Just World News with Helena Cobban

This is, of course, the kind of question that few in the US public discourse yet dare to ask… (As for me, I’d put it a little differently. I think that a failure of the Bush administration’s project in Iraq could constitute a net victory for the US citizenry, in terms of starting to re-balance our relations with the rest of the world away from imperial hegemony and back towards basic human equality.)
But anyway, how interesting that Roni Bart, an analyst at Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies should be the one now publishing a short analytical paper titled What if the United States fails in Iraq?
Bart judges that:

the specter of failure is there, significantly enhanced by the repercussions from the Samarra bombing. Even if Shiites and Sunnis avoid an all out civil war this time, there is a reasonable chance recurring provocations will, in the end, succeed in undermining the American project in Iraq. It would therefore do well to prepare for a scenario of failure: an American evacuation before the mission is completed, and before Bush vacates the White House in January 20092. True, given the president’s determination such a scenario is highly improbable. Nevertheless, a “what if” speculation is useful in explicating what is at stake.
An evacuation-in-failure could take place due to a protracted political deadlock in Iraq, ongoing guerilla warfare and terror activities with no end in sight, or deterioration into a full scale civil war (perhaps resulting in an increase in American casualties). Such circumstances might force American decision-makers to realize that the mission cannot be achieved and/or that potential fallout, in terms of foreign policy or domestic politics, is too risky. Arguments along these lines are already being made not only by Democrats but also by various Republican groups…

None of this analysis is ‘rocket science’, folks… Bart writes,

Internationally, American stature will suffer. Osama bin Laden will declare victory… Europeans will claim, yet again but with renewed vigor, that their Venus outshines the American Mars; that the American failure in Iraq proves that use of force exacerbates problems rather than solves them; that even as a last resort force must be agreed upon multilaterally by the Security Council; and that such an international consensus, possible only through American patience, might have made the difference in a successful reconstruction of a stable Iraq. A failure in Iraq will also strengthen the balancing-containing-obstructionist attitude of Russia and China vis-à-vis the United States. American prestige will hit a new low; American ability to deter might be undermined, at the very least in cases with potential for long-term military engagement. The United States will be perceived not just as a “Texan cowboy,” but an ineffective one at that. And the weakening in American resolve will project to the world – states and dictators and terrorists – that the United States not only can do less but also wants to do less.

Regarding the implications of an American failure in Iraq for Israel, he writes:

Given that the United States is Israel’s greatest friend and ally, it is safe to say that as a rule, any American failure is bad for Israel. Any global constellation in which the United States is weakened cannot bode well for Israel, because other (strengthened) international actors will be less favorably inclined toward Israel. That said, were the United States to partially disengage due to impatience with Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism (along the lines of Bush’s impatience with Arafat), Israel’s position will be strengthened.
Beyond the immediate Palestinian issue, any American attempt to forge some kind of regional response to a Shiite potential ascendancy and/or to a Sunni terror center will not include Israel. As the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War proved, Israel is perceived as a coalition breaker. Nevertheless, Israel will have to prepare itself for increased security threats, such as a Sunni terror center (with ties to Hamas?) and/or a Shiite-empowered Hizbollah in Lebanon. There may well be ground for covert cooperation with Jordan and Kurdistan against common threats.
The conventional threat posed to Israel by Iraq was removed in 1991; the nuclear one proved to be non-existing. An American failure in Iraq would transform the once ominous “eastern front” from a relatively minor threat to a new source of terror and instability.

Actually there is almost literally nothing new, let alone earth-shaking, here. Bart’s little piece has all the signs of something rushed off at the last minute, under deadline. But still, I find it interesting and noteworthy that the Jaffee Center folks have decided to start thinking and writing about this.
As I wrote elsewhere recently– never mind about the American pols, but I hope to heck the US military has started producing some sensible plans for a speedy and peaceable total evacuation of Iraq, under a number of different but increasingly possible scenarios…

I see from the handy “Democracy denied in Iraqi” counter here that 118 days have now passed since the much-vaunted Iraqi parliamentary election of December 15.
It has become clearer and clearer to me over recent weeks that the major cause of the political impasse that has brought so much uncertainty and violence to the country since then has been the anti-democratic meddling of the machinators of the US occupation force and some of their close political allies within the Iraqi political system. (See e.g., here, here, and here… )
Today, there is news that the acting Speaker of the Parliament, the very venerable Adnan Pachachi, has said he, “will convene the legislature next week to push the formation of a new government that is stalled over who will be prime minister.” Pachachi added, according to that AP report, that “Shiite politicians told him they hope to have the deadlock over the nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari resolved before the session”.
I certainly wish Pachachi well in his efforts. But we need to understand that the big, multi-party Shiite electoral list, the UIA, has thus far stuck firm with its original decision to nominate the current interim PM, Ibrahim Jaafari, to form the new government. That despite huge efforts by President Bush and others to try to scuttle his nomination
Regular JWN readers will know that I’ve been following intra-UIA political developments here for some time– and in a way markedly different from that pursued by most people in the MSM.
Recently, Reidar Visser wrote to me to add some of his own, impressively detailed analysis to what I’d written earlier. He wrote:

In one of your recent posts as well as the Global Policy Forum piece you focus on the combined strength of the Sadrists, i.e. Fadila + Muqtada supporters. This is a highly relevant point, because there are many ideological similarities between the two. But it is worth keeping in mind in this context that in the struggle over the PM nomination, it is the Muqtada faction plus the two Daawa factions that have kept the most unified position. Some leading Fadila members in fact signalled their support for Abd al-Mahdi, although others may also have “defected” (from those “leaders”) during the vote…
It is now rumoured that the Fadila Party have been quite prominent in the wheeling and dealing over government posts (and that they have even toyed with the idea of presenting their own leader, Nadim al-Jabiri, as a compromise PM candidate). If they are this thirsty for office they may well be particularly susceptible to the sort of arm twisting that no doubt is taking place these days. Thus, the Fadila element is probably not an overwhelming anti-Abd al-Mahdi force at the moment, and might conceivably at one point even follow Qasim Dawud’s example. (On the other hand, I have not yet seen any credible reports of the Muqtada supporters and the two Daawa factions reneging on their support for Jaafari. Also I should think that the spiritual leader of Fadila, Muhammad al-Yaqubi, the favourite of Muqtada’s late father, will dislike an ideological sell-out for the sake of positions of power.)

I really appreciate this clarification. Thanks, friend!

Here is Faiza’s description of last month’s Iraqi-US gathering organized by the Global Peace Initiative of Women– that same meeting that I described here and here.

… And talking of “leaked Zarqawi letters”, here’s an interesting story from Sunday’s edition of my old rag the London Sunday Times, talking about the anger of “Israeli military intelligence officials” that people in the Bush administration have publicized a supposed letter to Zarqawi from Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri that the Israelis had given the Americans back in October, on conditions of strictsecrecy…
The reason the Israeli intel people are upset, according to this piece which is bylined Uzi Mahnaimi, is that they fear that publication of the letter will, “undermin[e] their attempts to infiltrate Al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq”.
Mahnaimi writes:

Israeli intelligence sources said officials who had worked on “Operation Tiramisu” inside Iraq took emergency steps to protect their sources, but it was not clear how successful they had been in averting the damage to their intelligence network.

H’mm, Israeli intel people running around inside Iraq and in very close contact with some vicious Islamist extremists there… Whatever next?

Thomas Ricks had an interesting piece in yesterday’s WaPo, reporting on some leaks he’d gotten from U.S. Army officers about some PSYOPS (disinformation/ black propagnda) operations that they’d done back in 2004 to try to blacken the name of the possibly mythical Al-Qaeda figure, Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi.
Among the things that at least one officer reported having done, according to the first of these two Power Point stills that someone gave to Ricks, was to make a “Selective leak to [the NYT’s] Dexter Filkins” about Zarqawi, back in February ’04.
Ricks writes,

Filkins’s resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

You can actually still read the Filkins article in question from February 2004. It’s datelined Baghdad.
He wrote there that he’d been shown the Arabic letter in question and an English translation made by the US military, and was allowed to copy down large chunks of the English translation. No indication that he could read the Arabic, or that he was allowed to take his own Arabic translator in there with him…
The gist of the “Zarqawi letter” that Filkins described was– in effect– that Zarqawi was planning to foment a sectarian war. (Gosh, that makes Mr. Z. look rather bad, don’t you think?)
And this– for an administration that was struggling hard to persuade people of the connection between their war in Iraq and the broader “war on terrorism”:

The document would also constitute the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Are we scared yet???
Filkins did retain enough of his reportorial indpendence to write that, in addition to the claims made by his US military contacts that the letter was an “authentic” communication from Zarqawi, “other interpretations may be possible, including that it was written by some other insurgent, but one who exaggerated his involvement.”
He notably didn’t mention the possibility that the whole thing may have been a piece of black propaganda (PSYOPS) perpetrated on him and his unsuspecting readers by the US military.
Oh, but he did try to authenticate the letter in one way. His Washington colleague Douglas Jehl evidently contacted, “a senior United States intelligence official in Washington.”
This person, Filkins wrote,

said, “I know of no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way.” He said the letter was seized in a raid on a known Qaeda safe house in Baghdad, and did not pass through Iraqi groups that American intelligence officials have said in the past may have provided unreliable information

Phew, that was a relief– to learn that the letter did not come from “Iraqi groups” who may have been unreliable… Just, as it happens, from some quite reliably mendacious US PSYOPS people…
In Ricks’s piece yesterday, he wrote,

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter “because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized.” No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document’s authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

Well, if he was skeptical at the time about the letter’s authenticity, he sure didn’t share any of that skepticism with his readers. Instead, with all earnestness, he tried to “persuade” us that, because he’d received authentication from “a senior US intelligence in Washington”, then it was probably genuine.
Greg Mitchell over at Editor & Publisher has dug up some more info about the fallout from the Filkins piece. Writing yesterday, he noted:

Continue reading “Window into US ‘psyops’ in Iraq”