Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

So here’s W’s main line of defense now: “Oh, who really cares about Saddam’s WMDs one way or the other, but the main thing is, we did good to get rid of the old SOB, right?”
H’mm. It’s an interesting argument, and one that deserves to be taken seriously. (Though so too, of course, does the whole question of leading the world into this war under totally false pretenses… )
I think I have two responses to the argument.
The first is, yes, it’s good that SH is no longer in power– but we don’t know yet whether the situation, say, two or five years down the pike will be even more rights-abusing than what Iraq was throughout the past Saddamist decade.
We certainly can’t say that Iraq will be any kind of a settled, stable democracy. Or even, whether it will have stayed as one nation. Or whether, after two to five years, it may be sorta-kinda muddling along (with a lot of help from the neighbors in Iran.) Or whether its own internal tensions– unleashed, post-Saddam as Yugoslavia’s were, post-Tito– may plunge the whole country and some of its neighbors into prolonged and really cruel fighting that would be even more damaging to human welfare than Saddamist rule.
We just cannot tell. So let’s not make any kind of a judgment yet that, based on its consequences if not on the validity of the stated casus belli, the war against Saddam was a Good Thing.
(You think things couldn’t possibly get worse for Iraqis than they were under Saddam? I’ll tell you, I lived in Lebanon for six years of the ever-degenerating civil chaos there. Sometimes we’d wake up to news of some new atrocity and say, “Well! At least this thing can’t possibly get any worse than this!” And sure enough, some weeks later, it always would.)
Okay, that’s one line of argument. And by the way the consequences of the ill-planned Rumsfeldian war venture look worse and worse by the day.
The other line of argument takes seriously the proposition that Saddam’s human rights violations were so unspeakable, so atrocious, that Something Had To Be Done. But then the question, were there serious alternatives for dealing with the rights-abuse issue other than the unleashing of this ill-advised war?
And I say Yes! If the members of the Security Council had gotten seriously exercized over the issue of Saddam’s proven record of atrocious rights abuse— as seriously as they did over, say the unproven allegations regarding his development of some of the very same weapons that all the Permanent Five members of the SC already have– then they could have used many of the same kinds of mechanisms to deal with his rights violations as they tried to use regarding his weapons-regime proliferations.
I’m talking monitors. I’m talking intrusive inspections. I’m talking deadlines, and reports, and transparency, and verifiable compliance.
Why not?
OK, you may say, but the UN has never done anything like this regarding human rights before. Well you know what? They never did anything nearly as intrusive as UNMOVIC before, either. But Geore W Bush really, really wanted it, and he succeeded in ramming it through a dubious or even hostile Security Council.
If he had really, really cared about human rights– or if the rest of us had cared enough about it to be able to persuade him to do it– the Security Council could have created a Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission regarding Iraqi human rights practice, as well as or instead of the one for that was looking for those chimerical WMDs.
So here’s a suggestion. Why don’t we take some of the lessons and SOPs from the weapons UNMOVIC and think about trying to apply them to a truly atrocious human-rights situation instead? Like Burma, or North Korea. Non-violent, but firm.

The Christian Science Monitor– a paper that I’ve worked with since 1976 — has a really important piece today, in which it apologises for having last month run a piece based on documents that, it has now determined, are forgeries.
The docs in question were acquired by reporter Philip Smucker from disaffected Iraqi General Salah Abdel-Rasool, in Baghdad in early May. They alleged that the vociferously anti-war British MP George Galloway had received $10 million of Iraqi government funding over the past few years to help bolster a whitwash campaign for Saddam Hussein.
Forged documents? Why does this ring a bell?
The Niger/yellowcake forgeries, perhaps?
From what the CSM investigation revealed, the Rasool forgeries were of a considerably higher order of sophistication than the Niger/yellowcake ones. But this episode raises some really interesting questions. Who is producing all these forgeries, whose aim seems to have been to discredit leading opponents of the US-UK war effort, and to build public support for it in the west?
My first hunch would be the ever-untrustworthy Ahmed Chalabi. But since I would hate to smear someone’s reputation based on false accusations (unlike, of course, the authors of the Rasool forgeries), I think someone should launch a thorough investigation of this whole question.
Has there in fact been a conspiracy or network of conspiracies that has aimed to jerk the west into this war? Surely, we deserve to know.
I believe that both the Rasool forgery and the Niger/yellowcake forgery could provide leads that might clarify this issue. The leads on the Niger/yellowcake forgery are probably a little older at this point; though I don’t see many signs that they’ve been systematically followed up. Those low-grade so-called “documents” came to the Brits from the Italians? Or from the Germans? It all seems terribly vague.
Is anyone following this story up well?
But now, we have the much warmer trail of the Rasool forgeries to follow up.
According to today’s piece in the CSM, Rasool described himself as a closet anti-Saddamist and claimed he’d found them in the home of Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein.
(The latest CSM investigation, which is described in length in today’s article, reveals that though Smucker did not pay Rasool directly for the docs, he did make a separate payment of $800 to the general’s neighbor for doing some translating. In a pauperized place like Baghdad, that’s a LOT of money– and some of it just may have made its way back over the garden fence to Rasool… )
Where did Rasool actually get those docs from??? From the CSM’s description of them, the level of their sophistication/verisimilitude was such that it seems unlikely that Rasool produced them himself on a printing press in his back yard (though I suppose that, being a general, he could probably have stolen some of the relevant letterhead fairly easily.)
Some other fascinating clues, however, indicate the author of those docs was not very familiar with institutional practices inside the vast Saddam-era security bureaucracy… So maybe Rasool didn’t produce them himself, but merely agreed to pass them on to eager reporter Smucker on behalf of someone else. (It seems much of Baghdad was awash with former regime insiders trying to peddle docs to reporters in those days.)
So where did Rasool actually get them?? Can he identify the party who gave them to him??
No indication that CSM follow-up reporter Ilene Prusher tried to pursue those questions… But some good shoe-leather work on this lead may well lead into the heart of a much bigger pro-war campaign based on misinformation (regarding WMDs, in general), lies, and forgeries.

I went to a pre-lunch presentation on Iraq today given by our dear friend Adeed Dawisha. It was really good to see him. When he was last in Charlottesville, back last October, our conversation was a little stilted since he was a big supporter of Prez Bush’s war effort…
Well, our opinions on the advisability of launching that war still differ hugely, but now, there’s no point any more in arguing about it.
Regarding the present and future of Iraq– the country that Adeed grew up in– we can agree on some things and differ on others. So now at least, it’s easier to talk with him!
Adeed’s view of the present situation and future prospects in Iraq is considerably rosier than mine. Though I noted that it is now not nearly as rosy as the kind of scenario he sketched out when he was here back in October.
He and his spouse Karen Dawisha also had an article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, in which they argued that there are some fairly good prospects for the establishment– or re-establishment, as they claim– of democracy in Iraq.
In that article, they argued that two major assets Iraq has that will help build democracy there are (1) a large and well-educated middle class, and (2) a history of pluralism in the pre-Saddam era.
He made part of that same argument today. Well, the part about the middle class.
Personally, I’m a bit wary of that argument. It seems to spring from a generally unexamined classist kind of fallacy that people elsewhere who are “of the same class as us” will therefore end up thinking like us.
One thing I’ve learned from my close study of Lebanese and Palestinian society is that people who are bulwarks of the middle class– educated people, people of generally conservative social and economic views– in those societies don’t necessarily end up thinking like Jeffersonian democrats. In fact, they often end up being bulwarks of Islamist movements.
It was actually Ziad Abu Amr– Abu Mazen’s present emissary to Hamas– who pointed out to me when we were doing research together in Palestine back in the late 1980s that it was his best students from Bir Zeit University who would tend to gravitate toward Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That is, the students who stuck to their books, studied hard and effectively (and didn’t spend time running after girls, etc etc)– and who then went on to become very solid middle-class members of many different professions.
I think the ones who were less studious, more easily distractable, would be the ones who’d end up in the secular nationalist organizations.
And I’ve also noted the same phenomenon in Lebanon.
People in the west tend to have these stereotypical views of people of Islamist political leanings that they are all (1) wild-eyed radicals from the poorest segments of society, and (2) dyed-in-the-wool misogynists. I know for a fact that (1) is not true. And I’m open to entertaining a more nuanced view of things regarding (2)…
So even if, as Adeed claimed this morning, the benevolent occupation forces in Iraq (!) can succeed in getting people there back to work, and then the middle class will find its social and political footing there once again– well, according to Adeed, this would instantly make democracy a much more likely outcome. Myself, I’m not nearly as certain that this is so. (Nor, actually, am I certain about any of the antecedent logical steps in that argument.)
In this amazingly prescient post that I wrote on April 12 (from Tanzania), I wrote:
“People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order. The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so… In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order… In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need… “
Hey, did I call it, or what?
Anyway, one other last note from the morning’s session before I get up to go out to dinner with Karen and Adeed–
This is definitely the “oldster” crowd that gathers there at the Miller Center for Public Affairs for their mid-morning discussions. (Good for the no-night-driving crowd.) At 50 yrs old, I was probably the third youngest person in a room of some 40-50 people. But it’s a crowd that includes a lot of smart, well-informed people.
In the 35-minutes-plus of discussion that followed Adeed’s presentation about Iraq, the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “Ahmad Chalabi” did not come up once.
I think this tends to confirm my suspicion that the WMD issue (as in, who was it who by grossly inflating the size of the WMD threat jerked us into this war, anyway?) may not really develop political legs unless things go visibly very badly for the US occupation force in Iraq.
As for Ahmad Chalabi– boy, has he ever dropped off the map! Justifiably so, I think.
And of the other former heroes of the Iraqi exile– whatever happened to Rend Francke?? She’s the head of the (pro-democracy) Iraq Foundation in DC. When I last heard about her, Caryle Murphy was quoting her in the Washington Post— must have been February, maybe– as saying she planned to be aboard the first of the US tanks that entered Baghdad!!!!
Has anyone heard anything of her since?

CHALABI DOUBLY DISCREDITED: Ahmad Chalabi, the sleazemeister of Jordan’s Petra Bank scandal, has now been completely discredited on two key claims he made when he successfully “sold” himself and his ambitions for Iraq to Bombs-Away Don in the months leading up to the US invasion.
The first of these was that he had extensive networks of supporters inside Iraq who would rise joyfully to greet him and his US military pals as “liberators” when they entered Iraq.
The second was that he could provide to the US and their British allies insider information (presumably, from members of those same “networks”?) extensive and reliable details of many aspects of Saddam Hussein’s very advanced and dangerous WMD programs.
Well, it didn’t take many hours after the launching of the offensive against Iraq for the claim about Chalabi’s “extensive networks of supporters” to become discredited. The invasion proved NOT to be the promised cakewalk. And– as a matter of even greater continuing importance– the claims Chalabi had made about being easily able to negotiate the installation of a pliant, pro-US (and even, pro-Israeli) governing structure inside post-Saddam Iraq, based on those elusive networks of supporters, have also proven quite unfounded.
So the US is now mired inside Iraq for the long haul.
No surprise there, to me. Sadly.
Which brings me to the whole “WMD” issue. (Quite apart from the fact that ‘WMD’ itself is a highly misleading term, that has been deliberately introduced into this whole discourse by those who seek to gloss over the fact that there is a huge difference– in actual effect, as in the structures of international arms-control agreements– between nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and biological and chemical weapons, on the other… In the Middle East, there is only ONE state that has an existing nuclear-weapons capability. It ain’t Iraq, and it ain’t Iran… )
But here’s the thing. Thus far, the total fallaciousness of all the overblown claims that Bombs-Away Don, the Prez, their pals, and even their hired hand Colin Powell made about Iraq’s so-called ‘existing WMD capabilities’ has not become a huge issue within the US body politic.
Nothing like the size of an issue it has already become, for example, for Tony Blair, inside the British body politic.
But as Iraq turns into more and more of a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Bush administration (see Chalabi false claim #1 above), then the questioning inside the US as to “How on earth did our country get into this mess in Iraq?” will evidently become more pointed. (Think Gulf of Tonkin.)
At which point, the character of the so-called “evidence” on Saddam’s WMD programs will inevitably come under greater and greater scrutiny.
Meanwhile, of course, the COST to the US taxpayer of sustaining the large-scale military occupation inside Iraq will become far, far higher than Wolfowitz and Co. had projected– not just because of the size of the occupation force required and the length of its stay (reason for both of which being Chalabi false claim #1), but also because of the reluctance of other powers to join in an occupation venture which was launched on the basis of such inaccurate and deliberately manipulated “evidence” about the alleged WMD programs.
I have seen numerous signs that there’s a lot of anger out there, in the international community, about the increasingly evident deceptiveness of the grounds on which the Bushites first of all launched the war against Iraq, and then tried to strongarm as many weak governments as they could into joining the so-called “coalition”. This feeling of having been deceived has probably only been further stoked by Wolfie’s recent boasts to Vanity Fair about how the ‘WMD issue’ was used (manipulated?) primarily for bureaucratic reasons, rather than because it had any particular merit. It is a feeling that will certainly make other governments think twice or thrice about responding positively to the administration’s pleas that they contribute either troops or treasure to Washington’s continuing tasks regarding the administration of Iraq…
Which will put the onus for staffing and paying for the lengthy occupation of Iraq firmly back where it belongs: on the shoulders of the US.
But heck! That’s you and me, US taxpayers!! This is going to cost us real dough!!!
… So who got us into this situation, then?
The easy thing is to blame Ahmad Chalabi. However, contrary to what you might infer from reading the above, I don’t put the primary responsibility on him. Hey, the guy’s an operator! He was easily able to roll all those thousands of small investors who lost their savings in the Petra Bank– and, for quite a while, the Jordanian bank regulators, too.
So, do we blame him for trying to “roll” the US government when he got a chance? Possibly, yes. To some extent. But much more than Chalabi, I place the blame on the shoulders of those within this administration who were his willing dupes, who placed US foreign policy, billions of dollars of US taxpayer money, and the lives of scores of US soldiers (as well as untold thousands of Iraqis) totally and uncritically in hock to this proven conman.
And they would be?? Well, I’m sure that you, my readers, are smart enough to figure this out.

TWO MORE THINGS ABOUT SHI-ITE ORGANIZING: In yesterday’s post– right below here, I waxed fairly admiring of the political smarts that Hizbullah has shown over the year, in Lebanon, and suggested that much of what Hizbullah has learned through that experience there will inform the actions of their Shi-ite co-religionists inside Iraq.
I want to add two quick points. One, inevitably, has to do with the whole issue of “terrorism”, and the extent to which the discourse of “terrorism” is used and abused in order to vilify and exclude political opponents.
I have, of course, just been in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, even Desmond Tutu, were for many decades routinely described by the apartheid rulers as “terrorists”. And in Mozambique, where the Frelimo government for many long years refused to talk to their Renamo opponents on the grounds that the latter were merely “bandidos” (bandits). Now, they are valued members of the national parliament…
So people do generally know how these discursive strategies of exclusion work. And that they are, at the end of the day, strategies that are always manipulated for political purposes.
Lebanon’s Hizbullah occupies a position on the US State Department’s formal list of “foreign terrorist organizations”. That is due mainly, I believe, to actions that people associated with Hizbullah took against Americans and other westerners in the 1982-85 period– the period before Hizbullah’s actual establishment as a unified organization, and when Lebanon was still reeling from the brutal campaign Israel sustained during the summer of 1982, in the course of which an estimated 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people lost their lives. A majority of them, most likely, noncombatants.
Which is not to excuse any of the brutal acts that local Shi-ite-based grouplets carried out during the years that immediately followed. The murder of AUB President Malcolm Kerr stands out as one particularly horrifying and tragic incident.
But other actions taken by Shi-ite grouplets in those years that were also described as “terrorism” really were not terrorism at all. In particular, the spectacularly bloody attacks against the US Marines barracks and a large French caserne in Beirut, in October 1983 that killed 241 Marines and 57 of their French counterparts, and scores of others wounded was not terrorism by any recognizable definition of the word at all.
It was horrifying for the survivors of the attacks, for the family members of the 300 soldiers killed, and for the amour-propre of the US and French governments of the day. But it was not “terrorism”. Those who lost their lives were active members of the uniformed military who had taken the oath of military office whereby a person is, in essence, given a license to kill if ordered to do so and also to accept the fact he or she may be killed while in the line of duty.
Which perhaps goes to show that the discourse of “terrorism” is less useful and all-encomapssing than some of its practicioners take it to be. But certainly, it helps to indicate that accusations of “terrorism” always need to be given careful examination. In fact, the discourse of “terrorism” turns out to be far less useful, in practice, than the traditional distinctions that international humanitarian law has always sought to make, between what can be done to active-duty “combatants” and what can be done to “noncombatants”, a class that includes wounded soldiers and prisoners-of-war, along with all civilians.
Those distinctions have been spelled out in a score of international treaties and conventions since the late 1800s. The discourse of “terrorism”, by contrast, remains a slippery eel, subject always to political abuse and manipulation…
Which brings me back to Hizbullah. Once it had been established, Hizbullah’s leaders were generally very careful and disciplined in the approach they took to targeting. The vast majority of their military attacks were against Israel’s soldiers doing occupation duty inside Lebanon. This counts as allowable “resistance to occupation” under international law. certainly not “terrorism”– though of course the Israelis always tried to paint it as such.
On some occasions, however, Hizbullah did launch some fairly low-tech, low-yield rockets against civilian population centers in northern Israel. Hizbullah leaders always claimed they did this in response to Israeli attacks against population centers in Lebanon that lay outside the mutually-agreed “zone of operations” in the south of the country.
Of course, once people get into tit-for-tat retaliation mode, it becomes very hard to see “who started it” regarding any such move toward escalation. (That was why the question of getting a reliable and credible monitoring presence in on the ground became very important.) But it’s certainly true that Israeli commanders themselves sometimes admitted that it had been their side that started an escalation. And then, there were hige-scale Israeli escalations like the big punitive raids of 1993 and 1996 that were preceded by nothing like a “justifiable” trigger on the behalf of Hizbullah– and that did not provoke any Hizbullah “retaliation” against Israeli civilians on anything like the scale of the punishment that the IDF inflicted on Lebanese civilians during those raids.
Once again, the discourse of “terrorism” then dominant in western circles proved totally unhelpful in explaining what was going on, or in informing further actions on behalf of Western governments. The discourse of international humanitarian law (Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions) proved considerably more informative and helpful.
… Well, that’s one quick take on a matter that probably needs much more discussion. The other thing I wanted to note re the current emergence of Shi-ite political power in Iraq is the whole issue of women’s rights inside Iraq.
This, to me, is a much stronger reason to feel wary about the rise of organized Shi-ism than the whole badly-abused question of allegations of “terrorism”.
I know woefully little about the role of women, or women’s issues, throughout Hizbullah’s many years of experience in Lebanon. I don’t doubt but what the party has women members and women activists who must, presumably, play some kind of a role in planning and implementing the party’s many grassroots-level social and economic programs. But I sure haven’t seen any women referred to among the party’s leadership.
The party’s strong advocacy of veiling I do not, necessarily, take to mean that it favors total submission of women and their exclusion from public life. I know for a fact that in many Arab societies, many of the women who veil do so precisely so that they can go out into public life, jobs, academia, etc., without having their honorable-ness questioned at every turn…
But one thing I think we all have to take note of in Iraq is the terrible battering that women’s role in society seems to have taken in the aftermath of the US/UK invasion. This is NOT a case, like that in Afghanistan, where the authors of the invasion/occupation could claim that one of their “goals”, or at least one of the effects of their action, had been to strengthen the ability of women to take part in public life.
In Afghanistan that goal has been met only very partially, and very “modestly”. And in most parts of the country, not at all.
In Iraq, we have to recognize openly that systematic misogyny of the type practised in Afghanistan by the Taliban was not a problem at all under Saddam Hussein. Sure, women suffered under his rule. But they did not suffer any worse than the men in their same families. They weren’t denied an education or the means to make a living. Far from it! Iraq under the Baathists gave women a prominent and respected role in many fields of public endeavor.
I mean, how many other countries have women in charge of their biological-weapons programs??
But it was not just “Dr. Germ.” Under Saddam, women were prominently present in all sectors of public life.
And now, in many places, they dare not even leave their homes, or send their daughters to school.
Where is the outrage amongst western feminists about that?
Where is the questioning in the western press about the huge and much-celebrated soccer match (a recent, American-organized ‘showcase’ in Iraq of how good Iraqi-American relations were) , with a turnout of scores of thousands of fans– none of whom appear from the news pictures to be women?
Where is the questioning about the patheticly small number of women involved in all these much-heralded “consultations” the American gauleiters are holding regarding Iraq’s political future. A measly total of SIX women were all there were at the most recent “consultation” in Baghdad– along with TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR men.
Gimme a break! Where’s the outrage??
So anyway, what I wonder about, is what role the Iraqi Shi-ite organizations (as well as all the other emerging political groupings there) are going to play in Iraq in the future regarding the woman question. It could be a good role. For starters, anyone who can increase basic public security can transform the lives of women and girls completely, simply by allowing them to exit their houses and go to schools, job, and markets. But beyond that, there’s no reason we can’t hope that the Shi-ite organizations will also give active support to women taking leadership roles inside and outside their respective political parties…
Well, maybe I’m unrealistic. But I do like to look beyond the whole “veiling” issue that so many other western feminists seemto get so badly hung up on.
Actually, it was in Iraq, back in 1980, that I had my first experience of veil-wearing as possibly being a liberating experience. One of my Iraqi “minders”, a very good-hearted woman called Asea, agreed to take me to Najaf and Karbala. But being a Christian gringa, the only way I could possibly get into the shrines there was by donning the whole black abaya. So that’s how I spent my whole day there– going into the shrines, wandering with Asea around the markets, etc.
I wore the abaya. I spoke pretty good Lebanese Arabic at the time. People we met just assumed I was a visiting Lebanese Shi-ite. They were friendly. But we didn’t stick around any one place long enough for the flaws in my Arabic to become too evident.
I have to say that that point, having spent six years living in Beirut and traveling around the Arab countries as a western woman, that day was the first one in which I had not felt trapped in the gender complications of my public role.
In “liberated” Beirut and the other Arab countries I visited, I always dressed modestly. I learned to keep my eyes on the ground– simple eye-contact from a gringa could frequently be seen as a come-on. I walked the streets the same way I see my daughter walk New York now: fast, purposeful, alert.
But despite practising all those defensive precautions, I would still– just by virtue of my mid-brown hair, or whatever; I really don’t know– have young boys running after me in the street shouting “prostitute!” In some places– Damascus comes to mind, but there were portions of all other Arab cities I worked in where it would also happen– the crowds of young men on the street would seem to compete in trying to do painful jostling right into my chest as I walked by. I could never NOT be aware of the fact that I was a woman walking on an Arab street–
Until I went to Najaf and donned the abaya.
What can I say?
I can say Damascus has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, and maybe the other cities have, too.
I can say that the right to walk on a public street without suffering constant sexual harrassment is one that all people, women and men, should be able to enjoy, and that should be enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights.
I can say that the terrible harrassment that women are reportedly suffering on the public streets of many Iraqi cities these days is simply unconscionable.
I can note that when I was in South Africa, I learned that when South African blacks and whites were negotiating their final transition to democratization, all sides agreed that each party would field a negotiating team of five members– AT LEAST TWO OF WHOM WOULD HAVE TO BE FEMALE. That in the “front bench” of two members of that team, AT LEAST ONE MEMBER WOULD HAVE TO BE FEMALE. And that as the role of chairing those proceedings rotated amongst the parties, EVERY OTHER CHAIR WOULD HAVE TO BE A WOMAN.
That was in “deepest Africa”, back in the 20th century.
But how about “the new Iraq”, today??

SHI-ITE ORGANIZING: Ways, ways back in 1985, I published a book about Lebanon. (It won an award from Choice magazine, actually.) The “new” phenom in Lebanon then– new, I mean, in terms of, gee-whiz, it suddenly gets “discovered” by otherwise uninterested Westerners– was the rising influence of the country’s rapidly modernizing and rapidly organizing Shia community.
I wrote a bit about that along the way. A little monograph called “The Shia Community and the Future of Lebanon” (January 1985). A chapter in a book co-edited by Juan Cole and Nikkie Keddie: “Shi’ism and Social Protest” (Yale, 1986).
More recently, I’ve been going back to look at some of the more recent scholarship being done on the Shi-ites of Lebanon, and in particular on the notable successes won over the years by Hizbullah.
What is clear to me, from my own earlier work, from my close knowledge of developments in Lebanon throughout the past 30 years, and from this more recent work that’s now starting to come out, is that Hizbullah is an incredibly sophisticated, disciplined, and focused organization.
Some Westerners may look askance, or with a strong but unexamined sense of cultural/intellectual superiority, at a political movement run by men in turbans. They do so, I suggest, at the risk of considerably underestimating a religio-political culture that– in the case of Hizbullah, above all– has shown itself to be extremely adept at the core political chore of winning and keeping a strong and multifaceted political base.
And no-one looking at the political dynamics of the Middle East today can fail to see that Hizbullah is renowned throughout the entire region for being the only grouping anywhere that was able to liberate large chunks of Arab land from Israel’s military occupation. Considering that Hizbullah is a non-state actor and has none of the immense advantages that the stature of statehood confers, that’s no mean feat.
Hizbullah is important, currently, I believe, for two main reasons:
(1) because of the power throughout the Muslim world of “the Hizbullah mystique” — that is, the narrative that argues that Hizbullah won (all or nearly all) of its goal of liberating Lebanon from Israeli occupation primarily through the force of arms. One clear contrast that is often posed, in this argumentation, is with hapless old Abu Ammar and Abu Mazen, who have pursued peace negotiations with Israel for so many long years but have gotten nothing but repeated grindings of Israel’s military jackboot in their face for all their pains. And–
(2) because we can fairly confidently expect that much of the same political/organizing smarts that Hizbollah has displayed in Lebanon will be increasingly displayed by the Lebanese Shit’ites’ co-religionists in Iraq.
I’d love to write about both aspects of this topic. Not sure that I have time to, tonight. But here goes.
First, the possibility of Iraqi emulation of Hizbullah. Well yes, it’s evidently going to happen. Has already been underway for quite a time, indeed. While I do not pretend to know all the ins and outs of the relations among the different Iraqi Shi-ite groups, or the details of their relations with different factions in Iran, it’s evident that the Iraqi Shi-ite groups which have had a strong presence in Iran in recent years must have had close links and the opportunity for close consultation with Hizbullah people there.
Plus, the links between all three of these Shi-ite communities go back a long way. Lebanese ulema have received their religious training in Najaf for many centuries, and have socialized and inter-married there with many members of the big Iraqi (and some Iranian) religious lineages. So of course continued cross-border learning has been taking place– on matters of how to liberate a country from foreign military occupation, as well as on interpretations of arcane religious texts.
So what kind of lessons might the Iraqi Shi-ite organizers have been getting from their Lebanese counterparts? One key one, I think, would be the need to adopt a careful, longterm strategy of guerrilla warfare, and to pay attention to the classic guerrilla doctrine that rock-solid socio-political organizing is every bit as important (and sometimes, much more important) than organizing for direct military confrontations.
In Lebanon, in the years after Israel’s large-scale invasion of 1982 (which had been preceded by its smaller-scale invasion of 1978), it was Israel’s continued presence on Lebanese soil and the clumsiness of the interventions it made in Lebanese politics that themselves stimulated the birth and rapid growth of Hizbullah.
Hizbullah won early acclaim for the daring of its front-line fighters and the ingenuity of the tactics they used against the Israeli occupiers. (Israel in Lebanon, like the US in Iraq today, always swore its troops were not there to stay… But the Israelis never showed any signs of voluntarily leaving the country completely to its rightful owners.)
The Israel “Defense” Forces with their state-of-the-art military technology, funded and largely provided by an ever-generous Uncle Sam, always had the ability to “beat” Hizbullah on the battlefield. There was never any question about that. But the darned thing was– the thing that frustrated the heck out of two or three generations of Israeli military leaders– that they could never figure out how to translate a battlefield victory into a lasting political victory. The one big attempt to do so– in 1982, when they occupied about 35% of the whole country right up to and including the capital, Beirut– rapidly proved to have led to an order that was ways too costly, at every level, to sustain.
I’ve written about this before. In 1984, the inflation rate in Israel went up to 373%.
So they re-jiggered their footprint in Lebanon, and tried to keep a smaller force in “just” the south of the country, and to use it to project a “deterrent” threat that would deter the unruly Lebanese from messing with the IDF any further.
Israel’s “deterrent” in Lebanon was meant to work like this: Israel (of course!) would set the ground rules for any encounter. If something happened that Israeli gauleiter Uri Lubrani didn’t like, then the IDF would launch a “punitive” raid to force Hizbullah or other opponents to shape up.
But it didn’t work out like that. Hizbullah was never cowed into submission by those Israeli raids.
So starting in the early 1990s, the Israeli brain-boxes came up with a new idea. Instead of punishing Hizbullah, they would punish the Lebanese population instead, and try to force large parts of the Lebanese body politic to repudiate Hizbullah. (Sort of what they’ve been trying to do in the Palestinian occupied territories for the past 30 months. Also, without much notable success.)
So in 1991, and in 1993, and again in 1996, Israel launched raids of increasing ferocity against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Each time, they unilaterally declared that most of the (majority Shi-ite-peopled) area of South Lebanon was a “free-fire zone”, and that Lebanese civilians stayed there– in their own homes– at their own peril. (And then they accuse others of “terrorizing” civilians??) The idea there was to send waves of Shi-ite refugees flooding northward for their lives; and that once these waves hit Beirut, they would put irresistible pressures on the Lebanese government to repudiate and finally take action against Hizbullah. To step up the pressure, Israel bombed bridges, power-plants, roads… The pressure inflicted on the lives of most Lebanese was terrible indeed.
But the support for Hizbullah didn’t waver. In fact, it got stronger each time. Finally, the 1996 invasion– launched by Shimon Peres and titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath”– resulted in a humiliating debacle for the Israelis, when they were forced to accept significant changes in the rules of engagement inside Lebanon that went in Hizbullah’s favor.
I guess from that time on, the writing was on the wall for the IDF’s strategy of “active, forward-based deterrence” in Lebanon. In 1999, Ehud Barak ran on a platform calling for speedy, unilateral withdrawal. After he won the election, that was one campaign promise that that he managed to keep. (Unlike the one about real and rapid progress in the negotiations with the Palestinians.)
So the interesting question is why did the political part of Israel’s “deterrent” strategy backfire so badly in Lebanon? And the answer to this has to be the political and organizing genius of Hizbullah. Which stands in stark contrast, I might add, to the shoddy and makeshift organizing capabilities of Yasser Arafat and his colleagues, with their tangled lines of command, their total lack of focus and discipline, and their general over-all reluctance to speak honestly and directly to “the people” whenever they can avoid doing so– which they generally do.
In contrast to Arafat’s Fateh, as it has become over the years, Hizbullah’s leaders always tried to keep close to the people. It was always assiduous about offering them the very best levels of social and economic support that it could. For many years–and perhaps until today– Hizbullah organized all the trash collection in Beirut’s southern suburbs; it regularly trucked in drinking water to all the subrubs’ neighborhoods; it provided cheap schoolbooks for hard-pressed parents and students; it sent its young men to refurbish school buildings. In the agricultural areas of the Bekaa, meanwhile, it provided agricultural extension services, marketing expertise, and cheap loans to farmers.
Most of these services were provided irrespective of the religion of the recipient, though their provision was always centered in areas of high Shi-ite population. But at the political level, Hizbullah’s leaders and sheikhs and ulema associated with it were always very careful to reach out across confessional lines and engage in interfaith dialogues with counterparts in other religions. Though everyone knew Hizbullah had good relations with Iran– which helped to fund the many social programs– Hizbullah’s leaders were always at pains to position themselves as a specifically Lebanese party. They played the political game in Lebanon with aplomb, building alliances across all kinds of confessional and political boundaries in order to maximize the number of their winning candidates in parliamentary and local elections.
Israel’s attempts to get the Lebanese body politic to repudiate them failed in the mid-1990s because by then Hizbullah had become an important and generally valued part of the body politic itself. When Israel launched the punishment raid of 1996, even leaders of the Maronite Christians– traditionally Israel’s closest allies inside Lebanon– declared, “we are all Hizbullah now”.
Without the massive attention to grassroots organizing, and the smart but careful political strategy that stemmed from that organizing, Hizbullah could never have attained those results. On a purely military battlefield, it would always have been smashed by Israel. ut lebanon is not just a “battlefield”. It is also a country, with politics, and even more importantly, people.
My current argument with those friends in the Arab and Muslim worlds who seem to have been dangerously swayed by the attraction of the “Hizbullah mystique” is that Hizbullah’s substantial victories never grew mainly out of the barrels of its guns. They came instead overwhelmingly from the strength and intelligence of Hizbullah’s political strategies.
So if the Palestinians, or the Iraqis, or anyone else who wants to free their country from foreign military occupation wants to take a leaf from Hizbullah’s playbook, maybe they should concentrate on Hizbullah’s superb political-organizing skills much more than on its military achievements.
Indeed–and I have argued this a number of times– they could maybe try to replicate what Hizbullah achieved but with even less loss of life, and less pain and suffering, by doing Hizbullah’s style of meticulous and focused political organizing, and its active mass resistance actions– but on the basis of a determined adherence to using nonviolent means??
So far, this seems to be the focus of what the mullahs in “the new Iraq” are doing. So far, I have a lot of respect for them. It is, after all, their country that the US and UK forces are now quite extra-legally parked in…
As far back as April 12, I wrote here that Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld bore a lot of responsibility for the terrible power vacuum and mayhem that was then starting to emerge inside Iraq. And I wrote there that in the center and south of the country, the Shi-ite mullahs looked like the network best prepared to provide the kind of very basic services that in such circumstances everybody needs. (Oh, things like basic personal security. Bombs-Away Don seemed to have forgotten about that completely.)
And of course, Iran is right over the border. Handy for them. A long and very porous border, too.
So of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?

THOUGHTS ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD: The war is not yet finished. Securing the peace has still even to begin. I think we can attribute the tragic mayhem we presently see in Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities to two main factors:
(1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors– and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now– basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and
(2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld’s brilliant “strategy” of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces.
With regard to the second of these factors, there is a clear and evident contrast with, for example, the situation during the advance of the (Western) Allied armies during WW2. My father, James Cobban, was a Major in British Military Intelligence during that war. In June 1944, he crossed into Normandy a few days after D-Day. He and a colleague then undertook a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of the “beach organization” that their unit had been planning, for the British sector of the Normandy beach, throughout the previous months. Their clear thought was that Allied forces continuing to island-hop in the Pacific toward the heart of Japan could benefit from this evaluation.
But then, he and his British colleagues, and the Americans with whom they were then–as now–working so closely, immediately turned their attention forward: to how to rule post-victory Germany. Governance of France and Belgium, where the Allied front-line was advancing slowly eastward throughout the rest of 1944, were, I think, left mainly to their own respective national anti-Nazi organizations to plan for. But clearly, ruling post-Nazi Germany would be a task for the major Allied forces. And luckily– as it turned out– they had time to make some fairly solid plans.
The approach the US and Britain adopted, which was informed by the visionary wisdom of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was basically that of rehabilitating German society on a tolerant, democratic basis. (It stood in stark contrast to the strongly punitive approach the Allies had tried at the end of WW1, which, as many of them understood, had later helped to incubate Hitlerism.) And the Americans committed themselves to providing the long-term investment of men and finances needed to bring that project to fruition.
Thank God they did–in West Germany, and in post-victory Japan.
On Europe’s eastern front, things were far more chaotic. As the Russians advanced westward, racing to get to Berlin before the Americans, they left in their wake vast areas of absolutely untamed chaos. Plus, the Russians themselves had suffered so hugely during earlier stages of the war– with some ten million Russians killed during the Nazis’ earlier advance into Russia– that they were little inclined to “tame” any of the forces of anti-German vengefulness that were loosed in their wake…
It is worth remembering that in the months after the Russian advance, some eight million ethnic Germans were summarily ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe. (That was the number of the ethnic-German refugees who survived that violent upheaval and made it, somehow, to the relative safety of the US-British zone. One can surmise that further hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans– perhaps millions of them– never made it that far but were slaughtered along the way. It was an ugly, vengeful process. Yes, those families had lived a life of some privilege in Eastern Europe during the years of the Nazi occupation there. But no, they did not deserve to be driven out of their homes like cattle and summarily stripped of all their possessions along the way.)
Now, who knows what is going to happen in Iraq? The fact of the present mayhem behind US-UK lines cannot be wished away, however much Bombs-Away Don desires to do so. It will have lasting as well as immediate political consequences.
Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order.
The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. (“Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!”) And the Americans’ non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don’s public attitude of condoning–almost celebrating!–the looters at their work.
In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it’s not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96… So, still some big uncertainties there.
In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.
I saw on CNN Friday that a Shi-ite cleric filmed in Baghdad gave a sermon that seemed to echo very closely some recent statements made by Iranian President Khamanei. To the effect that, while they were glad that Saddam had been toppled, still they knew the US forces had only come in on a pretext of searching for weapons of mass destruction, but that their real motives remained suspect and their plans should be resisted….
So my conclusion is that because the peace in Iraq is still far from being won– or even, yet, pursued– by the dominant US part of the US-UK coalition, the war itself is still far from being over. There will be huge challenges, alignments, and realignments of different locally based powers ahead; and many of these shifts of power may be accompanied by further recourse to violence. ( The Iraqi exile politicans are like a froth that dances on the top of this beer. They may have an impact– but only insasmuch as they have or quickly find a real base among the locally-rooted forces.)
We in the global anti-war movement need, I think, to keep our focus clear. We can quickly rejoice that Saddam is no longer in power. But in a real sense, now, Saddam is not the issue. (I can even unite with Bombs-Away Don on that.) The issue is the wellbeing of and longterm prospects for Iraq’s 24 million people. How on earth can they be saved from falling into chronic, extremely atrocious and destabilizing, Lebanon-like disorder??
It is clear to me that the further use of aggressive violence is not going to bring this about. As we have already seen, the massive violence applied to Iraq by the US-UK forces has already brought forth torrents of follow-on violence from within that deeply-scarred society. Our emphasis has to be on continuing to urge everyone involved to use the many nonviolent means that remain in order to resolve the remaining issues of serious disagreement.
Thank God we still have the UN! For all its flaws, and for all the battering it took at the hands of US arrogance last month, it is still there as an institution that we or any of the parties involved inside Iraq can call on to help to negotiate an exit out of the present, extremely anti-humane state of chaos inside Iraq.
People living, like Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, in tidy, secure western countries where by and large the maintenance of public order is not even an issue really do not, in my humble opinion, understand how central that one, socially-generated “commodity” is to the wellbeing of actual humans.
Can the presence of the US forces inside Iraq contribute to the provision of public order? Certainly, it is their responsibility to do so, under the 4th Geneva Convention. (And the fact that, in their “race” toward Baghdad, they apparently failed to make any effective plans at all to secure public order in the areas behind their lines could possibly even be described as a “grave breach” of Geneva-4; that is, a war crime.)
By the same token, if they cannot provide public order then they should just get out of the country, rather than staying, possibly compounding the problem of insecurity by their presence, and by their continuing presence preventing anyone else from doing the job.
Can we see a democratic, tolerant, and self-governing Iraq emerge from all this? No, this goal still, sadly, sadly, seems far away. I guess we need to continue to hope, pray, and work hard for it to come about.
But the central message remains: Violence still cannot solve problems successfully, in Iraq or anywhere else.

INSIDE SOUTHERN IRAQ: Ghanim Alnajjar is a Kuwaiti professor, long-time human-rights activist, and indeed the UN Secretary-General’s Special representative for Human Rights in Somalia and Somaliland. He is also an old friend of mine with whom I was recently put back in touch by Yvette, author of the ‘Jaded in Africa’ blog (see link to it, at right.)
Ghanim has a particular perspective on Iraq, and on the rights situation there. In the waning days of the 1991 Gulf War, he was one of the thousands of Kuwaitis who were taken captive, as civilian hostages, by the Iraqis. He was one of the lucky ones who made it out alive– and he has always been very active on behalf of those who so far have not managed to do so. (And may never do?)
Earlier today, Thursday, Ghanim penned the following account of his recent humanitarian mission into South Iraq, which gives a great and sobering snapshot of the situation there. He’s given me permission to run it in JWN:
I have just been back from a humanitarian mission from the southern part of Iraq. There are few points which need to raised in this regard. Being not a journalist –with due respect– but someone who knows this area of the world very well, having many individuals or whole families as friends, I had a chance to have in depth conversations with tens of individuals from different backgrounds, some of them I knew before and the majority I did not know. Some of these quick thoughts are as follows:
1)The resistance: There was no resistance as such. If there was serious resistance, the allied forces would have faced serious difficulty. Most of the people just stood back and watched, waiting for the conclusion of the conflict.
2)Why did the army fail: Most of the enlisted army did not think of the war as their fight, some said to me, many of them are extremely patriotic, it was Saddam’s fight. “we are tired of Saddam’s fights”. Those professional soldiers and officers said they simply changed their clothes and deserted.
3)Why they did not rise up: the memory of the 1991 was present in their mind. Even with the apparent collapse of authority of Saddam’s, they just could not trust the US anymore. They needed to see a proof that he left altogether to beleive it. Many people are happy but they did not feel this is the right time for celeberation. They rose up before and were cheated. The US struck a deal with Saddam, and they were the victims after they beleived George Bush sr in 1991. I was joking with three Iraqi doctors in a hospital, telling them some new Kuwaiti jokes about “God may save him” referring to Saddam, they laughed and told me that they have more jokes about him more than I can take. When I asked them to tell me some, they smiled and said, not now, honestly we are not sure. Tens of similar incidents proved the point of fear which played the major role in cooling any potential uprising.
4)Why they did not leave: why there were no refugees, was the reason coercion? No, it was a widespread belief that this war will be over sooner than the world could believe, provided that the allies were serious, not like the 1991 case. This was a mistake in analysis.
5)How about the US?: what is expected towards the US, is it appreciation, suspicion, love , hate,? There is a mixture of suspicion and a-wait-and-see attitude. The general tendency is suspicion more than any other consideration, thanks to the US ill advised behaviour in 1991. There is hope everywhere needing to be warmed up. The current living conditions play some part in causing this attitude.
6)How about the future Iraqi government: It should be noted here that the grave mistake would be to appoint any one of the Iraqi exiles opposition figures for the immediate administration. There will be a negative reaction to such an appointment. I was glad to hear recently that the tendency is going in this direction in the south. I am glad to hear also that a CIA report said something on those lines, finally , the CIA got it right.
There are other points but these are some quick ones which I wanted to share…
The only sad part in this regard are the civilian casualties, which is partially why I hate wars no matter how politically justified it is.

PLANNING FOR THE ‘AFTERMATH’: The military outcome of this war is, at this point in time, completely unpredictable. The currently “best possible” scenario for the US-UK troops could be mean getting into Baghdad within the next 2-3 days; regime collapse there spreads out through the whole country; extension of a measure of US-UK military control over the whole country by the end of April. The “worst possible” scenario would be that sometime between 2004 and 2005 the US decides the still-continuing imbroglio has become so costly that it finally decides to “redeploy offshore” (Reagan’s memorable term for the withdrawal from Lebanon, 1984) and has to plead desperately for the United Nations to facilitate its departure…
Actually, a short-term appearance of that “best case” does not in itself preclude the subsequent realization of the “worst case.” But even in itself, the “best case” scenario as outlined above now looks highly unlikely.
What is clear is that what was envisaged — and actively peddled– by many in the Washington policy community as a sort of hygienic and rapid shift from an “Iraq dominated by Saddam” situation to an “Iraq rebuilt by America” situation has been neither hygienic nor rapid. Instead, the US-UK forces are mired in the mud, fog, and pestilence of combat. Which is the precise fact that the war-peddlers wanted the rest of the world to forget about all along. Hence, what I always called their strong attempt to “elide” the nasty fact that before the “rebuilding by America” phase could begin, there would still, actually, have to be a war.
They made it sound like some wonderful, Iraq-wide urban renewal scheme. Just a few political details to be seen to there– oh, just the collapse of a national government, nothing major– and then the good and the great could get on with their intensely visionary, intensely humanitarian task of building a new Iraq.
Except that three or four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had to be summoned in along the way there.
But no need for me to labor this point any more. I wrote a lot about the “elision of war” move before the war was launched. I guess I do want to make one arcane etymological point, though, while we’re talking about an “aftermath”. This word has no relationship to ordinary math– arithmetic and geometry and such. Instead, the “math” in there is an Old English term for land that has been mowed. (As “filth” is an area that has been fouled, etc.) So to have an “aftermath”, first of all you need to do some “mowing”. And mowing is a totally appropriate term to describe what is being inflicted on the people of Iraq right now…
Example: the Brits are now jumping up and down saying they need to get into Basra because the people there have no clean water. Well, why do they have no clean water? Is it that they’ve never had clean water? No. Is it because the city’s water-pumping plants– whose capacity had previously been reduced by 12 years of UN-US-UK-imposed sanctions on vitals parts– were finally knocked out of business in the first days of this war by a British or American bombardment? Yes: this explanation of what happened is far, far more likely.
And throughout the whole country the same pattern has been observed. Because of President Bush’s inhuman decision to launch this war, major damage has been caused to many pillars of Iraq’s national infrastructure. That is what happens in war. (Which all the eager “urban renewers” in the policy and “humanitarian” communities preferred to forget.)
But then, for the protagonists of this war to say that at this stage they need to continue the fighting in order to “save” the Iraqi people from the consequences of the resulting, and quite predictable, humanitarian disaster– well, this defies all morals and logic.
[The other day, my 17-year-old daughter Lorna Quandt said in amazement: “Mom, has the world always been this crazy?” I said, “Well, love, it’s true that states often treat other states and their citizens very cynically. So I guess at one level it’s always been somewhat like this. But these present claims of ‘humanitarianism’ really are beyond belief.” We agreed that an analogous situation in our neighborhood would be if we set fire to our neighbor’s house, and then as the flames rose higher rushed ostentatiously in to “save” her. And that after that, we would just stay on in her house and say that because we had “saved” her life, now we claimed her house as our own… ]
I actually set out to write about the still-ongoing wrangle inside the Bush administration over who gets to control post-war Iraq. Even though it may seem hard to see just why anyone would want to get stuck with what likes a mammoth tar-baby of a political challenge there. But still, Washington infighting being what it is, everyone there is fighting for a piece of the piece of the “post-” war action. In fact, they’re doing it so hard that few people even look outside Washington and notice that actually, even Tony Blair wants the UN to play a major role in overseeing Iraq’s rebuilding.
The fighting, as so often, has been between the hawkish Pentagon suits and the State Department. Earlier, agreement had been reached that post-war Iraq would be administered by an all-American body headed by a recently retired General, Jay Garner. But who would work under him? (Garner himself comes across as either tight-lipped or very unsure of himself.)
State had earlier rolled out its own plan: to have, under Garner, three very well qualified senior Foreign Service Officers (two females and one African-American) each rule Gertrude Bell-like over a sector of a somewhat federalized Iraq…
But then, the Pentagon countered with a petulant insistence that No! It wanted to have its own favored nominees in control of the whole shebang. One name prominently mentioned was that of Jim Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA in the early Clinton years who is also a Board member of the extremely rightwing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. (Garner also has a lesser link with JINSA: he went on a JINSA-sponsored trip to Israel a few years ago.)
In the NYT today, David Sanger has a piece in which he reports that, “On Capitol Hill, however, even the Republican-controlled appropriations committees of both the House and Senate voted today to take control of reconstruction out of the hands of the Pentagon, and give it to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The committees voted to give the State Department and other agencies authority over the $2.5 billion in post-conflict aid that the Bush administration sought for the Pentagon under an emergency appropriation.”
So the issue has been resolved for now…. Or has it? Who can tell whether the Pentagon suits might not mount a counter-attack? What about Blair and his continued insistence that the UN has to have a role? And anyway, more fundamentally, who can foresee at this point when it might even be safe to start thinking about starting long-term reconstruction in Iraq, rather than just short-term distribution of emergency rations?
One thing does seem clear. Given that all the promises made by the exiled Iraqi pol, the Great Pretender Ahmed Chalabi, to the effect that “his” people inside Iraq would all rise as one to welcome their US-UK “liberators”, have been proven disastrously misbegotten, that is one person who most likely will NOT be given any role in “rebuilding” Iraq.
Meanwhile, the 60-plus percent of the Iraqi population who are Shi-ites seem simply to be biding their time. It increasingly seems to me that the future of nearly all the non-Kurdish part of the country will lie in their hands, and in no-one else’s.
In a future post– to be written, perhaps, as I take my 40-hour, four-leg journey to Arusha, Tanzania in just a few days’ time– I’ll say a few things about the time I visited the Iraq’s two very holy Shi-ite cities, Najaf and Kerbala, back in 1980.

“PRECISION” GUIDED MISSILES? HOW’S THAT? Every time there’s a war, the Pentagon assures that, “our missiles have gotten a LOT smarter since the last time.” And so now, once again, we’re promised that they’re using the smartest missiles ever.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if a missile is so darned “smart” then it should be able to arrive at, say, a military headquarters without harming a nearby market-place?
But how about this: this time round, the Pentagon has guided missiles that are so unbelievably dumb that they not only miss the intended target building– they also miss the intended target country altogether!!
And this has happened not just once but, according to high-level Pentagon briefer Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as quoted in an article in today’s Washington Post, “about seven times.”
I’m not quite sure what “about” seven radical mis-aims means in this context. But that was the number of times, according to McChrystal, that US Tomahawks and other supposedly “smart” missiles have slammed into countries other than Iraq. At least once into each of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Turkey and Saudi Arabia were both so pissed off by the phenomenon that they rapidly forbade the US from even flying their Tomahawks over their national terrains.
This question of much-dumber-than-promised munitions needs to be taken carefully into consideration when we listen to claims from Pentagon spokespeople about the US conducting this war “in a more surgical way than ever before”, or claims that “the military is actually even exposing its own people to significant risks in order to minimize civilian casualties.”
We need to start with a clear understanding of the lethality of some of these munitions. The “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945 had an explosive force equivalent to 10-12 kilotons of TNT. The biggest (and also, reputedly “smart”) bombs that the US military is dropping over Iraq these days have an explosive force of 2 kilotons. So six of them would provide the explosive force of one Hiroshima.
In Hiroshima, of course, many of the subsequent fatalities came from the after-effects of the radiation released by the bomb. But nearly all of the physical damage caused by the bomb– the destruction, by fire, of the entire downtown area, and the incineration of the people living there– came from the sheer force of the blast and the many fires it sparked throughout the city.
In Hiroshima, too, the damage was multiplied by the US Air Force’s fiendish decision to set the detonation of the bomb to occur NOT when it reached the ground, but some 600 meters up in the air. That distributed the effects of the blast much more broadly. In the case of the US’s present arsenal, “air burst” of some bombs including the infamous MOAB has come back into vogue again.
So we are talking about some extremely unpleasant and lethal munitions in the US arsenal. Not the kind of “tool” that you would want to give anyone to use irresponsibly.
What does “responsible” mean in this context, I wonder?
It’s a known “fact” of statistics that if a system has a failure rate of X percent, then you can reasonably predict that if you use the system Y x 100 times, you could expect X x Y of those operations to result in failure. So if you know that the guidance system on your “smart” munition is going to fail X percent of the time, then the more missiles you fire, the greater the number of mis-aims.
Gosh, this is SO elementary.
But then, it’s also a known fact of running any kind of complex system, that the more complex its operations become, the greater the chance of human or other error. So as your “Y” value above becomes greater within the same period of time, it ends up multiplying your failure rate by more than a factor of Y.
You get my drift.
These guys have fired thousands of PGMs into Iraq these past ten days. According to that same W. Post article, McChrystal said that just counting the Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles alone, 675 have already been fired. (I think each one costs around $2 million, by the way. So that’s $1.35 billion of “our” tax money going whoosh, right there.)
And that’s not mention the heavy stuff being dropped by the B-52s, and the JDAMS, and everything else. Very complex operations indeed.
So it was entirely foreseeable that, in these circumstances, a non-trivial number of these very lethal munitions would end up mis-aiming.
In the W. Post article, reporter Jonathan Wesiman wrote:
“McChrystal told reporters there is no indication of a serious technical problem with the sea-launched cruise missiles. More than 675 have been launched since the beginning of the war, he said. The failure rate at this point is about 1 percent, and in most instances, the errant missiles did not explode. The warhead on a Tomahawk is not supposed to activate until it nears its target. One Pentagon official said that with a weapon system as sophisticated as a precision-guided cruise missile, a failure rate of 5 percent would be considered ‘very good.'”
I think these statements from McChrystal and the nameless Pentagon official need unpacking a little. McC accurately did the math to get figure of 1 percent. (That’s the figure for the number of Tomahawks that fell on the wrong country, remember– not just the wrong house, or the wrong city-block.) And we learn that, “in most instances” the mis-aimed missiles did not explode. He notably did not say, “in all instances.” That’s pretty scary.
And then, this un-named guy (okay, I’m just hazarding a wild guess here as to the gender of Wesiman’s Pentagon official) says that for something like the Tomahawk, even a failure rate of “5 percent” would be considered very good.
How’s that again? If you’ve launched 675 missiles as massively lethal as the Tomahawks, and as “few” of them as 5 percent, that is, 33.75 Tomahawks (or let’s say “about” 38 of them) end up going to the wrong place— the wrong country, say, or the wrong city-block, or even just the wrong building– then that is not just “acceptable”, not just “good”, but “very good”??
These people are– I’ve said it before– very dangerous, and criminally insane.
It’s not just that they treat the rest of us like idiots when they assume we can’t do the math on the consequences of very heavy, very complex bombardments with massive munitions. It’s that they don’t seem even to be able to imagine that the kinds of figure for “failure rates” that they talk about so glibly have actual and devastating consequences on the lives of actual human beings.
So let’s bring this madness to an end. Please. Let’s end the bombing right now. And let’s bring our soldiers home before they do any more damage to the world and to their own, already badly damaged psyches.
Addendum: Bob Fisk had a story in today’s Independent, datelined from the Shu’ale portion of Baghdad, in which he reported on the “at least 62” civilians who were killed by an errant missile there Friday. He reported on a key shard of metal he saw there:
The missile was guided by computers and that vital shard of fuselage was computer-coded. It can be easily verified and checked by the Americans ? if they choose to do so. It reads: 30003-704ASB 7492. The letter “B” is scratched and could be an “H”. This is believed to be the serial number. It is followed by a further code which arms manufacturers usually refer to as the weapon’s “Lot” number. It reads: MFR 96214 09.
The piece of metal bearing the codings was retrieved only minutes after the missile exploded on Friday evening, by an old man whose home is only 100 yards from the 6ft crater. Even the Iraqi authorities do not know that it exists. The missile sprayed hunks of metal through the crowds ? mainly women and children ? and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads. Three brothers, the eldest 21 and the youngest 12, for example, were cut down inside the living room of their brick hut on the main road opposite the market. Two doors away, two sisters were killed in an identical manner. “We have never seen anything like these wounds before,” Dr Ahmed, an anaesthetist at the Al-Noor hospital told me later. “These people have been punctured by dozens of bits of metal.”
Can someone who reads this help to track down that “manufacturer”, or any other details about the missile? (I’m thinking “ASB” may be air-to-surface ballistic?)