Author: Helena

On Thursday, Juan Cole had a really interesting post that highlighted an aspect of the David Kelly affair in the U.K. that I had earlier been too dainty to write about in public.
Namely, what seems to have been the late Dr. Kelly’s long-time affair with Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American, a Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force who was assigned to Kelly as his interpreter when he was the chief bio-weapons inspector for UNSCOM in Iraq.
I’ve been wondering two things:
(1) Are there dots that need to be connected between the David Kelly affair in London and some of the recent words of David Kay in the U.S.?
What Kay was saying was that, in his estimation, one of the reasons the CIA had become so flabby and ineffective–my words, not his– in its gathering of decent, fresh intel on Iraq by the late 1990s was that earlier in the decade it had become easily addicted to all the pickings it got from UNSCOM.
We all know from Scott Ritter’s work and other sources that UNSCOM had been deeply penetrated by the CIA. But was Mai Pederson perhaps part of that operation? Who knows?
(2) It seems that a lot of people in public life and the media world had known about Kelly’s relationship with Pederson, whom I have seen described in print somewhere as “a flirty divorcee”. (That’s a sort of code-word for a “loose woman”, and it is probably a terrible libel against her. But many journos use it to tell you, nudge-nudge, that the two people in question have “that” kind of a relationship…)
So here’s my second question…

Continue reading “Kay and Kelly, connecting the dots?”

I was so intrigued by Juan Cole’s (highly indirect) reference to the possibility
of Grand Ayatollah Sistani having adopted Gandhianism that I immediately
blogged
about it. Then I picked up the phone to speak to someone who, I was
confident, could give me further insight on this important topic. To
my happy surprise, my esteemed friend
Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina
picked up the phone on the first ring.

I was surprised, because Sachedina travels a lot away from our common home-town,
Charlottesville, Virginia. Why, just last month, he made his third
visit to Iraq since the downfall of Saddam. (I felt foolish that
I had not called him earlier to say “al-hamdu lillah ala salaamtak” after
his safe return, and to ask him what he had learned on his trip.)

Sachedina, you see, is someone who knows his way around the world of Mesopotamian
Shi-ism pretty well. Born an “overseas Indian” in Tanzania in 1942,
he returned with his family to India after Tanzanian independence. He got
his first degree in India, then in 1967 he traveled to Mashhad, Iran, where
he spent four years getting a degree in Persian language and literature and
Islamic jurisprudence. While in Iran he made a broad network of friends
and colleagues in religious circles: those friends included people who are
now high up in the Iraqi and Iranian Shi-i institutional hierarchies.

“So Aziz, do you think Ayatollah Sistani has been directly influenced by
Gandhianism at all?”

Sachedina replied carefully. He said that in his contacts with Sistani,
the Ayatollah had mentioned a number of non-traditional sources for his thinking,
including what Sachedina described as “psychological tracts.” “But Gandhi’s
works? No, I don’t think so. He doesn’t believe in religious
pluralism, you have to understand that. He sees himself as speaking
for all Muslims, certainly– Sunni as well as Shi-i. But Gandhi? No,
I don’t think so… If his followers have been using Gandhian-style
tactics, then that would be more tactical than spiritual, I think.”

Sachedina and the Ayatollah go back a long way…

Continue reading “Sachedina on Sistani, etc.”

Two great pieces on Juan Cole today. The first quotes an un-named “European peace worker in Iraq” as having said:

“I

Here’s a question. Various news reports recently have spelled out that Bremer and the Bushies are now prepared to change just about any aspect of the infamous “Rube Goldberg” scheme to hold anti-democratic political “caucuses” in Iraq within the next few months– any aspect, that is, apart from the timing. Administration people across the board all seem quite adamant that the June 30 date for some kind of a political-transition “event” in Iraq is sacrosanct…
But why should everyone else in the world kowtow to that demand?
You should realize, folks, that you’re reading the words of a person who has argued here quite consistently that what the US should do is pull its troops out now, immediately, this instant, if not yesterday… I have no patience at all with people who bring forth some version of a “white man’s burden” argument that the US at least “owes it” to the poor benighted Iraqi people to stick around and do what it can to bring peace and security to their benighted country…

Continue reading “Controlling the timetable”

Robert McNamara, the man who as US Defense Secretary in the 1960s was the architect of the US escalation in Vietnam, has until now been reticent in criticizing George DUH-bya’s war on Iraq. This silence was all the more surprising because of the lengths the 87-year-old McNamara has gone to over the past decade to understand, excoriate, and apologize for the misdeeds he and his colleagues committed in Vietnam.
Now, he has spoken. Doug Saunders, a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, called McNamara recently at his office in Washington DC and asked him to apply the lessons he learned about Vietnam to the present situation in Iraq.
(I found this story thru a comment “Munguza” left on Yankeedoodle’s “Today in Iraq” blog). Here’s how Saunders described McNamara’s response to his question:

“We’re misusing our influence,” he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. “It’s just wrong what we’re doing. It’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong, it’s economically wrong.”

Continue reading “McNamara speaks, finally, on Iraq”