Epistolary fraud? Almost certainly

Juan Cole’s explanation of why the “Zawahiri Letter” looks like a forgery is very convincing to me. (Al-Qaeda’s leadership itself has also claimed it is such.)
Juan argues that basic elements in the greetings, etc., used in the “Letter” indicate that:

    Most likely it is a black psy-ops operation of the US. But it could also come from Iran, since the mistakes are those a Shiite might make when pretending to be a Sunni. Or it could come from an Iraqi Shiite group attempting to manipulate the United States.

Hey, Juan, don’t forget the Brits! Remember that (1) Blair’s guys have a huge presence down there in the Shiite areas of southern Iraq, and (2) British rightwingers were the author of the infamous 1924 “Zinoviev Letter” which, by apparently associating Ramsey Macdonald’s Labour Party with the machinations of the Soviet Comintern, lost Labour the British General Election of that year.
The role the Zinoviev Letter played in that election has been extensively studied in Britain, including in recent years. Many Labour leaders thought the British intelligence services had been complicit in its production. But that Wikipedia entry states that a 1999 study by the British Foreign Office’s chief historian found that, intelligence responsibility for the letter was “inherently unlikely.”
The Wikipedia entry also noted that:

    Although much of its content otherwise persuasively echoes Comintern vocabulary, the letter contains errors (such as “Executive Committee, Third Communist International” – a nonsensical title) which led many even at the time to denounce it as a hoax.

Well, who knows who the true author is this time round, of what looks very likely to have been a Zinoviev-letter-type hoax– and also one released just before a key nationwide vote.
(Anyway, here’s another important question: Has anyone in the British media found out yet what those two SAS guys were actually doing when they were barrelling around Basra, heavily armed and dressed as Arabs, and they got arrested by the Iraqi police just over three weeks ago?)
On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (that is, Negroponte) put the text of the “Zawahiri Letter” up on its website in both Arabic and English, accesible through a portal on which this statement is made:

    The United States Government has the highest confidence in the letter’s authenticity.

But it is not really the US government that needs to be “convinced” of the letter’s authenticity, is it?

Zbig

Zbigniew Brzezinski , writing in the Int’l Herald Tribune yesterday:

    during the last four years, the Bush team has thus been dangerously undercutting America’s seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle.
    To be sure, since America is extraordinarily powerful and rich, it can afford, yet for a while, even a policy articulated with rhetorical excess and pursued with historical blindness. But in the process America is likely to become isolated in a hostile world, increasingly vulnerable to terrorist acts and less and less able to exercise a constructive global influence.
    Flaying away with a stick at a hornets’ nest while loudly proclaiming “I will stay the course” is an exercise in catastrophic leadership.
    But it need not be so. A real course correction is still possible, and it could start soon with a modest and common-sense initiative by the president to engage the Democratic congressional leadership in a serious effort to shape a bipartisan foreign policy for an increasingly divided and troubled nation.
    In a bipartisan setting, it would be easier not only to scale down the definition of success in Iraq but actually to get out – perhaps even as early as next year. And the sooner the United States leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail.
    With a foreign policy based on bipartisanship and with Iraq behind us, it would also be easier to shape a wider regional policy that constructively focuses on Iran and on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while restoring the legitimacy of America’s global role.

Well, I’m not so happy about the possibility of just some of the domestic Iraqi groups “forcibly prevailing” over the others after a US withdrawal. (But remember the scale and lethality of the attempts to “forcibly prevail” that are being pursued in the country right now…) Otherwise, though, well said. I just wonder how many people in the Democratic Party leadership are listening.

Uganda etc on ‘Transitional Justice Forum’ blog

We have a terrific new contributor over at our Transitional Justice Forum blog. She’s called Joanna Quinn, and she’s written some really interesting things about transitional justice issues in Uganda and a bunch of other countries. (See here and here, for starters.)
At the second of those links, she and I have started having a pretty interesting discussion. Check it out. Indeed, we’d really love it if some of you could take the plunge over there and contribute a few comments or questions to our Comments boards.
Uganda is really, really interesting right now. Last week, the government claimed that the ICC had issued five or so indictments against members of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), which has maintained a really vicious civil war in the north of the country for several years… But no word from the ICC directly on these indictments. Is the government jumping the gun? How will the ICC’s intervention (whatever it turns out to be… so far, they announced only a “judicial investigation” into the situation there) affect the politics of war and peace?
I want to say thanks to those of you who sent in suggestions re the new blog… I haven’t had time to implement them all yet, but fully intend to. Rome not built in a day, etc.
One thing we need more of over there is contributors and commenters who want to argue a fairly robust pro-prosecutions line… So far their voice is very under-represented at TJF, and we definitely want to have them there. Do any of you folks from here want to do that, or do you have friends you might tell about TJF who might want to do it? (Or, tell me about them and I’ll invite them along.)

Sunni dissension, Iraq

According to both Al-Hayat and the BBC, Ayatollah Sistani has now (through his aides) called on Iraqi Shias to vote “Yes” in Saturday’s referendum.
The Hayat article notes in addition that the Sunnis of Iraq are split between those in favor of and those opposed to the constitution draft. It says that the Association of Muslim Scholars (still opposed) has called on the Iraqi Islamic Party (now recently supportive of the latest draft) to reverse its position again. The Hayat piece says that IIP offices in Mosul were attacked, and one of its members was killed…
All, sadly, in line with what I was writing here.

Maggie

Well, happy 80th birthday, Lady Thatcher.
How about this intriguing Thatcherian utterance, described by Tina Brown in today’s WaPo:

    The former chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Lord Palumbo, who lunched with Mrs. T six months ago, told me recently what she said when he asked her if, given the intelligence at the time, she would have made the decision to invade Iraq. “I was a scientist before I was a politician, Peter,” she told him carefully. “And as a scientist I know you need facts, evidence and proof — and then you check, recheck and check again. The fact was that there were no facts, there was no evidence, and there was no proof. As a politician the most serious decision you can take is to commit your armed services to war from which they may not return.”

This, of course, was the same Lady (then Mrs.) T who famously, back in August 1990, urged W’s father “not to go wobbly, George” in terms of his confrontation with Saddam.
That was then, and now is now. I wonder what snippets of conversation the once-Iron Maiden exchanged at the gala birthday party hosted for her in London today, with favored guest Tony Blair?

Quaker retreat coming up

Tomorrow afternoon, I get the huge pleasure of leaving town and joining many friends (Friends) from my Quaker meeting here in a weekend-long retreat over near Richmond. I’m really looking forward to it. I know many of my Jewish friends have spent the time since sundown yesterday fasting and praying as they “take account” of all their actions over the past year, which I gather is the main point of the Yom Kippur observances. I sort of feel in need of some of the same moral and existential stock-taking… Though mind you, the main focus of this retreat is on “community building”, so it might end up a little different. Who knows?
Last week, I got to teach two classes at the Quaker school we have here in Charlottesville– Tandem Friends School. I was working with a group of 15-year-olds, leading them in two 70-minute explorations of some of the key teachings of John Woolman. They are great young people. Many of them were deeply engaged in thinking through the tough challenge of how to make the world a better place using only life-affirming and non-violent means.
We talked a lot about how, back in the 1750s, John Woolman traveled up and down the east coast of (what would later become) the US, talking to the many Quakers living and farming here then who did so on the basis of their reliance on slave labor. He and a small bunch of other Philadelphia-area Quakers had become opposed to the practice of slavery, but their dilemma was how to persuade all the other members of their beloved Religious Society of Friends that participating in the institution of slavery was not– as some Quakers still held– the ethical thing to do in those times, but was indeed an abomination.
Gradually, over the years, Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and other anti-slavery activists won more and more (Quaker) converts to their cause. Quaker shipowners in Newport RI gradually turned away from their previous, often very lucrative, engagement in slave-capturing expeditions across the Atlantic. Quaker farmers in Virginia and the Carolinas gradually found ways to manumit (free) their slaves– which often wasn’t an easy thing to do. And then, finding that there was no way to make a living on this poor soil if you had to actually pay your farm labor, most of them ended up selling up and moving either to the “new” lands of the west, or to cities, to take up various trades. (And yes, Woolman had a lot to say about the colonists’ taking of the lands from the Indians, too.)
Anyway, my fascination with Woolman stems from this. He and his allies did the slow, steady work of persuasion which over time transformed the Quakers into a solidly anti-slavery body, and was the foundation on which in the 19th century they started to build a nationwide anti-slavery movement. I would like to think that today, we American Quakers could do the same with our opposition to war and global domination. (And by and large, we don’t even have to start where Woolman did, by persuading our own co-religionists that those things are an abomination.)
Quakers are generally (and imho, quite rightly) very wary of self-aggrandisement. If we weren’t, I would have suggested my local Quaker meeting (church) or one of our bigger bodies should take out huge ads all over the country saying something like: Quakers! We were right about slavery so listen to us on war!
Nah… I guess that’s not how we do things… Just telling other people that you’re right and they’re wrong is not, after all, a very successful strategy of persuasion. In fact, as I well know, it can really put people’s backs up…. A strategy based on listening and building relationships is still– now, as always– the best way to win real attitudinal change.
Okay, I know I practice it only very imperfectly here on the blog. But I try, I try.
In Woolman’s journal (the full text of which is available online) he shows that he has listened very carefully to the arguments made by the Quaker slaveowners and slavetraders of his day, and he recounts those arguments in impressive detail– and with an impressive lack of judgmentalism– in the journal. Nowadays, reading it, you’d be more inclined to be aghast… “They believed they were actually doing the Africans a favor by bringing them here to ‘Christendom’!?!?!” “They actually used Biblical stories to try to justify slavery!?!?!” “They believed what?!?” And maybe at the time, Woolman was inwardly pretty aghast, too, given his very different view of the ethical quality of slavery. But the way he describes those forms of argument– and then, methodically, lists the responses he’d given to them– is all written in very straightforward prose. (With never an exclamation point in the whole text, as far as I can recall. Come to think of it, had they invented them then?)
So why am I writing all this here? I’m not entirely sure. I am in a Yom Kippur-ish kind of a mood. Also, the burden of just closely following the whole horrible disaster of this war every so often starts to get to me, and I need to take some time out. Re-reading Woolman, as I have done recently, helps to give our present set of struggles some good perspective. Going to the retreat should be another way to do the same thing.
There is this pesky fact that I’ll be there, Quaker-retreating away like nobody’s business, at the very same time the Iraqi referendum is being held. Oh well.. It’s not as if the referendum is going to change a huge number of things in the greater scheme of things. There will still be plenty to write about– in Iraq, in the rest of the world, when the retreat finishes, Sunday.
But before I go, I’ll post an ‘Iraq open thread’ here so y’all can have a good conversation about it in my absence. This post here, however, is not yet that thread.

Referendum prospects & maneuvers

I have a column on Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor today. The title is In Iraq, a rush toward democracy could trigger civil war.
Well, I didn’t write that headline… I would have phrased it a little differently, since what they’re rushing toward doesn’t exactly look like “democracy” to me… More like a series of murky deals concluded behind closed doors.
As so often, though, it was really tough to write something on Monday-Tuesday for a Thursday paper, about a topic that was such a fast-moving target. The major intervening development has been the “breakthrough” that Zal Khalilzad achieved yesterday by winning the support of some (but by no means all) of the country’s Arab Sunni political leaders for yet more last-minute changes in the “constitution” document to be voted on Thursday.
The text of the Constitution now looks like a ragged old patchwork, it’s had so many post-“deadline” changes sewn into it… And of course, we now learn that a major provision in it is a textrual promise there that it can– indeed will– be changed very rapidly after the referendum.
I think the effect of all these last-minute shenanigans may well be to sow confusion among the Sunni voters, who had previously been reported to be lining up pretty solidly behind those who urged them to (a) take part in Saturday’s referendum, and (b) do so by voting “No.”
In addition that position, two others are now being advocated in the Sunni community: To take part and vote “Yes” to the newly fiddled-with version; or to stay away from the polls altogether.
Those urging abstention are the Islamist militants. Those urging a “Yes” vote are apparently the Iraqi Islamic Party– hard to find out quickly who else. Those urging a “No” vote are, according to the NYT article linked to above:

the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents hundreds of Sunni clerics from across the country. At least two other Sunni leaders, Adnan al-Dulaimi of the Conference of the Iraqi People and Kamal Hamdoon, a Sunni member of the constitution drafting committee, said Wednesday that they would also continue to oppose it.

It strikes me that what has been achieved with the latest round of (quite extra-procedural) textual finessing of the document is not (gasp!) a more perfect Constitution for Iraq, and most certainly not a document that will help Iraqis to escape from the cluitches of the present violence and insecurity. What has been achieved is to sow dissension in Sunni Arab ranks, with the effect of weakening that community’s political cohesion– and also, with the possible consequence that the “No-voting bloc” fails to get the required 2/3 majority required to block the document.
(Though how can anyone be assured that we will ever know what the “true” vote in the majority-Sunni provinces ends up as being?)
I end my CSM column warning of the danger of a full-blown civil war that could spread further throughout the region…

    What can the US do to avert such a disaster? Some people say the US should stay in Iraq to prevent the outbreak of a civil war. But this misreads the record of the 30-month period the US has already spent as the occupying power there. During those 30 months, ethnic and sectarian tensions have worsened considerably. There is no reason to expect that another 12 or 30 months of US presence would be any different.
    If the US stays, the intra-Iraqi civil strife is very likely indeed to continue, or even escalate. But if the US announces a speedy departure, and then leaves in good order – who knows? The Iraqis may fall into civil war afterward, or they may not. But at least the US troops will not be caught in the middle, and the US will not be as morally responsible for the strife. Also, if the US troops are clearly on their way out, then no Iraqi community will find it as easy to overreach politically as the Kurds and Shiites have done recently (while protected by the imperfect shield of the US troop presence). And all sincere Iraqis will realize – as South Africans did some dozen years ago – that if they want to save their country they will need to find a way to deal with each other.
    Will that happen? It still might. Who would have thought back in 1990 that black and white South Africans could find a way to work together? And if Iraqis should lack confidence in negotiating their future among themselves and feel they still need a reassuring outside presence – well, there are many candidates for the job more qualified than the US military.
    Despite many good intentions, US policies have thus far brought Iraq to the brink of internal breakdown. This week’s referendum won’t stop that process. Within the next six to eight months, the best thing that could persuade Iraqis to hold their country together is a speedy and total exit of US troops.

The prospects all seem to me fairly depressing. But at least, within the US, the ground-swell of opinion that is ready to criticize Bush on his handling of the war, and to seriously consider a pullout, is finally starting to build.

Syria: ‘suicide’ and uncertainty

Earlier today, Syria’s powerful and well-connected Interior Minister, Brig.Gen. Ghazi Kanaan, was found dead in his office, an apparent suicide. Prior to taking up his present job Kanaan had for 20 years been Syria’s pro-consul in Lebanon. He was one of seven Syrian officials who were questioned recently by the UN-appointed Mehlis Commission, which has been investigating the circumstances of the killing of Lebanon’s Rafiq Hariri last February.
Mehlis is scheduled to submit his report to the Security Council on October 25.
One first very important question is: did Kanaan in fact commit suicide?
It isvery hard to think of someone who has carried out the repressive tasks Kanaan has carried out inside both Lebanon and Syria throughout his life being suddenly struck by an attack of remorse such as might have propelled a suicide. There are of course, “suicides” and “suicides.” A person can be surrounded by armed opponents, handed a gun, and given the option of “ending it quickly.” (An option far kinder than that given by Kanaan to many of his victims.)
Is this a suicide?
If we assume that the decision that Kanaan’s life be taken was not one made only by himself, we need to ask why other powerful figures inside Damascus might want him dead. So far there seem two conjectures worth entertaining:

    1. President Asad wanted Kanaan to be the fall-guy who would carry the rap as the “highest” Syrian official responsible for Hariri’s murder… He may well also have wanted Kanaan to be effectively silenced and put in a place where he could no longer be interrogated by Detlev Mehlis’s investigators. Such a place was found.
    2. (This one was suggested on Josh Landis’s excellent blog from Syria) “Was Ghazi Kanaan setting himself up to be Bashar’s alternative? Could he have been the Alawite “Musharrif” that some American’s and Volker Perthes suggested would take power from the House of Asad and bring Syria back into America’s and the West’s good graces.” Under this scenario, Asad would have found out about the plot and ordered the staged suicide fairly rapidly.

(Perthes, I should note, is a very well-informed expert on Syria, and like Mehlis a German national. He is someone whose judgment I would generally be inclined to trust. On the other hand, I– like Josh Landis– found Perthes’s analysis of Bashar’s present political weakness in that IHT article to be a little overdrawn…)
Josh also refers to this story on the Lebanese newswire Naharnet which tells us that,

    Hours before he died, Kanaan contacted the Beirut Voice of Lebanon radio station and gave it a statement, concluding with the words: “I believe this is the last statement that I could make.” He asked seasoned interviewer ‘Wardeh’ to pass his comments to other broadcast media.

From that story, it ‘appeared’ that Kanaan feared principally that he was about to be set up as the fall-guy for the Mehlis Commission. However, contacting the Voice of Lebanon to give it that statement at that time was an incredibly risky thing to do. What could Kanaan have hoped it would achieve– apart from, perhaps, activate some pre-agreed plan for his exfiltration at a time of dire distress? And if there was perhaps some such plan in which he had at least some degree of faith in, then Landis’s speculation about the possibility that Kanaan was plotting with the Americans might indeed be not far from the mark.
All of Damascus must be on tenterhooks right now. I wonder if there has been a widespread campaign of arrests there? If Kanaan was indeed setting himself up (with help from the Americans and possibly others) to topple the president, then that is what we should expect to see.
If there has not been such a campaign, then the staged suicide of Gen. Kanaan is much more likely to have been an intra-regime affair… Obviously, the killing of a man as politically powerful as Kanaan would leave a good proportion of his many political allies in the country angry (and scared), but that is a different matter.
We should get more clues as to the real story here within the coming days. But of course, given that the regime passes in and out of the cross-hairs of the ardent “regime-changers” in washington, almost anything might happen in Syria over the days ahead.
(I’ll just note quickly here that when I took part in that gathering about Syrian political futures in DC six weeks ago, one of the conclusions in which most of the expert participants concurred was that any political force that might replace President Bashar al-Asad at the present time would almost certainly be considerably more hostile to US policies than Asad has been…)
God save Syria.

Pre-referendum security in Anbar province

Four days to go to the referendum… and according to this story in Az-Zaman — as translated by IWPR– the Independent Electoral Commission has still not been able to open any voting stations in the western Anbar region, the site of military operations over the past two weeks.
The IEC head, Adil al-Lami, has apparently,

    urged Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafari to stop military operations in the western sector of the country so that citizens can participate in Saturday’s constitutional referendum. Lami… said Jafari was cooperative on the matter. Lami announced that the commission has opened 94 voting stations in the Anbar region and Fallujah.

From the total huge number of polling stations that the IEC operated countrywide during the last election, 94 doesn’t actually sound like very many.
Let’s hope that transitional PM Jaafari and the US commanders actually do start a ceasefire immediately to enable some semblance of decent referendum to be held… Though even then, the conditions for a reasoned, well-informed public consultation on this matter still look, let’s say, decidedly sub-optimal.

Many Iraqis apathetic or uninformed on the constitution

I read it here, on Riverbend’s great blog, first. You should read the whole of that wonderful post there… Bottom line: a conversation with her nieghbor, Umm F., to whom River has loaned one of her much-marked-up copies of the constitution…. Only to find that Umm F has split the bundle of papers in two and is using the two bundles to sweep dried berries off her porch…
Riverbend:

    “But what will you vote?” I asked, watching the papers as they became streaked with the crimson, blood-like tooki [berry] stains.
    “You’ll actually vote?” She scoffed. “It will be a joke like the elections… They want this constitution and the Americans want it- do you think it will make a difference if you vote against it?” She had finished clearing the top edge of the wall of the wilting tooki and she dumped it all on our side. She put the now dusty, took- stained sheets of paper back together and smiled as she handed them back, “In any case, let no one tell you it wasn’t a useful constitution- look how clean the wall is now! I’ll vote for it!” And Umm F. and the hedge clippers disappeared.
    It occurred to me then that not everyone was as fascinated with the constitution as I was, or as some of my acquaintances both abroad and inside of the country were. People are so preoccupied trying to stay alive and safe and just get to work and send their children off to school in the morning, that the constitution is a minor thing.

And now, here is a poll from the United Nations, as reported by Duraed Salman of IWPR’s Baghdad bureau:

    a recent nationwide public opinion survey conducted by the United Nations found the majority of respondents – slightly over 60 per cent – knew little or nothing about the constitutional drafting committee. Nearly 77 per cent had not seen a copy of the proposed constitution, and 91 per cent had never participated in constitutional discussions hosted by civic or non-governmental organisations.
    On the streets of Baghdad, posters encouraging citizens to vote were torn down so often in some neighbourhoods that the government decided to stop replacing them. The UN began distributing five million copies of the proposed constitution for public distribution just a little over a week before the referendum. And a government-sponsored media campaign that was supposed to outline in simple language details of the draft has proved ineffective.
    Instead, the media has focused almost entirely on the politics surrounding the referendum on the proposed constitution, [sociology professor Adul-Qadir] Hamdi asserted, and has ignored explaining the document itself.
    “The public only knows about the disagreements among the blocs drafting the constitution,” he said.
    Some residents are so unaware of the upcoming vote that they believe it is for a new Iraqi cabinet. Others are not registering to vote because they say the results are already fixed. And some argued they are too consumed in trying to survive to pay attention to the referendum.
    “What vote are you talking about?” asked Amjad Sa’ad, a 31-year-old security guard. “When our basic daily needs are met and our security is restored, then we will care about such things.”
    Zuhra Abdu-Samad, 53, reacted angrily when asked about the upcoming referendum, indicating that it would not produce anything of value. “It is just like shaking a fruitless palm tree,” she said.

… Yes, or maybe a tooki tree. But then, at least you can use the constitution to help clean up the mess?