Palestine applies for membership in International Criminal Court

The Palestinian Authority on Friday took further steps towards joining the International Criminal Court and has asked the court to investigate crimes Israel has committed on Palestinian territories since June 13, 2014, according to ICC sources.

A US senior State Department official told Reuters that the move could have implications for US aid to Palestine saying: “It should come as no surprise that there will be implications for this step, but we continue to review. U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority has played a valuable role in promoting stability and prosperity not just for the Palestinians, but also for Israel as well." If there is an investigation launched it could be focused on the long war on Gaza that began on July 8 of last year. However, the Palestinians also seek an investigation into the continuous building and expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory. These settlements are considered illegal under international law. Any probe could begin once Palestine becomes a full member of the ICC and signs the Rome Statute.

 Relevant documents, the instruments of ratification were delivered to UN Assistant Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, Stephen Mathias, by Riyad Mansour the Palestinian Ambassador to the UN. The ICC has recognized the UN General Assembly's recognition of Palestine as an observer state. It will take at least 60 days for Palestine to become a member of the court. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime MInister, urged the ICC to reject that Palestinian request to join since they are not yet ranked as a state: AFP reported Netanyahu as saying: “We expect the ICC to reject the hypocritical request by the Palestinian Authority, which is not a state but an entity linked to a terrorist organization." Netanyahu was referring to the fact that the Palestinian Authority now rules in a unity government with Hamas, which is classified by the US, Israel and some other countries as a terrorist organization.

The Palestinian status at the UN was upgraded from observer entity to observer state in 2012 opening up the possibility of joining the ICC as well as numerous other international organizations. US State Department spokesperson, Edgar Vasquez, claimed the Palestinian move would be counter-productive and do nothing to help Palestinians achieve a sovereign and independent state: “It will badly damage the atmosphere with the very people with whom they ultimately need to make peace."

 Palestine had threatened to make this move if a resolution presented to the UN security council to establish a timetable for an Israeli pullout from occupied territories among other items, failed to pass. The motion was defeated by one vote but would have been vetoed by the US in any event.

Juan Cole claims that if an investigation does go ahead by the ICC the court could very well find that specific Israeli officials were guilty of violations of the Rome Statute of 2002: Article 7 forbids “Crimes against Humanity,” which are systematically repeated war crimes. Among these offenses is murder, forcible deportation or transfer of members of a group, torture, persecution of Palestinians (an “identifiable group”) and “the crime of Apartheid.” Cole claims that the Israeli government murdered Palestinian political leaders and routinely expelled Palestinians from parts of the West Bank. Building squatter settlements on Palestinian land and excluding Palestinians he cites as an example of an Apartheid policy. Cole says that convicting Israelis under Article 7 would be "child's play for the prosecutor". The ICC can only work through member states but it could authorize states to capture and imprison convicted authorities. Israel could also be subject to legal reparations that might threaten Israeli business interests and operations in Europe, as well as making travel to some countries for convicted officials hazardous. Sudanese president Omar Bashir is already in the position of not being able to visit Europe without risking arrest after his conviction by the ICC.

The Age of U.S. Shadow Power: Juan Cole

In an article published recently in the NATION and also available here. Juan Cole a prof. at the U. of Michigan and well know commentator on Middle East politics writes of what he calls "The Age of American Shadow Power".

Cole notes that covert actions have long been part and parcel of U.S. policies to project power world-wide. However within the last decade he argues that these actions are becoming a more important part of U.S. power supplementing or even replacing conventional military action in many cases.

Among the new shadow power tools are drone strikes, electronic spying, secret operations by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command. The government also now uses many more corporate contractors and mercenaries for security and even some terrorist groups.

As Cole points out these new tools can lead to operations that may put the U.S. in peril and create blow back. They also make the U.S. very unpopular in areas where they are unemployed. Drone attacks, and CIA operatives in Pakistan are a good example as well as the antics of private security contractors,. This is just a short introduction to the article for much more detail see the full article. Cole claims that if the use of shadow power is not rolled back it could hurt U.S. diplomacy and the blow back from the practices could make the U.S. actually less secure.

Juan Cole: Netanyahu Humiliates Obama

Meanwhile many in the US chastise Obama for being unfriendly to Israel! It is simply amazing to behold how many just dutifully line up to spout the Israeli line. As Drone points out the Israeli's seem to deliberately try to offend the U.S. and when challenged have refused to back down on building in East Jerusalem. For the Israeli their annexation of territory is simply an accomplished fact and the remained of the world which denies its legality should simply wake up and smell the coffee! This is from countercurrents.

Netanyahu Humiliates Obama

By Juan Cole

24 March, 2010
Juancole.com

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sets the tone for Israeli policy-- one that is earning him few friends in the West. Three embarrassments broke for him on Tuesday. First, yet another housing expansion in East Jerusalem was announced while he was meeting President Obama. Then, the cover story of Israeli troops accused of firing live ammunition at Palestinian protesters began to unravel. Then British Foreign Minister David Miliband unceremoniously tossed the Mossad London station chief out of the country for counterfeiting British passports, to be used in an Israeli assassination of a Palestinian in Dubai recently. Netanyahu personally ordered that hit, and is responsible for the forging of real peoples' passports and their use to commit a murder. Netanyahu is the one behind these acts of arrogance, and they are emblematic of his mean brand of politics.

The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu humiliates American officials every time it meets with them. Netanyahu met Obama in Washington on Tuesday, and like clockwork Israel embarrassed Obama by announcing that same day it was going ahead with a building project (funded by an American millionaire) in East Jerusalem that the Obama administration had strictly told the Israelis to halt. What I don't understand is why the Palestinians cannot sue over this issue in American courts. If the administration's stance is that East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and the US is signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, then why couldn't Palestinians with standing sue in the US when their property is usurped by an American millionaire?

Israel will investigate the shooting deaths of two Palestinian youth who were protesting (not rioting as AP puts it) against Israeli theft of water from the village well. Israeli troops claimed they were using rubber bullets, but Palestinians charge it was actually live ammunition.

Juan Cole: Five questions for the Afghan Surge

As usual Juan Cole provides interesting and insightful commentary on events. He points out in his questions the great difficulties that the new Afghan policy poses. At the same time some of the important Taliban leaders have been captured in Pakistan. Cole thinks that NATO is doing better in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. However, this remains to be seen. Leaders can be replaced and there seems to be still plenty of violence in Pakistan, the Zardari government is weak and corrupt, and the Pakistanis are probably still more concerned about India than Islamic extremism. This is from juancole.


Monday, February 22, 2010
Five Questions for the Afghan Surge;
Or, Getting Past the Hype

Gen. David Petraeus, a straight shooter, admitted on Meet the Press Sunday that the Afghanistan War will take years and incur high casualties.. His implicit defense of President Obama from Dick Cheney on the issues of torture and closing Guantanamo will make bigger headlines, but sooner or later the American public will notice the admission. The country is now evenly divided between those who think the US can and should restore a modicum of stability before getting out, and those who want a quick withdrawal. The Marjah Campaign, the centerpiece of the new counter-insurgency strategy, is over a week old, and some assessment of this new, visible push by the US military in violent Helmand Province is in order.

There was never any doubt that the US and NATO would win militarily, fairly easily occupying Marjah and nearby Nad Ali. Marjah at 85,000 or so is a city smaller than Ann Arbor, Michigan. The campaign is only significant in a larger social and political context. The questions are:

1. Can the stategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, of taking, clearing, holding and building be extended deep into the Pashtun regions? Marjah is only a stepping stone to the key southern city of Qandahar, which has a population of a million, more the size of Detroit.

This outcome has yet to be seen. But for rural Pashtuns to come to love foreign occupiers is an unlikely proposition. Even the WSJ admits that in Marjah, the Marines are not exactly feeling the love from the civilians they have supposedly just liberated. Since the Taliban are typically not as corrupt as the warlords, in fact, to any extent that the US and NATO re-install corrupt warlord types in power, they may alienate the locals. And keeping civilian casualties low so as to win hearts and minds is key here. That task will become more difficult as the US inserts itself more deeply into Pashtun territory, since insurgent villages will have to be defeated. The Soviet occupation produced 5 million externally displaced and 2 million internally displaced, along with hundreds of thousands dead. A campaign in Qandahar could easily displace half a million people, and they might mind. Meanwhile, on Monday, the governor of Dai Kundi asserted that a US airstrike killed 27 persons, mostly civilians. There is also the question, raised by Tom Englehardt, of whether the US is capable of good governance in Afghanistan when it is not in Washington, DC.

2. Can the demonstration of vitality and of a sense of progress mollify NATO publics long enough to fight a prolonged war and do intensive training of troops and police over several years?

No. Over the weekend, the center-right government of the Netherlands fell over whether to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war is universally unpopular in continental Europe, and governments have troops there mostly in the teeth of popular opposition, because NATO invoked article 5 of its charter, 'an attack on one is an attack on all' with regard to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks. It may take months after the next elections this spring for the Dutch to form a new government, in part because of the surging popularity of the far-right populist anti-Muslim 'Freedom Party' of Islamophobe Geert Wilders-- a smelly party the others will probably not want in their coalition. Holland's 2000 troops are likely to be withdrawn by late summer. Canada's military is also departing Afghanistan. Are these one-off situations, or are they the beginning of a NATO withdrawal over-all, which will leave Obama in the lurch? Australia is already refusing to take up the Dutch slack, and its government is under public pressure to get out, itself. While it is entirely possible that scandal-plagued rightwing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi will survive the next elections in Italy, it is also possible that he will not, and his successor may well want out of the unpopular Afghanistan quagmire. Moreover, the Pashtun insurgents may smell blood in the water with the Dutch withdrawal from Uruzgan (the home province of Mullah Omar), and target the smaller NATO contingents (the deaths of 6 Italian troops last fall raised public ire against the war).

There are about 45,000 NATO and other allied troops in Afghanistan, and 74,000 American. Obama wanted to increase the European contingent by 10,000, but NATO generally declined that offer, and now the NATO contingent may begin to shrink just when more trainers in particular are desperatedly needed. The Afghanistan National Army is supposedly nearly 100,000 strong, but many critics say the true number is half that, and that even that half is mostly illiterate, poorly trained, and often suffers from uncertain loyalties, drug use, or other debilitating considerations.

3. Can an Afghan army be stood up in short order that has the capacity to patrol independently and keep order after the US and NATO troops withdraw?

Unlikely. The answer to the question about Afghan military preparedness-- after nearly a decade of training and an investment of $1 billion that Afghan troops are not ready for prime time. In the Marjah campaign, they showed no initiative, no ability to fight independently. They are poorly served by their junior field officers, and they are 90% illiterate. (The NYT reporter expected to see them with maps out planning approaches!) The ethnic make-up of the particular Afghanistan National Army units sent into Marjah is also not clear. Almost no ANA troops hail from Helmand Province, and Tajiks (native speakers of Dari Persian, often from towns and cities) are vastly over-represented in the army. There is often bad blood between Tajiks and Pashtuns, the group that predominates in Marjah. The same skill set of the ANA most prized by the US Marines during the assault-- the ability to sniff out which households are Taliban-- may be a liability in the holding and building phase, since it stems from a decade and a half of Tajik Northern Alliance battles against the Taliban.

4. Can the Afghan public, which includes many groups (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks) deeply harmed by Taliban rule, accept reconciliation, as well?

Unlikely. Former Northern Alliance leader popular among Tajiks, Abdullah Abdullah, warned Karzai against reconciling with the Taliban this weekend. Abdullah dropped out of last fall's presidential contest in protest against alleged ballot fraud in Karzai's favor. There is general hostility toward reconciliation with the Taliban among the parties representing northern, non-Pashtun ethnic groups.

5. Can so much pressure be put on the Taliban that at least their middle and lower ranks will accept reconciliation with the Karzai government?

So far, there is no sign that the Taliban leadership still at large is interested in negotiations. A Taliban spokesman replied to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's call for reconciliation with Kabul over the weekend with a resounding 'No!'. Qari Muhammad Yusuf Ahmadi told the Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto that the Taliban would cease fighting when there were not further foreign troops in his country. He said, according to the translation in The News:



“The entire world knows that foreign forces have invaded Afghanistan and occupied this country. They have also started the fighting. Taliban will neither lay down weapons nor will hold talks with Karzai administration even in the presence of a single foreign soldier in Afghanistan. . .”

“The ongoing war in Afghanistan is between Afghans and foreigners. The responsibility of the war lies on the foreigners and their slaves. They continue fighting in the populated areas and have sent 15000 troops to small area like Marja; and are killing civilians and trying to impose infidels on Afghans.”

“Karzai himself has no power. The foreigners control everything and the nation is fighting against them.”


Commenting on the deaths of 12 civilians in Marjah, Qari Muhammad said: “Karzai should have said who martyred the people. In fact neither Taliban kill the people and nor destroy their houses. These are foreigners who are bombing the houses and killing civilians everywhere as they have brought miseries to the people of Marja.”

On the other hand, those members of the Taliban shadow government now in Pakistani custody may be less categorical. A third Taliban commander, Maulvi Kabir (the shadow governor of Nangarhar Province) has been captured by the Pakistani military, allegedly based on information provided by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar, the military chief of staff for the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar, was picked up recently in Karachi in a joint operation of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and US intelligence, which picked up signals from Baradar. Serious inroads are being made by these arrests into the Taliban 'shadow government' of officials who plan out roadside bombings and other attacks in specific provinces of Afghanistan while hiding out in Pakistan.

Pakistan's Prime Minister, Riza Yusuf Gilani, and the military chief of state, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, appear to believe that capturing these high Afghan Taliban leaders will give Islamabad leverage in a negotiated settlement of the contest between the Karzai government and the Pashtun religious far right, which is in insurgency.

Obama's Afghanistan escalation among the sullen Pashtuns is a desperate policy, as dangerous as attempting to build a series of sand castles on the beach at high tide.

Ironically, his bigger success has come in Pakistan, where he appears to have convinced the Pakistani elite to intervene decisively against their own, Pakistani Taliban, and also now to begin arresting the Old Taliban shadow government that is hiding out on Pakistani soil. If he can go further and convince Islamabad that its support of the Afghan Taliban was all a long a key strategic error that has blown back on Pakistan proper, he will thereby come closer to victory than he could by any military measures inside Afghanistan itself.

End/ (Not Continued)

Juan Cole: False beliefs about Iran.

This is a very useful article because it gives considerable evidence why a number of beliefs about Iran held my many in the West are not true or not likely to be true on the evidence. It is easy to jump from the fact that Ahmadinejad often comes out with somewhat hysterical rhetoric about Israel that Iran is really planning to attack Israel and would if it had the bomb. This would be suicide as the Israeli's themselves have nuclear bombs and a much superior armed forces and delivery systems! In discussions in the west about Iran's nuclear ambitions and supposed violation of the NPT it is never mentioned that Israel already developed atomic weapons on the sly and refuses to be part of the NPT--for obvious reasons. Israel would never countenance inspectors at its own nuclear facilities. The talks referred to in the article seem to have been more positive than observers expected in spite of the great mistrust between Iran and the western negotiators.

Juan Cole <jricole@gmail.com>Date: Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 12:57 AM

Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the US, other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky.
Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the USReality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war in decades (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of "no first strike." This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.
Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.Reality: Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to "wipe it off the map."Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of 'no first strike' to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.
Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to 'wipe Israel off the map?'Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.Belief: But aren't Iranians Holocaust deniers?Actuality: Some are, some aren't. Former president Mohammad Khatami has castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust, which he called "the crime of Nazism." Many educated Iranians in the regime are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is) nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it militarily.Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.Actuality: Iran has a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where it says it is trying to produce fuel for future civilian nuclear reactors to generate electricity. All Iranian leaders deny that this site is for weapons production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly inspected it and found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed with fair confidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons research program. This assessment was based on debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents they brought out, in addition to US signals intelligence from Iran. While Germany, Israel and recently the UK intelligence is more suspicious of Iranian intentions, all of them were badly wrong about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction and Germany in particular was taken in by Curveball, a drunk Iraqi braggart.Belief: The West recently discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapons plant in a mountain near Qom.Actuality: Iran announced Monday a week ago to the International Atomic Energy Agency that it had begun work on a second, civilian nuclear enrichment facility near Qom. There are no nuclear materials at the site and it has not gone hot, so technically Iran is not in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did break its word to the IAEA that it would immediately inform the UN of any work on a new facility. Iran has pledged to allow the site to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, and if it honors the pledge, as it largely has at the Natanz plant, then Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons at the site, since that would be detected by the inspectors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that Iran could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz precisely because it is being inspected. Yet American hawks have repeatedly demanded a strike on Natanz.
Belief: The world should sanction Iran not only because of its nuclear enrichment research program but also because the current regime stole June's presidential election and brutally repressed the subsequent demonstrations.Actuality: Iran's reform movement is dead set against increased sanctions on Iran, which likely would not affect the regime, and would harm ordinary Iranians.Belief: Isn't the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine of mutually assured destruction just would not work with them?Actuality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why haven't they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait. Israel invaded its neighbors more than once. In contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The US elite was once unalterably opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.
Belief: The international community would not have put sanctions on Iran, and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.Actuality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (unsuitable for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb). But with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to 90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as demonstrated by the CIA's discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006 from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones, consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can't attack and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC.Posted to Informed Comment at 10/01/2009 01:27:00 AM --

Juan Cole: Obama's Domino Theory

While Cole gives a plausible critique of Obama's domino theory I just wonder if Cole thinks that the theory is developed as Obama's real rationale for his Afghan and Pakistan policies or if there is some alternative rationale that Obama refuses to reveal. Personally given the obvious errors in the theory that it is probably a public consumption rational based on public fear of terrorism. I think that probably the real reason for Obama's Pakistani and Afghan policy is to project US influence and power in the region. However, Obama seems not to be aware of the difficulties of doing this using the methods he has chosen. Increased military presences will mean more expense and casualties and increased use of drones in Pakistan will increase anti-US feeling in Pakistana and perhaps destabilise the Pakistani govt. resulting in a less co-operative govt. taking power in Pakistan.


Obama's domino theoryThe president sounds like he's channeling Cheney or McCain -- or a Cold War hawk afraid of international communism -- when he talks about the war in Afghanistan.
By Juan Cole
Mar. 30, 2009
President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting "al-Qaida" in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.
Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.
He acknowledged that we deserve a "straightforward answer" as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. "So let me be clear," he said, "Al-Qaida and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. "And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban," he said, "or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged -- that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."
Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan," and warned, "Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within."
This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the "Taliban" is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded "Taliban" only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or "killing" it.
The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled "Taliban," though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no prospect of "al-Qaida" reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army.
While the emergence of "Pakistani Taliban" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan's security, they have just been defeated in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital threat to the West: "Actually, I don't agree with that assessment, because when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. They had ready access to international communications, ready access to travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more primitive. And it's much more difficult for them to move around, much more difficult for them to communicate."
As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they "kill" it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.
Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.

Juan Cole: Afghanistan: Obama's Vietnam

This is from Salon.

On interrogation and closing Guantanamo and exiting Iraq as Cole mentions there is a departure to a considerable extent from Bush tendencies but on Pakistan and Afghanistan Obama is actually more aggressive than Bush and is intending to have his very own surge in Afghanistan.
The recent drone attacks confirm this continuation and expansion of Bush policy.


Obama's Vietnam?Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.
By Juan Cole
Jan. 26, 2009
On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?
Obama's first meeting with his team on national security issues focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the course of which the new president is reported to have endorsed the drone attacks. Friday's were the first major U.S. airstrikes on Pakistani territory since Jan. 1, because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, killing 40 of them. The two cells the U.S. hit are accused of raiding over the border into Afghanistan, lending support to the Taliban there.
The tribal notable Khalil Dawar, who lived near the village of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency, hosted a party of five alleged al-Qaida operatives in the guesthouse on his property. An American drone hit the site with three Hellfire missiles. According to the Pakistani press, the strike not only killed the four Arab fighters and a Punjabi militant, but also the Pashtun host and some of his family members. A few hours later, missiles slammed into another residence near the village of Wana in a nearby tribal agency, South Waziristan, killing 10. Pakistani sources disagreed over whether there had been any foreign fighters at all at the second target, with locals claiming that 10 family members, including women and children, were the only victims. Villagers in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt sometimes rent to the Arab fighters because they are sympathetic to their struggle, but sometimes they just need the money.
The U.S. committed itself, when it overthrew the largely Pashtun Taliban in 2001, to building up a new government in Afghanistan and restoring the country to stability. The new government of President Hamid Karzai, however, was viewed as disproportionately benefiting northern ethnic groups such as the Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks. NATO search and destroy missions in the ethnically Pashtun south of the country alienated villagers, as did forcible eradication of lucrative poppy crops. The Taliban revived, and new groups emerged allied with them, turning to suicide bombings and attacks on the new Afghan army and on NATO and U.S. troops. Obama has committed to dealing with this problem by increasing the size of the U.S. and NATO troop contingent in Afghanistan, which already stands at more than 50,000, but the plan is facing stiff resistance from NATO allies and their publics.
Sandwiched between the lush river-fed plains of Pakistan and the deserts and mountains of southern Afghanistan, the 13 Federally Administered Tribal Areas are a no-man's land that is technically part of Pakistan but seldom truly controlled by Islamabad. Ethnically, the inhabitants are Pashtuns, the same group that dominates southern Afghanistan, and many of them deeply sympathize with those Afghan neighbors who are fighting Western troops and the Karzai government. In recent years, tribal and village organizations in FATA have been shunted aside by Muslim radicals who formed the Pakistan Taliban movement, emulating the Taliban of Afghanistan. They not only raid into southern Afghanistan but have also committed terrorist acts in Pakistani cities such as Peshawar and Islamabad.
The Bush administration launched 30 air attacks on targets in Pakistan in 2008, killing 220 persons. The strikes seem to have started in the summer, during the presidential campaign, about a year after candidate Obama began urging this policy. Bush may have instituted the aerial attacks to deny Obama a campaign talking point and to prevent him from out-hawking John McCain. That is, Obama may have pushed Bush -- who had earlier been wary of alienating Pakistan -- to the right. The American bombing of the tribal areas occurs with tacit Pakistani government acquiescence as a result of a secret agreement reached last September, despite the sometimes vehement public denunciations that Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani issues after they've occurred.
In this instance, a spokesman for the Pakistani foreign ministry complained to Ambassador Anne W. Patterson, saying, "With the advent of the new U.S. administration, it is Pakistan's sincere hope that the United States will review its policy and adopt a more holistic and integrated approach towards dealing with the issue of terrorism and extremism."
The Pakistani government is now ruled by the largely secular, left-of-center Pakistan People's Party, and President Asaf Ali Zardari blames the Taliban for the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, late in 2007. Any dispute between Islamabad and the Obama administration centers on issues of national sovereignty, not on the question of whether the Taliban should be crushed. Pakistan's own military is also fighting the Pakistan Taliban Movement and its tribal supporters. Early last week, Islamabad's Frontier Corps pounded several villages of the Mohmand Agency, killing 60 militants. In the course of the past five months, Pakistani military operations against the Pakistani Taliban in the neighboring Bajaur Agency have left hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands homeless and displaced.
The risk Obama takes in continuing the Bush administration policy of bombing Pakistani territory is provoking further anger in the public of that country against the United States and harming the legitimacy of Zardari's fragile elected government. A Gallup poll done last summer found that 45 percent of Pakistanis believe that the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan poses a threat to their country. Of Pakistanis who expressed an opinion on the matter, an overwhelming majority believed that the cooperation between the U.S. and the Pakistani military in the "war on terror" has mainly benefited Washington. If a more muscular American policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan sufficiently angers the Pakistani public, they could start voting for religious parties, delivering a nuclear state into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists.
The fundamentalist Jamaat-i Islami (JI), led by Qazi Husain Ahmad, held a rally of several thousand protesters in the Pakistani capital on Friday to protest the drone attacks and the ongoing military campaigns in FATA. (I saw the demonstration on satellite television, and it was clearly bigger than the wire services reported.) The coalition of religious parties of which the JI formed part was dealt a crushing rejection by the Pakistani electorate last February, but for the U.S. to continually bombard Pakistani territory could be a wedge issue whereby they return to political influence. Whereas the Jamaat-i Islami had welcomed Obama's new path in the Muslim world before the strikes, the JI leader blasted the new president in their aftermath.
Obama's policy toward Pakistan is not solely military. He appointed as his special advisor on Pakistan and Afghanistan veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who played an important role in peace negotiations over Bosnia in the 1990s. The new president, who has praised Pakistan's return to civilian parliamentary rule, has pledged to triple civilian aid. Opinion polling shows that more civilian development monies and less focus on military equipment are precisely what a majority of the Pakistani public want. Obama also intends to tie the annual amount of military aid released to the actual performance of the Pakistani military in preventing cross-border raids of FATA militants into Afghanistan. Allegations have swirled for the past year that rogue cells in the feared Inter-Services Intelligence of the Pakistani military have been actively sending the militants to hit targets inside Afghanistan, including the Indian embassy at Kabul.
Despite the positive harbingers from Obama of a new, civilian-friendly foreign policy that will devote substantial resources to human development, the very first practical step he took in Pakistan was to bomb its territory. This resort to violence from the skies even before Obama had initiated discussions with Islamabad is a bad sign. It is not clear if Obama really believes that the fractious tribes of the Pakistani northwest can be subdued with some airstrikes and if he really believes that U.S. security depends on what happens in Waziristan. If he thinks the drone attacks on FATA are a painless way to signal to the world that he is no wimp, he may find, as Lyndon Johnson did, that such military operations take on a momentum of their own, and produce popular discontents that can prove deadly to the military mission.
-- By Juan Cole











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Badr Corps avoids crackdown on Militia

As is often the case Juan Cole has an interesting analysis of the recent attack on militias by the U.S. and Maliki. The U.S. often stresses the Iranian connections of the Mahdi army of Sadr but at the same time ignores the closer connections between the Badr Brigades and Iran. The reason is transparent but will never be clear to the U.S. public who read mainstream media. The Badr brigades are connected to the Maliki govt. Iran and Iraq actually have good relations right now. It is the U.S. that is making all the fuss! If anything Sadr is less pro-Iranian than the Badr group. It is just that to hedge its bets Iran tries to foster good relations with Sadr as well.
The U.S. and the Iraqi govt. have in effect violated the terms of Sadr's ceasefire and now it seems they are only selectively acknowledging a second ceasefire brokered by Iran. Operations continue against Sadr City. Even Saddam had trouble controlling Sadr City so how likely is it that Maliki and the U.S. can do so successfully. A likely result is an increase in U.S. casualties perhaps the only possible way that the U.S. can be persuaded to withdraw unless Americans begin to draw a connection between their deteriorating economic situation and war costs.

Likewise, the ISG pointed out that the Badr Corps paramilitary was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and is close to Tehran. (See below). It fought on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's side in the recent Basra fighting. In other words, the government side was the pro-Iranian side. The Mahdi Army and Sadr neighborhood militia forces they attacked were largely Iraqi nativists who bad-mouth Iran. Fiderer points out that the ISG report had already diagnosed this syndrome. The Bush team did propaganda, pointedly declining to name Badr as an Iranian client and blaming Iran for the Mahdi Army's violence. In fact, the violence came as a response to violations of the cease fire by the US and the Iraqi government, which took advantage of it to arrest Mahdi Army commanders (that's a ceasefire?)

The key role of Iran in backing the Badr Corps (which Ryan Crocker and Gen Petraeus pointedly did not condemn, and Senator Lindsay Graham actually defended!) is demonstrated by the following:




' Al-Sharqiyah, Al-Iraqiyah Roundup: Political Blocs Express Support for Government
Iraq -- OSC Summary
Thursday, April 10, 2008

Dubai Al-Sharqiyah Television in Arabic . . carries between 1400 GMT and 2000 GMT on 10 April the following . . :

-- "The Badr Corps Command took a series of quick measures to protect itself from any possible military campaign against all militias in Iraq. A high-ranking official at the Interior Ministry, who asked to remain anonymous, said that the Badr Corps withdrew its key commanders to Iran in the past few days after it entered a new batch of fighters, around 1500 it total, into the Interior Ministry services. '

Juan Cole: Top Ten Challenges for US in the Middle East

This is from Juan Cole's blog. As usual Cole's remarks are quite perceptive although I sometimes find him rather naive. He is a bit bemused by the fact that if the US were really interested in combatting terrorism they would bave acted differently. He doesn't conclude, as I would, that combatting terrorism was not the first order of business for the US but projecting US power and securing energy supplies. Iraq was no fool's errand! While terrorism is a genuine threat that threat is also used as a fig leaf to cover the US drive for global hegemony.
Cole seems very confident that US interventionism if properly done will help stabilise the situation in the Middle East. I have no idea why he should think that!
The record so far has not been very good. Even well intentioned intervention can often exacerbate the situation. For example any support for those trying to democractise from inside Iran is most likely to be counterproductive and gives an excuse for authorities to brand them as enemies of Iran.

Top 10 Challenges Facing the US in the Middle East, 2008
10. Helping broker a deal in Lebanon between the March 14 Movement and the Shiites so that a new president can be elected and a national unity government can be formed.

Lebanon's economy was badly damaged by the Israeli war on the poor little country in summer of 2006. Tourism is a big part of that economy, and is being hurt by the continued political instability. Given historically high oil prices, Iran will probably make $56 billion from petroleum sales this year. That gives it lots of carrots to hand out in Lebanon. If the Lebanese were better off, foreign oil money would not be as important to them. Likewise, the country's poverty breeds social ills. Hizbullah militiamen might be harder to find if there was well-paying work for young men in the south. The dire poverty of Palestinians in camps such as Nahr al-Bared near Tripoli has made them open to predations by Mafia-like groups linked to al-Qaeda. Just a couple of weeks ago, Lebanese security broke up a plot to blow up churches in Zahle on the part of a small group of jihadis. An economically flourishing Lebanon would be less likely to be beset by these ills. The Levant is not that far away from the US or its major interests, and it is very unwise to allow the pathological situation in Lebanon to fester. A prosperous, healthy Lebanon is good for US security and is less likely to become the cat's paw of regional powers hostile to US interests.

9. The US should exercise its good offices to encourage continued dialogue between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The capture of Baghdad by the Shiites and the ethnic cleansing of most Sunnis from it have set the stage for a big Sunni-Shiite battle for the capital as soon as the US troops get out of the way. It is absolutely essential to Gulf security, and to American energy security, that Saudi Arabia and Iran not be drawn into a proxy Sunni-Shiite war in Iraq. Keeping in close contact with each other and with Iraqis of the other sect is the best way for them to avoid a replay of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Those in the Bush administration who dream of an Israeli-Saudi alliance against Iran are playing with fire, a fire that is likely to boomerang on the US. If the Persian Gulf goes up any further in flames, the resulting unprecedentedly high petroleum prices will likely finally produce a bad impact on the US economy. Instead, the US should be attempting to bring Iran in from the cold, now that the NIE has absolved it of nuclear-weapons ambitions.

8. Congress should expand funding for, and guarantee the future of, the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point. Its researchers do among the very best jobs of analyzing the writings and activities of the Salafi Jihadis, and so of combatting them. Few government institutions are as effective. If the US government were serious about the threat of terrorism, I would not even have to make this plea. Of course, if Bush and Cheney had really cared about the threat of al-Qaeda, they would have gone after it and gotten Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri rather than rushing off on a fool's errand in Iraq.

7. The US must repair its tattered relations with Turkey. Turkey has been a NATO ally for decades and Turkish troops fought alongside American ones in the Korean War. Turkey stood with the US in the Cold War and gave the US bases on its soil. As a secular country, it is an ally in the struggle against the Salafi Jihadis, for which even religious Turks have contempt. Turkey has among the more promising economies in the Middle East, among non-oil states, and is attracting billions in foreign investment. The US has for some strange reason stiffed Turkey several times in the past decade. The Clinton administration promised Turkey a billion dollars in restitution for the monies it lost during the Gulf War, and then Congress refused to appropriate the money. More recently, the US has unleashed a virulent and violent Kurdish nationalism by allying with Massoud Barzani in Iraq. Barzani in turn has given safe harbor to guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), who have been going over the border and killing Turks, then retreating to Iraq. The Bush administration has tried to resolve this probably by helping the Turks bombard PKK positions inside Iraq, but that is not ideal. Instead, the US should put economic and other pressure on Barzani to expel the PKK from Iraq.

6. The US must keep the pressure on Pervez Musharraf to hold free and fair, early elections in Pakistan. The elections probably cannot be held on Jan. 8, as planned, because of the extensive turmoil and destruction of polling stations and ballots during the past few days. But they should not be postponed past March 1. Musharraf's own legitimacy has collapsed, and he is in danger of becoming a Shah of Iran figure, hated by his own people and driven from office. Such a scenario could be very bad for the United States. That is why Joe Biden is right and John McCain is wrong when the latter warns against dumping Musharraf. Why cannot the American Right learn that backing the wrong horse is often worse than not having a horse in the first place?

5. The US and NATO have to stop doing search and destroy missions in Afghanistan. The Pushtun tribespeople are never going to put up with tens of thousands of foreign troops in their country, and, indeed, in their underwear drawers. Search and destroy missions just multiply feuds with local people. The NATO and US military missions in Afghanistan have to be redefined so that they are not simply putting down tribes for the central government. The best Afghan central governments have ruled by playing the tribes off against one another, not by trying to crush them. The solutions in Afghanistan are political and economic. More reconstruction needs to be done. Farmers need aid to be weaned off poppies. Forced eradication of poppy crops appears to be behind a lot of the "Taliban resurgence," which actually often looks to me from a distance like angry farmers taking revenge for the destruction of their livelihoods.

4. The US must facilitate provincial elections in Iraq. They are arguably more important than any other step. They would solve a number of important problems.

The Sunni Arab provinces of Al-Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Diyala have unrepresentative governments (Diyalah, 60% Sunni, is ruled by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a hard line Shiite group!) The Sunni Arab parties declined to run in January, 2005, and there have been no subsequent provincial elections. Representative Sunni provincial governments could negotiate from a greater position of strength with the federal government of Shiite Dawa Party leader and prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. Some of the Awakening Councils members, who are self-appointed, might get elected and so gain greater legitimacy.

Without legitimate provincial governments in the Sunni Arab provinces, it is hard to see how the US can hope to withdraw troops and turn over security to locals, as Gen. Petraeus had planned to do in Mosul this year.

In the south, Basra needs new elections because its provincial government saw a major division this year, leading to an ISCI-led vote of no confidence in the governor, who is from the Islamic Virtue Party. But then the governor refused to step down! Ineffective governance in oil-rich Basra, which contains the country's only major ports, is bad for the whole country. In some other southern provinces, such as Diwaniya, a more representative provincial government might make for more social peace.

What I am saying now is not new, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. Petraeus have repeatedly called for such elections. I am saying, now is the time to make a big push for them. If the US starts drawing down troops this year, it will make it harder to hold elections, since the Iraqi security forces probably cannot keep the voters dafe. If the US leaves behind the current provincial governments, as with Diyala, Diwaniya and Basra in particular, it is probably leaving behind provincial civil wars.

3. The US Congress must allocate substantial funds, on the order of $1 billion or more, for Iraqi refugee relief in Syria and Jordan. UNO relief funds are running out. Iraqis' own savings are running out. Children are not in school and are going hungry. People are being exploited, including young girls forced into prostitution. A majority of the 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria went there in 2007, and almost all of them have been forced out of Baghdad and other areas because of the political instability that the United States unleashed in their country. The surge is being touted as a victory in the US press, but it seems to have displaced 700,000 Iraqi civilians! The US is spending $15 billion a month on the Iraqi and Afghanistan Wars. It can afford $1 billion a year for refugee relief. This is our responsibility. How future generations of Iraqis view the United States will in part depend on whether we do this. I ask all Americans to write your congressional representatives and press them on this humanitarian issue.

2. The Bush administration should expend all of its remaining political capital in the region to have the Israelis return the Golan Heights to Syria. The Golan was captured in 1967. By the United Nations Charter, countries may not permanently grab the territory of their neighbors. The Syrians will have to agree to keep the Golan a demilitarized zone, with UNO blue helmets patrolling as a safeguard. In return, Syria would have to agree to cease backing Palestinian militants and would have to play a positive role in creating a Palestinian state. Damascus would also have to work to restore social peace in Lebanon. Such a deal might help to detach Syria from its alliance with Iran. That in turn would weaken Hizbullah. This deal would be good for Israeli security, and if it helped speed up the creation of a Palestinian state, might even keep Israel from falling into the Apartheid situation that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said he fears.

1. The US must insist that the Israeli siege of Gaza must be lifted. A third of Palestinians killed by Israel this year were innocent civilians. The agricultural sector is being destroyed because farmers cannot export their goods owing to the Israeli blockade. Food, water, essential medicines are all being denied to civilian populations, including children. If Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is so worried about Israel being seen as an Apartheid state, he should release Gazans from their penitentiary and stop deploying collective punishment against civilians.

posted by Juan Cole @ 12/31/2007 06:26:00 AM 0

Juan Cole: Ten Myths about Iraq

As usual Juan Cole is perceptive, and provocative. Here he takes on many of the myths pushed by mainstream media about the situation in Iraq.


From: Juan Cole
Date: Dec 25, 2007 11:48 PM
Subject: [infoco] [Informed Comment] Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2007

10. Myth: The US public no longer sees Iraq as a central issue in the
2008 presidential campaign.

In a recent ABC News/ Washington Post poll, Iraq and the economy were
virtually tied among voters nationally, with nearly a quarter of
voters in each case saying it was their number one issue. The economy
had become more important to them than in previous months (in November
only 14% said it was their most pressing concern), but Iraq still
rivals it as an issue!

9. Myth: There have been steps toward religious and political
reconciliation in Iraq in 2007.

Fact: The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has for the
moment lost the support of the Sunni Arabs in parliament. The Sunnis
in his cabinet have resigned. Even some Shiite parties have abandoned
the government. There are new tensions between Shiites and Kurds over
what to do.

8. The US troop surge stopped the civil war that had been raging
between Sunni Arabs and Shiites in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Fact: The civil war in Baghdad escalated during the US troop
escalation. Between January, 2007, and July, 2007, Baghdad went from
65% Shiite to 75% Shiite. UN polling among Iraqi refugees in Syria
suggests that 78% are from Baghdad and that nearly a million refugees
relocated to Syria from Iraq in 2007 alone. This data suggests that
over 700,000 residents of Baghdad have fled this city of 6 million
during the US 'surge,' or more than 10 percent of the capital's
population. Among the primary effects of the 'surge' has been to turn
Baghdad into an overwhelmingly Shiite city and to displace hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis from the capital.

7. Myth: Iran was supplying explosively formed projectiles (a deadly
form of roadside bomb) to Salafi Jihadi (radical Sunni) guerrilla
groups in Iraq.

Fact: Iran has not been proved to have sent weapons to any Iraqi
guerrillas at all. It certainly would not send weapons to those who
have a raging hostility toward Shiites. (Iran may have supplied war
materiel to its client, the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (ISCI),
which was then sold off from warehouses because of graft, going on the
arms market and being bought by guerrillas and militiamen.

6. Myth: The US overthrow of the Baath regime and military occupation
of Iraq has helped liberate Iraqi women.

Fact: Iraqi women have suffered significant reversals of status,
ability to circulate freely, and economic situation under the Bush
administration.

5. Myth: Some progress has been made by the Iraqi government in
meeting the "benchmarks" worked out with the Bush administration.

Fact: in the words of Democratic Senator Carl Levin, "Those
legislative benchmarks include approving a hydrocarbon law, approving
a debaathification law, completing the work of a constitutional review
committee, and holding provincial elections. Those commitments, made 1
1/2 years ago, which were to have been completed by January of 2007,
have not yet been kept by the Iraqi political leaders despite the
breathing space the surge has provided."

4. Myth: The Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," who are on the US
payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri
al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants.

Fact: In interviews with the Western press, Awakening Council
tribesmen often speak of attacking the Shiites after they have
polished off al-Qaeda.

3. Myth: The Iraqi north is relatively quiet and a site of economic
growth.

Fact: The subterranean battle among Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs for
control of the oil-rich Kirkuk province makes the Iraqi north a
political mine field. Kurdistan now also hosts the Kurdish Workers
Party (PKK) guerrillas that sneak over the border and kill Turkish
troops. The north is so unstable that the Iraqi south is now
undergoing regular bombing raids from Turkey.

2. Myth: Iraq has been "calm" in fall of 2007.

Fact: in the past 6 weeks, there have been an average of 600 attacks a
month, or 20 a day, which has held steady since the beginning of
November. About 600 civilians are being killed in direct political
violence per month, but that number excludes deaths of soldiers and
police.

1. Myth: The reduction in violence in Iraq is mostly because of the
escalation in the number of US troops, or "surge."

Fact: Although violence has been reduced in Iraq, much of the
reduction did not take place because of US troop activity. Guerrilla
attacks in al-Anbar Province were reduced from 400 a week to 100 a
week between July, 2006 and July, 2007. But there was no significant
US troop escalation in al-Anbar. Likewise, attacks on British troops
in Basra have declined precipitously since they were moved out to the
airport away from population centers. But this change had nothing to
do with US troops.

Bush-Aznar Transcript: The War Crime of the Century

This is from Juan Cole's blog. The transcript is translated there as well. It is quite interesting. What amazed me is that Bush goes on gushing about democracy and also the threat of Saddam to the US as if this all made sense rather than rhetoric for the masses but maybe before other leaders it is protocol to spout the proper rhetoric. Another interesting point made by Cole is that Saddam would take with him documents implicating the US administration in his biological and chemical weapons programs, a point that seems plausible.

Bush-Aznar Transcript: The War Crime of the Century

I made two claims about the transcript published by El Pais of Bush's conversations with Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar on 22 February, 2003, at Crawford, Texas.

The first is that the transcript shows that Bush intended to disregard a negative outcome in his quest for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a war against Iraq. Bush wanted such a resolution. He expressed a willingness to use threats and economic coercion to secure it. But he makes it perfectly clear that he will not wait for the UNSC to act beyond mid-March. He also explicitly says that if any of the permanent members of the UNSC uses its veto, "we will go." That is, failure to secure the resolution would trigger the war.

Uh, that is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. If you can't get a UNSC resolution, and you haven't been attacked by the state against whom you want to go to war, then you are supposed to stand down.

Both because he set a deadline beyond which his "patience" would not stretch (the poor thing had already waited four months; I mean, is he a toddler that he lacks elementary patience?), and because he specified a UNSC veto as a signal for his launching of the war, Bush made it very clear that he was willing to trash the charter of the United Nations and to take the world back to the 1930s,to an era of mass politics when powerful states launched wars of choice at will on the basis of fevered rhetoric and fits of pique.

The second claim that I made was that Bush was aware of, and rejected, an offer by Saddam Hussein to flee Iraq, probably for Saudi Arabia, presuming he could take out with him a billion dollars and some documents on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Both provisions were intended by Saddam to protect him from later retaliation. The money would buy him protection from extradition, and the documents presumably showed that the Reagan and Bush senior administrations had secretly authorized his chemical and biological weapons programs. With these documents in his possession, it was unlikely that Bush would come after him, since he could ruin the reputation of the Bush family if he did. The destruction of these documents was presumably Bush's goal when he had Rumsfeld order US military personnel not to interfere with the looting and burning of government offices after the fall of Saddam. The looting, which set off the guerrilla war, also functioned as a vast shredding party, destroying incriminating evidence about the complicity of the Bushes and Rumsfeld in Iraq's war crimes.

Aznar asked Bush if he would grant Saddam these guarantees, and Bush roared back that he would not.

By refusing to allow Saddam to flee with guarantees, Bush ensured that a land war would have to be fought. This is one of the greatest crimes any US president ever committed, and it is all the more contemptible for being rooted in mere pride and petulance.

Note that even General Pervez Musharraf allowed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to go to Saudi Arabia with similar guarantees, even though Sharif was alleged to have attempted to cause Musharraf's death. A tinpot Pakistani general had more devotion to the good of his country, and more good sense, than did George W. Bush.

The passage in which Bush agrees with Aznar that it would be better if Baghdad fell without a fight refers to the possibility that the Iraqi officer corps would assassinate Saddam and decline to put up a fight. Bush would very much have liked such a fantasy to come true.

But he did not need to fantasize. He had a real offer in the hand, of Saddam's flight. He rejected it. By rejecting it, he will have killed at least a million persons and became one of the more monstrous figures in recent world history.

I have done a translation of the transcript, with some dictionary work. I would be glad of any corrections, but I think it is good enough for government work. No one can read it without recognizing that Bush was champing at the bit to go to war; that he only wanted the UNSC as a fig leaf and was determined to ignore it if it did not authorize the war; and that he had a deal on the table from Saddam but absolutely refused to pursue it, preferring instead either a sanguinary conflict or his adolescent fantasy of Baghdad falling without a shot.

=============

Juan Cole: Demonisation of Ahmadinejad

Americans seem to forget what they have done to Iran.. Bollinger hardly represents any stirling qualities of US American University Presidents. Although he resisted calls to cancel the speech he used it as an opportunity to show his patriotic credentials by insulting his guest even before he spoke. As my next post illustrates Ahmadinejad's reception should be contrasted with that of an actual dictator Musharaff. He was welcomed with open arms, as was Hitler's ambassador many years ago.

Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.

By Juan Cole



Sept. 24, 2007 | Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran's 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.

There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran's rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the '80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration's unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

But the right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran's ceremonial president to the U.N. General Assembly has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who recently pressed Gen. David Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country (thus cleverly using one war of choice to foment another).

American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the Europeans and at the United Nations for impeding Tehran's nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. Washington wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the United Nations but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. The Bush administration may attempt to create a "coalition of the willing" of Iran boycotters outside the U.N. framework.

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, "Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community." He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

ElBaradei intervened to call for calm after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said last week that if the negotiations over Iran's nuclear research program were unsuccessful, it could lead to war. Kouchner later clarified that he was not calling for an attack on Iran, but his remarks appear to have been taken seriously in Tehran.

Kouchner made the remarks after there had already been substantial speculation in the U.S. press that impatient hawks around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney were seeking a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran. Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an "Iran war rollout" by the Cheneyites this fall.

Juan Cole: The Situation in Gaza

I am a bit surprised at some of what Cole says and what he does not say. Excluding Hamas from the electoral process is surely just about as bad as letting them run and then cutting off aid etc. when they win. In the case of excluding them in Palestine this might be an invitation to civil war. Although Cole talks of Hamas being overthrown in Gaza by Israel and the US he does not mention that before this the US and Israel were providing arms for Abbas. Cole does not mention the appointment of a new govt, by Abbas with a prime minister who was a former World Bank and IMF employee.
Whatever makes Cole think the world won't look the other way if the Palestinians remain poor, stateless, hungry and landless? This will especially be so if violence against Israelis continues as it no doubt will.

The Situation in Gaza

I have been traveling and not able to spend as much time as usual scanning the news, but of course have followed the events in Palestine with dismay.

It is to be expected that a lot of comment in the United States on these events will be rife with racist attitudes and polemical dismissals. The Palestinians have long been demonized by the Western media, apparently for not going along quietly with their expulsion from their homes, the large scale theft of their land, and their reduction to an almost slave-like status of statelessness. Palestinians are not intrinsically more violent than anyone else, not essentially less able to administer or govern than anyone else. Few countries have not had civil wars or at least major civil conflicts. The question should be not "Why are Palestinians like that?"-- which is a racist question-- but what social and economic factors are driving the present conflict?

Why is it that so little analysis is offered of why things have developed as they have? Isn't anyone interested in the important differences between Gaza's economy and that of the West Bank? Gaza is much poorer and much more isolated from the world. Is it any big surprise that its population is more radicalized and might be drawn into supporting Hamas?

The Gazan population is being thrown into more misery by an Israeli blockade of electricity, fuel and even food. (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that it will be a humanitarian blockade; if you believe that, I have a bridge over the River Jordan you can purchase inexpensively from me). UNRWA is warning against the blockade. With an unemployment rate of 50% and widespread malnutrition, caused by the ordinary everyday Israeli pressure on Gaza, the territory's population can't take much more extra deprivation without an immense human toll being exacted.

It seems obvious that Hamas will be overthrown in Gaza, jointly by Mahmud Abbas, Israel and the United States. But it seems unlikely that Mahmud Abbas will gain any genuine authority there if that is how he comes to power. And, the events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush's "democratization" program for the "Greater Middle East." The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the "Greater Middle East" looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.

If Bush and the Israelis couldn't live with a Hamas electoral victory, they should have exluded Hamas from running a year and a half ago. The Egyptians don't let explicitly religious parties contest elections, and a similar rule could have been made in Palestine. Holding an election, having people win it with whom you won't deal, and then overturning the election with militias, is a recipe for violence and instability. That's what happened in Algeria in the early 1990s, and it caused untold suffering.

The Israelis may be sighing a sigh of relief that the Palestinians are busy fighting one another for the moment. But what has happened is not good for Israel in the medium to long term, since I suspect it signals the end of the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. And, if you don't have a two-state solution, ultimately the likelihood is that Israel will be stuck with the Palestinians as citizens. The world is not going to look the other way forever as they are kept stateless, poor, landless and hungry.

posted by Juan @ 6/19/2007 06:15:00 AM 17

Bleak Assessment of Purge by US military

This is from Juan Cole's blog.
The solution to these problems seems to be more of the same: more troops for a longer period of time. I just wonder how long US citizens will put up with "their" government doing the opposite of what most of them want. There will no doubt be more casualties for the US and even an increase in the rate of casualties.
Cole's point about Russian weapons being mentioned is interesting. No doubt as the Cold War heats up again there will be more Russian meddling discovered!

A bleak internal US military assessment of the progress of the Bush/Kagan "surge" in Baghdad, revealed by the NYT on Monday, has been followed up on by CNN.. Here is what the Pentagon correspondent is saying:



' A top U.S. commander tells CNN that three quarters of Baghdad simply is not under the control of U.S. or Iraqi security forces. Brigadier General Vincent Brooks says just one quarter of Baghdad is in a controlled state. Brooks said control means U.S. and Iraqi forces are able to maintain physical influence over a specific area, preventing its use by the enemy.

It's been three months since the security crackdown began. More than 20,000 U.S. troops have poured into the city. But Brooks says there is still a crucial problem -- the lack of qualified Iraqi police.

In some areas, they are still loyal to death squads and militias. In other areas, there just aren't enough police. In neighborhoods such as Amiriyia and West Rashid, U.S. troops are still having to go back into those areas that they had cleared.

Attacks against U.S. troops in Baghdad are on the rise. Military intelligence officials are analyzing this video from the Islamic State of Iraq claiming to show Russian grenades being thrown at U.S. troops. Analysts say these grenades may be designed to burst into high temperature fires on impact. One official calls it a new threat. '


Funny how Iran agrees to meet with the US about Iraq, and then Russian President Vladimir Putin shoots his mouth off about missiles, and all of a sudden the deadly weaponry in Iraq is coming from Russia, not Iran.

Both reports underlined that US troops are just not present on a continual basis in the vast majority of neighborhoods. Among the bars to progress is that the Iraqi authorities have not

1. provided enough troops and policemen to man checkpoints and patrol neighborhoods, just as a matter of sheer numbers

2. provided enough security forces willing to take risks

3. provided even-handed security forces that won't protect other Shiites from the militias.

And, remember that quieting down Baghdad was supposed to give the al-Maliki government breathing space to make the deep political compromises that might end the insurgency by negotiation. None of that political work appears to have been done, and not only because just one-fourth of the capital has even begun to be pacified.

Juan Cole on Cheney's visit to Iraq

Interesting that the Iraqi parliament is powerless to get US to withdraw! Again the lack of sovereignty in Iraq is transparent. Does Bush think that Cheney still has credibility and clout in Iraq? Ill bet no one let him go hunting in the green zone!

Cheney Greeted by Mortars, Demonstrations:
Iraqi Parliament pleads for US withdrawal

Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that US Vice President Dick Cheney was greeted, on his surprise visit to Baghdad, by a rain of mortar shells on the Green Zone and by protests in several cities organized by Puritan Shiite followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. One could have added the bombing in Irbil, the seat of close US ally Massoud Barzani, the Kurdistan leader.

Aljazeera is alleging that high on Cheney's agenda is getting the new petroleum bill passed through parliament. That legislation is certainly one of the four benchmarks the Bush administration has pushed on the al-Maliki government, and given Cheney's background as CEO of Halliburton, it is plausible that the oil bill looms large in his visit. It is probably behind his scolding of Iraqi parliamentarians for even considering a two-month hiatus this summer.

Cheney arrived a day after a majority of Iraqi parlimentarians signed a petition in favor of the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Actually, last fall 131 signed a similar petition. By the rules of the Iraqi parliament, such petitions have no force. The sense of those deputies was communicated to a committe, which promised to report out the resolution to the entire parliament, which it apparently never did. So, Tuesday's move shows a 10% rise in commitment to the principle of withdrawal over 6 months ago, but may be no more consequential. A petition is not a vote, and is a sign of how powerless the parlimentarians feel.

Virginia tech versus Iraq

This is from Juan COle's blog.
Canadian TV has had almost non-stop coverage of the Virginia Tech incident. I am completely baffled as to why this should be. I feel the same about the huge amount of publicity given to the trial of a serial murderer here. If the Tech incident were in Iraq (or India say) it would merit just a brief mention and perhaps one brief photo clip. The media encourages the public appetite for sensationalism while ignoring other important events. There will be a parade of experts who will comment on the psychology of the gunman and no doubt lectures about gun control and the need for more security on campuses. There is a climate of fear being created that will enable government to further restrict freedoms in the name of security. Someone just tell me how more likely it is that I be run down and killed while crossing a city street as compared with being shot by a deranged gunman at a university?


Tuesday, April 17, 2007

7 US Troops Killed;
Iraq Has Two Virginia Techs Every Day;
Thousands Protest in Basra, Demand Governor's Resignation

I keep hearing from US politicians and the US mass media that the "situation is improving" in Iraq. The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. Virginia Tech will be gone from the headlines and the air waves by next week this time in the US, though the families of the victims will grieve for a lifetime. But next Tuesday I will come out here and report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?

I wrote on February 26,


' A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives. '