of The National (UAE) requires careful mulling over by those who've followed Iraq closely over the past few years. For long-time readers of Talisman Gate, this article may come to be viewed as a vindication for what I've been arguing since autumn 2006.

Excerpts from 'The Big Sleep':

What has not followed the drop in violence is a political settlement: for the past year analysts have worried that the failure to disarm or integrate the Sunni Awakening groups into the state risked sowing the seeds of a new insurgency. But the tepid response to the arrest of Mashhadani and other Awakening men suggests that a political reconciliation may not have been necessary. The burgeoning Iraqi state, embodied by Maliki himself, can simply continue to expand its power and crush any rivals. One US Army Iraq expert, who worked closely with General David Petraeus to plan and implement the surge, told me in 2008 that the civil war would end when the Shiites realised they had won and the Sunnis realised they had lost. Based on the conversations I had during a trip through Iraq last month, both sides seem to accept that this is the case...

There is nothing the Awakening groups can do. As guerrillas and insurgents they were only effective when they operated covertly, underground, blending in among a Sunni population that has now mostly been dispersed. Now the former resistance fighters-turned-paid guards are publicly known, and their names, addresses and biometric data are in the hands of American and Iraqi forces. They cannot return to an underground that has been cleared, and they still face the wrath of radical Sunnis who view them as traitors. They have failed to unite and as their stories demonstrate, they are on the run.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi Allegedly Captured

2009-04-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

According to sources in the government, the man captured today is called "Ahmad 'Abid Ahmad Khamees al-Majma'i" (احمد عبد احمد خميس المجمعي). The Iraqi security services are saying that this man is "Abu Omar al-Baghdadi".

The first problem with this is that this man would not be able to claim a lineage from Quraysh, let alone descent from Hussein bin Ali, as Abu Omar al-Baghdadi does, which is a very big part of his appeal as "Prince of the Faithful" to the jihadists.

The Majama'a are a large tribal group in Diyala and in some pockets north of Baghdad. But they are certainly not part of Quraysh. However, many Majama'is joined the insurgency, and many were officers under the Saddam regime. Several Majama'a clans can be traced to Kurdish, Turkoman and Tatar ethnic ancestry.

Earlier, two names had been posed as possible identities for al-Baghdadi: Hamid al-Zawi and (my analyses) Khalid al-Mashhadani.

The picture released by Al-Arabiya TV is one associated with al-Zawi, and was not sanctioned by the Iraqi security services.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is important since he's supposed to be Islam's new caliph. However, his pivotal role in the world of jihad has been ignored by reporters and analysts alike.

UPDATE: it should be noted that there is a denial of the arrest posted on the Al-Faloja jihadist forum that other forum members are taking seriously. It is attributed to "Muharib al-Ansari" whose claims to be reporting from inside Iraq.

Quick thoughts on anti-Shi'ism and the future of jihadism in Saudi Arabia

2009-04-20T16:48:00.001-07:00

I’ve been waiting for those who know more about jihadism in Saudi Arabia to discuss this, but since I can’t spot much of a discussion going on, I’ll take a hesitant dip.

The ‘General Deputy’ (alnaib al-‘am) for ‘Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’, Abu Sufyan al-Azdi, released a 16 minute audiotape a couple of days ago.

Two things struck me about what he said:

-He addressed Mullah Omar as ‘Prince of the Faithful’, he did not address his salutations to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

-He cited two local issues that incensed him: recent Shi’a uppityness, and women’s rights. The House of Saud is being depicted as powerless or unwilling to put Shi’as and women in their place.

Al-Azdi provides the first jihadist response to the events of February 20 in the Baqee’a cemetery of Medina, when Shi’a kids tried to ‘steal’ the soil from the grave of Umm al-Baneen (one of Ali’s wives, the mother of Abbas who died alongside his half-brother Hussein in Karbala) in order to be blessed by the soil, the 'odiousness' of which the Wahhabis built their whole ideology upon. Among other things that happened on that day (or series of days…someone please correct my timeline), this led to a crackdown by the Saudi ‘Religious Police’ on Shi’a pilgrims in Medina (which al-Azdi lauds), and it then set off confrontations in the Shi’a strongholds of the Eastern Province.

The Wahhabi establishment is indignant at what seems to be a sudden spike of Shi’a assertiveness, coming as it does with a backdrop of officially sanctioned anti-Shi’a agitation as relates to Iran, Syria and Hezbollah.

The jihadists will seize upon this sentiment to attack Shi’as, for them to attack women will not go down as well with popular opinion.

Without going into all the analysis, I’d like to posit two possible scenarios:

-There will be two ‘Al-Qaeda’ affiliates operating in Saudi Arabia over the next couple of years: one following Al-Qaeda-HQ (Mullah Omar, Bin Laden and Zawahiri), and another following the strain of jihadism unleashed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi. They will have two varying (but not exclusive) operating styles: al-Azdi’s guys operating along classic Taliban-like guerrilla lines from rugged terrain where there is sympathy for the fighters, such as the mountains of ‘Asir. Al-Azdi is from ‘Asir (name: Sa’id Ali Jabir al-Ikhtheim al-Shehri, from the Mdaneh village near Al-Namass), and I believe he was picked for a top role specifically to give the people of ‘Asir a feeling that one of their own is in command. They will use anti-Shi’a agitation to their advantage, but it will be expressed by assassinating Shi’a luminaries; old-style jihadists are still queazy about slaughtering Shi'a laypersons.

-The Zarqawist strain, which pioneered the use of sectarianism as a quick burning fuel to power the engine of jihad, will go for mass killings of Shi’as: bombings, random beheadings, …etc. The Zarqawists will follow their successful model (in Iraq) for urban insurgency, using anti-Shi’a violence to open up margins of chaos in which they can outmaneuver the Saudi security forces. Their loyalty will be to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, and the Iraqi jihad, which puts them at a ‘populist’ disadvantage because al-Azdi’s outfit has many more Saudi luminaries (such as Bin Laden) in its hierarchy, earning more popular sympathy. But that will be a regional issue: I see the Zarqawists making more inroads with the proto-jihadists of Nejd, and the small towns there, while the al-Azdi types will be more comfortable in ‘Asir and near the border areas with Yemen. Which means that the Zarqawists will have easier access to Shi’a targets, whereas the al-Azdi’s may turn their energies against the Ismailis of Najran and the border areas, who won’t resonate as much with a public that wants to see reprisal attacks on Shi’as (…the Ismailis aren’t that compelling of an enemy, since the Shi’as can always be tied to Iranian hegemony across the Gulf).

Final note: I really hope that intelligence agencies are making use of wikimapia.org because it is full of useful info that only locals would know, for example, if one sniffs around the entries (made by whoever wishes to do so) in the villages around al-Shehri's home, one can spot lots of military titles preceding the personal names. Such info raises interesting questions: why is a cluster of villages that evidently benefits from the largesse and patronage of the Saudi state producing jihadists?

How is this possible? (see last Update, April 23, 2009)

2009-04-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

Remember Samir Ambrose Vincent (aka Sam Vincent), the Saddam agent turned FBI fink?

Well, since tattling to the feds, and consequently being sentenced to probation and a $300,000 fine last April in return for his cooperation, Vincent has been trying to get back into the Iraqi oil business.

To that end, he’s established Virginia Global Energy Consultants (VAGEC), with offices in the DC area, Amman, Istanbul and Baghdad.

Vincent fessed up to performing many services for the Iraqi intelligence service, the mukhaberat, to which he was vouched for by Nizar Hamdoon, a school friend and one of the original members of Jihaz Haneen, the embryo of the Ba’ath’s murder machine. One job that Vincent allegedly did was to ‘mule’ around hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to bribe United Nations officials as part of what came to be known as the ‘Oil-for-Food’ scandal.

Samir Vincent with Saddam Hussein

Vincent, 69, an Iraqi-American Chaldean Christian, was handsomely rewarded for his services:

Vincent received about $310,000 under the oil-for-food program and five oil contracts from which his company, Phoenix International LLC, made $1.9 million in profit, O'Callaghan said.

Notice how the ‘fine’ he had to pay was even less than the cash he personally received from the Saddam regime.

But that’s not the most offensive part of this whole thing. What’s really offensive are who his partners are: Steve Solarz (former Democratic congressman from New York, advisor to VAGEC), Nick Veliotes (former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Jordan, Vice President of VAGEC), Frank Carlucci (former Secretary of Defense under Reagan, Director of Vagec), and Jeffrey Smith (GC of the CIA under Clinton, General Counsel for VAGEC).

Excuse me?

These guys couldn’t find anyone less radioactive than Vincent to partner up with?

I don’t have a problem with these folks doing business in Iraq; Iraq needs all the business facilitation it can get. But to partner up with someone like Vincent, with all the crap that’s in his background? That just doesn’t even make sound business sense.

[Note: the head of VAGEC’s Istanbul office is ‘Fadhel Othman’; Fadhel Ali Othman was formerly the Director General of Engineering Affairs at the Iraqi Southern Oil Bureau during the Saddam years. He currently represents Portuguese and Turkish oil companies seeking to do business in Iraq. The head of VAGEC’s Baghdad office is ‘Dr. Talal Kenaan’; Talal Ashour Kenaan was formerly Director General of Oil Fields at the Iraqi Ministry of Oil. He then served as the head of the Oil Committee in Saddam’s parliament. Later, he was appointed as advisor with the rank of ambassador at Saddam’s Presidential Office. Kenaan received his PhD from France, and held the rank of division (shu’ba) member in the Ba’ath Party. He currently resides in Amman, Jordan.]

What’s most striking about this group is Stephen Solarz, who’s been known for his honorable support of the Iraqi opposition against Saddam for decades. Solarz could have found many open doors in Baghdad by simply leveraging his past. But working with Vincent is not honorable at all.

Veliotes, I can see: I remember that he was busy bad-mouthing the Iraqi opposition at the behest (and pay) of the Qataris. I can see someone like him involved in all sorts of mercenary business exploits. But why would Solarz do this to his own name?

A couple of liberal reporters went ballistic when a past association was found between Vincent and William Timmons right before the presidential elections last year, after they had mischaracterized Timmons as McCain’s ‘transition director’—a title denied by the McCain campaign. At the time, I was incensed too: Vincent is bad news, and that bad odor would have clung to all those who have worked with him by proxy. But it turns out that ex-agents of the Saddam regime are only as odious as it pertains to settling scores in U.S. politics. For them to be associated with a totalitarian dictatorship is besides the point to reporters, and to Washington insiders.

Another alum of the Oil-for-Food scandal, Shakir al-Khafaji of Michigan, is also busy setting up security deals in Iraq, hiring a whole bunch of ex-FBI agents in his new company, Veritas Global.

It’s as if nothing’s happened. Saddam’s paid agents are being rehabilitated, and allowed to do business in Iraq. And no one seems to think that it’s that big of a scandal.

But it is.

UPDATE: And the plot thickens...

Guess who Jeffrey H. Smith (GC of VAGEC) also works for? Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, of CPA fame. Coincidence? From the Arnold & Porter LLP website:

Represents Ambassador L. Paul Bremer with respect to his service as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, including testimony at Congressional hearings

Other fun fact, Smith also represented Martha Stewart. Allowing one's imagination to go wild, could she too be in on insider oil deals in Iraq? At this point, nothing surprises me about DC's incestuosness.

UPDATE 2: More onion peels, more names...

It seems that Vincent's VAGEC has been primarily fixing deals for UI Energy Corporation, a South Korean firm that does the bulk of its business in Iraqi-Kurdistan.

Virginia Global Energy Consultants, U.S.A, which has influence and experiences in the petroleum and natural gas exploration and development in Iraq, and Challenger Mineral Inc., which is a 100% subsidiary company of Global Santa Fe listed on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), are our global affiliated companies who are our partner to promote our energy development in the Middle East and North America.

That would explain why Steve Solarz is on UI Energy's Board of Advisors (...he's probably the link to Turkish companies) as well as Peter Galbraith, who's chummy with the Kurdish leadership. Ken Adelman, who regretted his support for the Iraq War and began championing then candidate Barack Obama, is also on there.

This even involves former CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid:

Congressman Stephen J. Solarz, the former Secretary of Defense U.S.A Mr. Frank C. Carlucci, the former ambassador to Egypt Mr. Nicholas A. Veliotes, and U.S. commander for the Middle East General John P. Abizaid, exercise their network and political influence to promote UI energy on the development of oil fields in Iraq where United States of America governs.

But for me, the icing on the cake is the role of Anthony 'Tony' Lake. He's in on this too. Back in the day, when he was at the CIA, he was one of the staunchest enemies of the idea of democracy in Iraq. He also served as Obama's top foreign policy advisor during the campaign (...and is identified as so on UI Energy's website). Now he's one of many trying to make money off of Iraq, even if it involves middlemen such as Samir Vincent.

UPDATE (April 23, 2009): As one would have expected from people who have something to hide, all the pertinent details about VAGEC's offices and management has been scrubbed clean from their website. Luckily, I captured images of what the web pages looked like before the cover-up.

Saddam's 'Secularism'

2009-04-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

I liked the front-page piece in the New York Times today about the return of vice to Baghdad. The 'money quotes' were:

A young woman who said she was 28 but looked 18 sat smoking, and downing soft drinks while her “date” drank Scotch. A university student, she would give her name only as Baida, but she was frank about her nighttime profession. Had something happened to force her into this? “No,” she said. “I go out with men so I can get money.” To support her family? She seemed stunned by the question. “No, for myself.”

And,

“If I had my way, I’d destroy all the mosques and spread the whores around a little more,” the detective said. “At least they’re not sectarian.”

But the piece suffered from the usual myopia one associates with the NYTimes, for example: "The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful." The monarchy (1921-1958) was secular, and the Qasim years (1958-1963) laid the foundation for legalistic 'secularism'. Baghdad was sinful way before Iraq was born. What's more, reporters seem to forget Saddam's 'Faith Campaign' to enforce stricter Islamic morals during the 1990s, when bars, liquor stores, and brothels were shut down. They also seem to forget that 'Uday held tens of public beheadings of women accused of 'prostitution' (...many opponents of the regime and their families had their reputations besmirched as part of this campaign).

And who wrote 'Allahu Akbar' on the Iraqi flag? It was Saddam.

So enough with the "Iraq was secular under Saddam" meme already.

Arabs and Kurds, and Emma Sky

2009-04-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

My Hudson-NY piece this week is about the Arab-Kurdish tensions that seem to be coming to a boil. I argue that long-standing tensions are being whipped up at the current time because it serves several political agendas:

Kirkuk is saddled with very difficult issues involving many interested parties. The critical urgency for tackling these issues—energy, demographics, a history of ethnic cleansing—is now being impeded by political expediency: the Arab-Kurdish disputes are being played up, because ganging up on the Kurds would bring the Sunnis and the Shias together, or so think the likes of Maliki, Mutlag and Sky.

The “Sky” I’m referring to is Emma Sky. I’ve been watching her rise for some time, and couldn’t tell whether this was a remarkably deft penetration of the American decision-making process courtesy of the ‘cousins’ across the pond, or that it was just an accident of history when mediocre characters, thrust into the eye of history, begin making irresponsible and ill-conceived choices. I’m still wavering between the two.

Sky has maneuvered herself into becoming General Ray Odierno’s brain.

Emma Sky

Sky has been recently quoted as saying:

“It is a fascinating society,” she said of Iraq. “They have got things here that we have totally lost in the West: the appreciation of each other, whether it is the family, the clan or the tribe; values that aren't capitalist.”

How foolish is that? What toxic mix of cluelessness and self-righteousness is necessary to allow someone to string together these words? Is Emma Sky arguing for a pre-capitalistic society for Iraq? Where’s the sense of irony here?

But I’ll hand it to her, she has been quite clever in rallying the ranks of her fellow travelers among the western media (think Tom Ricks), as well as the left-leaning think-tankers. She’s managed to manipulate them into adhering to a disciplined message about Iraq, one that is heavily colored by her politics.

But what really galls me is that she has the audacity to compare herself to Gertrude Bell. Apart from both of them being British, middle-aged and in a capacity to direct events in Iraq, there is really no way that Sky can measure up to Bell. I have a complex relationship to the latter: on the one hand I see how her personal biases negatively influenced her instincts, but on the other I’m awed by the intellectual heft and bravery she kept demonstrating. One of my favorite books is the Desert and the Sown, an account of Bell’s travel’s in what we’d now call the interior of the Levant around the turn of the century; a journey she undertook on her own. To me this book, one that is always handy for the leafing, is a testimony to how uniquely brilliant this lady was, a set of personal triumphs that one should think twice of before claiming them for themselves.

And guess what? Emma Sky has her eye on greener pastures: the Rose Garden. That’s right, she wants to start working for the Obama administration.

After a year or so away from the front line, Ms Sky will consider her next move. “I would love to go and work for the President in the White House,” she said, admitting that her favourite TV series was The West Wing.

God help us all.

Marc Lynch and the Arabic language

2009-04-12T21:19:00.001-07:00

Just a quick note on Marc Lynch's Arabic skills, which he touts...

He mistranslated the title of this column as "... and now we see the departure of the Awakenings from Iraq" (check out his links column on his new blog). He mistook the word "ghedir" (which means 'betrayal') for "mughadara" (which is 'departure').

This is part of a pattern that's been going on for some time. Lynch claims fluency in Arabic, and plays it up as a big draw to his 'expertise'. It is a trick that works on the gullible, and there are plenty of them in DC.

I've had things to say about Dr. Lynch before, check here and here. The key words are "intentional intellectual mendacity".

A guy who pretends to have fluency in Arabic and who had never been to Iraq was busily advising the Obama transition team on what to do in Iraq, and across the region. So much for clarity...

Watch him transform himself into an Af-Pak 'expert', and an Urdu linguist, in a couple of months...(Doesn't Google have translation software now?)

Baghdad Rumor Mill: al-Wa’ili, a ‘Man of Action’

2009-04-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

According to the gossip-mongers of Baghdad’s political class, the CIA’s contingency plan—in case things get messy—is a man, and this man’s name is Sherwan al-Wa’ili. Which is weird, since most had assumed that he was Iran’s guy.

Now, let’s be clear that no one is talking about a coup…yet.

The idea is that should there be some reason why Maliki gets physically or politically incapacitated—a constitutional crisis, a military confrontation in which the Iraqi Army is forced to retreat at the hands of the peshmerga, an Iranian-orchestrated assassination attempt, a too aggressive move against the ‘Sons of Iraq’—then there’s no need to worry for Mr. al-Wa’ili can easily and effortlessly take over.

Shirwan al Waeli

Al-Wa’ili currently serves at the PM’s pleasure as the State Minister for National Security, which is different from the British/Saudi security shop, Muwaffeq al-Rubay’i’s Office of the National Security Advisor, or the CIA’s own Iraqi Intelligence Service, run by Gen. Mohammad al-Shahwani.

Al-Wa’ili is a member of the Da’awa Party-Iraq faction (…the point-person of that organization being Abdel-Karim al-‘Anizi) that is seen as an offshoot of the Iranian itila’at, or intelligence service.

But that hasn’t always been the case: up until the fall of the Saddam regime, al-Wa’ili was an officer of the Iraqi Army, and a trusted one at that, even though he had a brother in Detroit who was a member of the Da’awa Party and had participated in the 1991 Uprising.

Here’s some background on the guy:

Sherwan Kamil Sebti al-Wa’ili’s family came to Nassiriya from obscure origins. His first name, Sherwan, is Kurdish, but he’s not. I’m sure he has a colorful anecdote as to why his parents chose this name for an Arab (or at least a non-Kurdish) kid but what is certain is that one doesn’t have a grandfather called ‘Sebti’ and claim to be of Kurdish origin.

At the time of liberation on April 9, 2003, al-Wa’ili was an army engineer, who worked closely with Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘Ali Chemical’, Saddam’s murderous cousin and military enforcer. This relationship had spun off wild tales about al-Wa’ili's alleged Ba’athist past, but what I’ve managed to determine is that it was nothing more than the relationship of a junior officer with his commander. Other tales talk about a fortune that al-Majid had entrusted with al-Wa’ili right before the downfall of the regime, a fortune which the latter allegedly used to purchase immunity and later political standing among Iraq’s new caste of rulers. But according to my investigation, that story is simply not true.

Al-Wa’ili rose to the top through accident, and for being efficient, trusted and well-liked. When the Americans first came to Nassiriya, they found their way to the home of Sheikh Ali aal-Minshid, the chieftain of the Ghizzi tribe. I don’t know who set this meeting up and whether there had been earlier contact between the Americans and aal-Minshid, but what happened was that there was a top ranking Ba’athist in that house, who had sought the tribal protection of his relative, the sheikh. This fellow lived in Adhamiya in Baghdad, and had assumed that there would be a bloodbath right after the fall of the regime, so he went to Nassiriya until things blew over. Suddenly, he found himself in a situation where the Americans were asking for recommendations as to who can manage the municipal affairs of Nassiriya, and this guy immediately thought of his friend, al-Wa’ili.

And so it happened that al-Wa’ili became something of a deputy governor for the Province of Dhi Qar. From then on, he found his way to parliament and later to a ministerial post, as a candidate of Da’awa-Iraq. There’s also a story of how he became a protégé of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an MP now in hiding in Iran after it transpired that he’d been a wanted terrorist for decades. Then there’s the lesser known story of how al-Wa’ili undermined al-Muhandis, earning brownie points with the Americans and the Gulfis as a result.

Things get even weirder when one keeps hearing, again from the rumor mill, that al-Wa’ili is a business partner of sorts with Shakir al-Khafaji, the former longtime Iraqi-American apologist for the Saddam regime (…who could have been double-dealing with the Americans too, who knows!), and who has still managed to make a bundle doing deals with post-Saddam Iraq, under the cover of a security company called Veritas Global. Other names suggesting a pattern of ‘partnerships’ with al-Wa’ili include frontmen for the Jordanian intelligence service.

In recent weeks, Washington has been overrun with Iraqi officers from every military and security branch conceivable. The gossipers claim that these officers are being told to follow al-Wa’ili’s lead. When eyebrows got arched given al-Wa’ili’s Iran connections, the officers were allegedly reassured that al-Wa’ili is in the good books of the Americans. When al-Shahwani’s own people, who’ve always felt that al-Wa’ili was running a competing, Iranian-backed intelligence service, raised all sorts of red flags, they were told, again allegedly, that al-Shahwani is on the outs (…by August), and that they must address their fealty to a ‘Man of Action’, Mr. al-Wa’ili.

The other name frequently named as al-Wa’ili’s ‘partner’ in this new relationship with the Americans is Maliki’s security advisor, Gen. Farouq al-‘Araji.

As some of the readers of this blog know, Talisman Gate is not above discussing gossip, since political gossip has value in and of itself. The general outlines may not be true, yet it is interesting that this seems to be what people are whispering around the Green Zone.

What one arrest teaches us...

2009-04-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

I have a new piece out on Hudson NY, about the Adel al-Mashhadani arrest in Fadhel, the 'reckoning' that the false prophets keep predicting, and the myths of the surge.

The concluding paragraphs are:

What is scary is that the lessons of the ‘surge’ are to be implemented in one form of another in Afghanistan, without fully understanding the implications, and delusions, of what happened in Iraq. This is no mere exercise in ‘I told you so’: the surge arrived in Iraq as the insurgency was petering out, but the surge is going to Afghanistan as the Taliban are on an uptick. The consequences of this misreading could be very, very grave.

The case of Adel al-Mashhadani teaches us that there cannot be security without ‘nation building’, a concept that has become something of a dirty word in the Obama administration. The two go hand in hand. One cannot turn to the thugs and co-opt them, letting bygones be bygones, because in the vast majority of cases, people seldom change their spots. In the New Iraq, men like Mashhadani should be dangling by their necks, not swaggering around with an American ID card hanging from their collars. One cannot expect the thief, the rapist, or the murderer to police the innocent. That is always a recipe for tyranny, for that is how tyrants rule. Let us hope that America’s new doctrinarians are not inclined to equate tyranny with stability, in a hasty repudiation of a doctrine that sees stability as an extension of democracy.

The usual argument against barring the Ba’athists from power runs akin to that made for rehiring the Nazis in postwar Germany: they made the trains run on time. But the analogy to putting Mashhadani back on payroll is to have brought back the Gestapo to maintain order in Bonn. Not only is it immoral, it’s dangerously absurd. We should be thankful that the Iraqi government is soberly correcting a foolish legacy that the departing Americans have forced upon them.

...Because Iraq's issues are one-dimensional

2009-03-28T10:51:00.001-07:00

The Washington Post has a story today about the Iraqi government's plans to relocate the Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) away from the border areas for now, and eventually away from Iraq.

The aftertaste of Ernesto Londono's copy is that the Iraqis are doing this due to Iran's undue influence over the decisions of Maliki's government. The MEK serving as an auxillary force in Saddam's reign of terror is only mentioned in passing. Even then, Londono uses the wishy-washy "reportedly" to describe the MEK role in supressing the 1991 Uprising. Apart from doing Iran's bidding, the Iraqis have no clearly defined reasons of their own to dislike the MEK, the story infers.

The MEK has plenty of Iraqi blood on its hands. Kirkuk and Kifri in 1991, and Ramadi in 1995, come to mind. But who's interested in what the Iraqis have to say for themselves, right? Certainly not the WaPo, unless its a sob story about how bad things are, relayed with the kind of rhetorical flourish that may or may not put someone in line for a Pulitzer.

Note to Londono & Co: Away with thee to the Hindu Kush, for there await the stories that will garner you prizes, and sustain your egos. Iraq is depleted, so off you go to greener pastures.

UPDATE: ADIL AL-MASHHADANI: Several news outlets are reporting that Adel al-Mashhadani was arrested by Iraqi troops today. Fighting broke out with his fighters in the Fadhl neighborhood of Old Baghdad afterwards. This is great news. Mashhadani was one of Al-Qaeda's point guys in eastern Baghdad, responsible for countless numbers of deaths. The Americans thought it wise to hire him, and trot him out to reporters, without mentioning what he had done. This is how I put it in February 2008:

Even thugs who were doing Al-Qaeda’s bidding just a few months ago and had only turned because Al-Qaeda had appointed someone else to replace them were polished up and made presentable and available for media comment: Adil al-Mashhadani was reborn as a respectable local notable. “Let’s get him in a photo-op with David Ignatius!”

I followed up in the comments section of that post with a description of how I would've handled it:

I certainly would not have hired Adel al-Mashhadani! I would have watched him battle it out with his replacement, Ala’a al-Alawi, and then sent in the Iraqi Army to shoot and arrest the remnants of both gangs.

I'm not sure, but I think I was the first to identify Adel al-Mashhadani as the leader of the insurgency in Fadhl (July 2007).

Now who wants to bet that Odierno will try to move heaven and earth to get this thug released? And all the venal reporters, as well as the self-described 'experts', will eat it up.

Quick Links

2009-03-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

-This week's post for Hudson NY is titled: Remembering the Americans.

Concluding paragraph:

America under Obama can physically escape from Iraq, but it cannot escape from its legacy in Iraq. It can choose to allow the broken jihadists and the ousted Ba’athists to define that legacy, or it can willfully shape how it shall be remembered. Given the way the world works these days, how others remember you filters back into how you remember yourself: will America’s strength and message endure and be reassured, or will the growl of the jackals grow louder?

-Maliki mouthed some very harsh words about the Ba'ath Party on Al-Iraqiyya TV. He said that the Ba'ath was "an absolute evil and whoever goes back to it will be held to account." These words are a clear reflection that his overtures towards Ba'athists, made in the hopes of establishing an alliance with the Mutlag faction, were rejected by Maliki's base. The link is here (Arabic text).

-Furthermore, MP Kamal al-Sa'idi of the Da'awa Party came out with the clearest expression (Arabic text) of his party's stance by saying that they didn't want the Islamic Party's candidate to assume the role of parliamentary speaker.

The Maliki-Mutlag Alliance

2009-03-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post finally caught up today with a story that was first discussed here about a month ago: the prospects of a long-term alliance between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Sunni MP Saleh al-Mutlag.

I have two quick points to make: basing this alliance on a re-integration of Ba'athists or Ba'athism into Iraqi politics will damage Maliki, in a major way. Anthony Shadid's copy in the WaPo failed to include the statement issued yesterday (Arabic link) by Maliki's office on a related 'talking-to-the-Ba'athists' controversy, which reads:

The Iraqi Constitution prohibits any dialogue with, or a return to the activity of, the disbanded Ba'ath Party or its participation in the political process due to having committed ugly crimes against all the components of the Iraqi people over the course of thirty five years and its propagation and exercise of sectarian and racist ideas, so we ask everyone to commit themselves to this principle towards all entities or facades of the expired Ba'ath Party.

Pretty explicit, huh? There's not going to be a Da'awa-Ba'athist love fest anytime soon. In fact, I'd wager that this passing controversy has already eroded a significant part of Maliki's appeal and his opponents will always come back to it over the next few months.

The second point I'd like to make is that forming any future cabinet in Iraq will be impossible without having the Kurds on board. The Kurds will likely remain a unified bloc in the next round of parliamentary elections, and their MP cadres are distinguished by party discipline. There won't be defections or splinters. Whichever way I do the math, it is simply impossible to form a coalition government that can pass parliamentary approval without including the Kurds, who remain very pissed off at Maliki and may throw their weight to any other coalition that sidelines him (...which would naturally include Mutlag, who doesn't really care who he aligns with as long as he gets a bunch of ministerial appointments).

Lastly, this report by ABC News is interesting. Click away (...I couldn't figure out how to embed the video link. Help!)

Al-Baghdadi's Fifteenth Speech

2009-03-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

The speech itself runs for about 13 minutes. It's the same voice, as best as I can tell. It was released by Al-Furqan on March 17, 2009. Al-Baghdadi declares the successful conclusion of the Karama ('Honor') Plan, and the beginning of the 'Harvest of Blessings', the title of the speech. It follows his fourteenth speech, released in January, which was about Gaza (...please let me know if I've missed any).

And once upon a time I used to care so much about what al-Baghdadi had to say that I'd translate his words and analyze away for hours (see his 13th speech here), but nowadays, especially since the jihadists have been defeated in Iraq, I can't seem to rouse myself into caring. Besides, either the jihadists or someone else has been doing a fine job of translating the speeches into English, so I don't feel compelled to put in the effort when the job is already being done.

Oh, by the way, for the readers who haven't followed this blog over the years, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is supposed to be the new caliph.

However, I briefly discuss what I believe are the important indicators of this latest speech in this week's piece for Hudson NY, and this is the concluding line:

Obama, the skilled orator, may be rudely awakened to the prospect that there are long-term and unexpected consequences when ceding the rhetoric of victory to one’s enemy; however delusional said enemy may be.

Questions for the 'Iran-engagers'

2009-03-12T09:11:00.001-07:00

I have a new piece out on Hudson-NY about why I think America's new policy of bartering with Iran over Iraq will lead nowhere.

Sample:

Of course, stereotypes are frowned upon in polite company, and there’s no politer company than that of diplomats, hell bent as they are on striking deals with the world’s most unsavory villains. But would it hurt to keep it in mind while haggling, considering that the jury’s still out on whether Iran’s multiple poker-faces are mere duplicity, or plain old creepy schizophrenia?

Wishful Thinking in DC

2009-03-05T13:53:00.000-08:00

I attended a think tank talk today involving Iraq. I can't get into specifics because it was off the record, but just to give you an idea of how misguided many of these people are, I'll relate the following: one person got up to ask a question and in the process referred to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as "the leader of the Muslim world, and the leader of the Arab world" and described him as "an enlightened man". What is disturbing is not that the Saudis have hired DC propagandists to sing their praises, but rather that the room did not break out in laughter and derision at this person's audacious sycophancy.

Otherwise, here's something I wrote for Hudson-NY: Iraq Withdrawal: Wishful Thinking.

It concludes with,

Consequently, Obama can give speeches to his heart’s desire but he’s not in charge of this particular policy, a policy agreed to by his predecessor in office and now wholly up to the Iraqi voter to decide on.

“The Enemy Has a Vote”

2009-02-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

Tucked deep within the recesses of the New York Times today are a couple of opinions that one doesn’t get to hear too often from Americans involved in the Iraq effort. Commenting on President Obama’s withdrawal timetables…

Others, like Capt. Craig A. Giancaterino, the commander of the 287th Military Police Company from Fort Riley, Kan., said they were concerned that a deadline for withdrawal was a horizon for the insurgency, too.

“It’s our own worst enemy,” he said. “You’re setting a target for the enemy to wait us out.”

Col. Burt K. Thompson, the commander of the First Stryker Combat Brigade, said more than once in an interview in his headquarters that “the enemy has a vote,” suggesting that even the president could be forced to adapt his well-laid plans.

“I don’t think the war is over,” he said. “We’ve thwarted the main objective of the insurgency, but the enemy has a vote, and the moment you let your guard down, something bad will happen.”

These points are theoretically compelling, but practically invalid at this point. The war is over. The insurgency is dead. The insurgents and militias won’t come back to life. And U.S. troops will have to leave far ahead of Obama’s stated schedule.

The SOFA referendum won’t pass. It will likely undergo the same mechanism by which the referendum on the constitution (2005) was conducted: it SOFA is rejected (over 50 percent) by three provinces, then it is rendered null. This is a very likely possibility, and it shall be very difficult to any political party, even ones in the ascendancy such as Maliki’s, to make the case to the public to vote for SOFA. Amendments to SOFA, or a whole new SOFA will likewise be very difficult to pull off, both politically and legislatively.

Which means that in one year’s time after the date of the referendum (…likely to be around the end of the summer), all U.S. troops, combat or otherwise, would have to depart Iraqi soil.

As most of you know, I support this eventuality. Though I am extremely grateful for all that America has done for Iraq, I do believe that it is in Iraq’s strategic interest to watch the Americans leave, not only to speed up internal political maturation (…the anomalous situation of the State Department and the CIA meddling in the minutia of Iraqi politics will have to diminish) but also to allow Iraq free reign to project its newfound strength across the region, sometimes in direct opposition to U.S. interests (…such as the stability of the Saudi regime).

Related to the points made above by those U.S. officers, here’s what I wrote recently about the al-Daini affair for Hudson-NY. The last paragraph reads:

A war came and went without Americans even having much clarity as to who the enemy was. Well, men like Daini were the enemy. And some Americans colluded with him. In another time, this would have been called treason. But in our ethically-lapsed times, such collusion is called activism.

The added bonus of American withdrawal is that it leaves the Obamists with less leeway to shape the future political trajectory of Iraq. That is, an early withdrawal puts some distance between Baghdad and the fools in DC who’d championed Daini, and some of whom have suddenly become influential in informing the new administration’s policies for the Middle East region.