Sistani, Clausewitz, the world

Sorry I haven’t been writing for a while… No, I was not at Davos (*chuckle*)… I was locked in a very intense drafting process in Washngton DC, with a couple of dear Quaker colleagues, for the past couple of days… I hope I can announce the results of that session here, soon…
Meanwhile, Iraq’s people have carried on making history, as I started to write about in my previous post here, written Tuesday.
Since Tuesday, I have tried to keep up-to-date with, at least, the WaPo and the NYT. Oh, I also spent a couple of great hours with Sir Brian Urquhart, the former Under-Secretary-general of the UN, but that’s another story.
So here are what I’ve noted as the seven most significant developments of the past few days:
(1) Sistani and his colleagues have been cleverly continuing to modulate, build, and orchestrate their political movement… Anthony Shadid, writing from Karbala in today’s WaPo, notes that Sistani aide Abdel-Madhi Salami: “urged his followers Friday to refrain from the kind of mass protests witnessed in Iraq’s two largest cities this month until a U.N. team determines whether nationwide elections are feasible.”
Shadid wrote that this suggested that Sistani feared the large-scale protests seen earlier in the week could get out of hand if continued. A more plausible (and not totally contradictory) analysis might be that Sistani and his people want to keep the popular movement disciplined in order to maximize its effectiveness. (Gandhi did the same, remember.)
Also, I’m sure that the Grand Ayatollah realizes that the show of popular force his people put on last Monday has already had a big effect, so it’s a good idea to keep that kind of a big “demonstration” in reserve, for when it’s next needed.
You could call this a civilian-mass-organizing version of the theory of “shock and awe”…. That is, an exemplary show of force that “persuades” the opponent to change his plan drastically in the way you want him to.

(2) Flowing from the Sistani factor, that “lovely chap” (irony alert, there, friends) Ahmad Chalabi, has jumped ship again. He’s been telling audiences at the ultra-neo-con “American Enterprise Institute” that Jerry Bremer’s Rube Goldberg plan for Iraq-wide political “caucuses” would be “a sure-fire way to have instability” because the resulting assembly would lack “legitimacy”.
So now, all of a sudden, the wellknown snake-oil salesman Ahmad Chalabi is in favor of…. you guessed it, elections! Of course his defection to the pro-elections camp is particularly problematic for the neo-cons because he really has been “their man” on all matters Iraqi for a very long time.
As I’ve noted before, the guy’s a consummate opportunist.
(3) Chief “coalition” weapons inspector David Kay has made public his judgment that there were no Iraqi WMD stockpiles to be found.
“I don’t think they existed,” Kay said in this Reuters story by Tabassum Zakariya. “What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last [1991] Gulf War, and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ’90s,” he said.
Asked about Kay’s comments, Colin Powell seemed to backtrack significantly from the certainty he’d expressed on the WMDs issue at his (in)famous Security Council presentation last February. `
“The answer to that question is, we don’t know yet,” AP is reporting Powell as having said, in reply to the question about Kay’s findings.
Those strange beings who live on Planet Cheney, meanwhile, continue to assert the WMDs are there, and will be found…. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for the concept of “Planet Cheney”.)
(4) The armed attacks against military units of the occupation “coalition”, and some of the people who work with them, have continued. No sign of the “successful pacification” that Gen. Sanchez and others were touting earlier in the week.
(5) Dubya himself has started pleading with the UN to get a political presence back into Iraq a.s.a.p. Buried down at the bottom of this story in today’s NYT, is a report that:

Lakhdar Brahimi, who has just returned from two years as the United Nations special envoy to Afghanistan, was invited to Washington on Thursday, where President Bush joined in the campaign to enlist him for Iraq, according to a senior United Nations diplomat.
Mr. Brahimi also met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and her aide on Iraq, Robert Blackwell. Mr. Brahimi told them he was not available and intended to take time off before taking up his new position as Mr. Annan’s special adviser on peace and security, the diplomat said.

How delicious! The very idea of Bush, Condi, etc groveling in front of Lakhdar just totally makes my day.
(Read what I wrote in a Jan. 6th post about Lahkdar, here.)
(6) And over in the UK, Tony Blair has a tough week coming up… The timing of David Kay’s revelations could scarcely have been any worse for Blair, since it is this Wed. that Lord Hutton will finally be releasing the report of his Inquiry into the whole affair of David Kelly’s suicide and the allegations that Blair “sexed up” the data on the Iraqi WMDs…
Kamal Ahmed is reporting in Sunday’s Observer that:

Tony Blair put his political future on the line last night when he admitted for the first time that he considered his job was ‘at risk’ 48 hours ahead of the two-pronged attack of tuition fees and the Hutton report.
Saying that the findings of Lord Hutton on the death of weapons expert David Kelly would be a judgment on his integrity, the Prime Minister added that whatever the political problems he faced, it was better to take tough decisions than to look for an easier political life…

Read the whole report of Ahmed’s interview with Tony the Possibly Phony, here.
I wonder: would serious political problems for Blair over the WMDs issue add some more momentum to the calls in the US for more holding-to-account of the thus far nearly Teflonized Dubya on this question???
(7) I can’t finish this round-up without just noting the woes Ariel Sharon is suffering as a result of the indictments against his son’s “business partner” (!) David Appel… Couldn’t happen to a nicer family than the Sharons, all this trouble, imho.
(In other interesting news from Israel, the swap of one Israeli “businessman” being held by Lebanon’s Hizbollah for 35 prisoners from Arab countries and around 400 Palestinian detainees is reported to be about to happen. One of those reported as about to be released is Abdel-Karim Obeid, a Shi-ite imam who was kidnapped by Israel 15 years ago from his home village in south Lebanon, precisely to be used as a hostage… And nor was he the only one… Then Israelis get all upset about Hizbollah kidnapping people to be used as hostages? Gimme a break! Fifteen years of a man’s life: gone… )
So anyway, now I feel back up to speed with the world.
My verdict is still that the popular movement and its leadership in Shi-ite Iraq are significantly turning the wheels of world history at this point…
One problem for the neo-cons, I have long felt, is that they never really took to heart the deep truths inherent in Clausewitz’s dictum that, “War is an extension of politics by other means.” One clear implication of that dictum is that it is the politics of any given situation that are, at the end of the day, what really counts– and that “war” is only one possible way to affect politics.
So yes, a country can indeed “win” a war on the battlefield, and then lose it royally by mishandling the political situation that follows.
Case study today, class? Iraq.