Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

Competent Intelligence Urged by Rumsfeld

Ironies of Iraq today:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is afraid that the new Shiite religious government in Iraq will purge ex-Baathists placed in the army and intelligence services by US ally Iyad Allawi, a long-term CIA asset. Rumsfeld said that competent persons should be retained. This is the same Rumsfeld whose own deputy, Douglas Feith, set up a grossly incompetent cell in the Pentagon to cherry-pick intelligence and produce a false image of Iraq as bristling with weapons of mass destruction and in league with al-Qaeda.

Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old firm, has been accused of doing shoddy work on the oil facilities in southern Iraq. After yesterday's admission by Bechtel that its work on energy and water facilities was now falling apart, this report raises the question of whether US reconstruction billions tossed to the private sector have bought anything useful at all for Iraq.

There were a string of violent incidents in Iraq on Monday, including three suicide bombings at a US base near Qaim, which wounded at least 3 US troops. Another suicide bombing at Samarra killed 3 Iraqis and wounded 20.

Some 400 university students in Baquba from the Sadr Movement demonstrated against the US on Monday, chanting "No, no to Jews!" Religious demography doesn't appear to be their strong suit, or they'd have complained about Baptists and Catholics.

An Iraqi newspaper, according to BBC world monitoring, is reporting that the unemployment rate in Maysan province is 48 percent.

Sharon Defies Bush

The AP headline gets it right:

So Sharon branded Bush a Chamberlain and the United States an appeaser because it pressured him to make peace with the Palestinians. You see, he didn't think that his grabbiness had caused enough trouble in the world yet. He wanted to go on grabbing other people's land and he wasn't going to let the mere fact that he had helped drag the United States into a hot war with terrorists give him pause.

I remind you that Sharon bad-mouthed the United States just after September 11. It wasn't any old time. The country was reeling. We were trying to understand what had happened. We were reaching out to Muslims who would be allies, like Pakistan and Egypt and Jordan. They were all telling us that the Muslim rank and file was angry about the Israeli predations in Palestine. Sharon in essence accused the 9/11 families who argued for the need to seek Middle East peace of being Chamberlains and appeasers.

Ariel Sharon must be among the most odious elected prime ministers now serving in the world. Guilty of numerous war crimes, from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon (which killed nearly 20,000), to ultimate responsibility for the massacre of unarmed Palestinian civilians by his Phalangist allies at Sabra and Shatila, to his recent policy of simply murdering persons he suspected of crimes, such as Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, the wheelchair-riding old clerical leader of Hamas. (Yasin may have deserved the death penalty, but there is no reason he could not have been arrested and tried. Just murdering people sets a bad example, aside from being illegal and a capital crime.)

Asking him nicely to abide by the US-backed road map for peace is not enough, obviously. Congress should cut him off without a dime until he stops stabbing the United States of America in the back with his aggressive expansionism.

And he should stop making enemies for the US among one billion Muslims who care about the fate of the Palestinians, just as 19th-century Americans cared about the fate of the Texans at the Alamo.

What the Muslims think is Really Happening in Jerusalem

The far-right Israeli extremists who demonstrated in Jerusalem were not just protesting the plan to remove Israeli colonists from Gaza, as was reported in the Western press.

Rather, they were threatening to invade the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim world understood this threat as an intention to destroy the third-holiest shrine in the Islamic world.

For historical background on the Temple Mount or al-Haram al-Sharif, see this excellent piece by Oleg Grabar.

(Grabar notes the traditional association of the Haram complex with the "city of David," but it is worth noting that the Assyrian and other ancient scribes, who wrote down everything that happened in the Middle East in the 900s BC, even mentioning obscure little rulers, never heard of David or his kingdom, and for all we know he was actually a bedouin chieftain later mythologized into a king with a city).

What we do know is that Jerusalem was under Muslim rule for nearly 14 centuries, longer than it was under the rule of anyone else, and Muslims consider the mosque on the Haram Sharif to be the third holiest site in the world.

It was to protect the shrine that Palestinians rallied on Sunday.

They were not alone. The entire Muslim world was alarmed by word of the threats, including:
King Abdullah II of Jordan, whom Israel formally recognized as guardian of the shrine in 1994. He warned of a destabilization that would completely destroy the peace process, if the shrine were harmed.

Yemen warned of a destruction of the peace process if the shrine came under attack. Especially vocal was the fundamentalist Muslim Islah or Reform Party.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt exploited the Israeli extremists' actions to rally their supporters against President Mubarak.

The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (whose families had been expelled from their homeland and displaced to squalid camps in someone else's country by the Israelis in 1948-49).

Saudi Arabia.

Iran issued the same warning.

So an issue that stirred Muslim fundamentalists to fury and might be a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda was surely intensively covered by the Western press, right?

Wrong.

The Washington Post said that the Palestinians were protesting plans by the Jewish fundamentalists to "rally at the site." That wasn't what they were afraid of at all. They were afraid that the extremists were bringing dynamite to blow up the mosque (a widespread rumor).

The New York Times likewise did not report that the Muslims understood the extremist group, Revava, to have sinister designs on the shrine. The NYT even put scare quotes around the word "defend" when it reported that young Muslim men were going to the Aqsa Mosque over the weekend, saying they wanted to defend it. I don't understand the scare quotes. Why not just report that they said they wanted to defend the shrine?

The Los Angeles Times reported that some Palestinians pledged violence against the Revava members if they came into the Aqsa Mosque. But the paper never explained why the Palestinians might have been that exercised. They thought Revava was coming in with sticks of dynamite.

Now, maybe Revava never threatened to destroy the mosque. I don't know. They don't appear to be humane, level-headed people, so maybe they did make the threat. But it is a gross dereliction of duty for the US press to neglect to even report that this threat is what had alarmed the Muslims around the world.

How can we possibly fight al-Qaeda and understand the Muslim world if our press does not even report what Muslims think is at issue in incidents like this? And note that no Western press article appears even to have rounded up the reaction in the Muslim world. They are invisible to our public, even when they are outraged.

Life Imprisonment for Saddam?


Are the guerrillas fighting in Iraq demanding that Saddam not be executed as one of their conditions for coming in from the cold? Adrian Blomfield reports from Baghdad that leaders of the Fidayi Saddam and Jaish Muhammad (Sunnis, including some former military officers who adopted political Islam) have been in back-channel communications with the new Iraqi government about the grounds on which they might give up their fight. One stipulation is that Saddam not be executed.

This demand would anyway be easy for Jalal Talabani to grant, since he is a long-time opponent of the death penalty (a lot of Iraqis feel that the country has seen enough executions, anyway).

But my sense of the religious Shiites and most Kurds is that they want to see a hanging.

Personally, I am still afraid that a media trial of Saddam will provoke a lot of communal violence as the crimes of the regime are rehearsed. Although most Sunnis are not implicated in those crimes, they were disproportionately committed by Sunni Arabs, and it is not clear we really want to draw the attention of the people of Kirkuk to them at this juncture.

Meanwhile, the new vice president, Ghazi al-Yawir (a Sunni), held consultations Sunday with Hareth al-Dhari, the leader of the fundamentalist Association of Muslim Scholars. Al-Dhari continued to refuse to have anything to do with the new government, according to al-Zaman.

US Millions in Iraq Wasted

I saw Lewis Black, the comedian, in Detroit last month. Lewis does angry humor. But at one point he went on a rant about how you just had to look around Detroit to see how the Congress was allowing our cities to deteriorate, and he flew into a genuine rage. A little sheepish, he admitted, "That was a private moment, and I'm sorry you had to see it. Note to self: just getting mad without a joke is not cool."

It is such a shame that there is virtually nothing going on on the streets downtown Detroit in the evening. Even the Borders closes at 7 pm. A single block in Greektown and the casinos are the only exceptions, as far as downtown shops go. An entertainment venue like Cobo Hall is designed so that the suburbanites can actually exit into its parking lot from the freeway, and never have to deal with the city at all. Because Detroit fell below a million in population with the last census, it even lost a good deal of Federal aid.

The true cost of the Iraq misadventure is consistently underestimated by the Bush administration, which does not even include the extra funds in the budget deficit! They even sneak the wounded soldiers back into this country so that the public does not get an accurate sense of the war's human costs for Americans.

So in light of the complete uninterest of the US government in the quality of life in much of the United States, an item like the below is especially maddening.

T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times reports that:

"Iraqi officials have crippled scores of water, sewage and electrical plants refurbished with U.S. funds by failing to maintain and operate them properly, wasting millions of American taxpayer dollars, according to interviews and documents.

Hardest hit has been the effort to rebuild Iraq's water and sewage systems, a multibillion-dollar task considered to be among the most crucial components of the effort to improve daily life for Iraqis. Of more than 40 such plants run by the Iraqis, not one is being operated properly, according to the Bechtel Group, the contractor at work on the project.

The power grid faces similar problems.

Miller quotes Bechtel and others as saying that Iraqis lack training and are lazy, explaining why the refurbished plants are not being kept up.

But there is another possible explanation. The American contractors that did the work, did it in the American way. The Iraqi engineers and technicians had their own techniques and equipment and spare parts. After the Gulf War in 1991, they were able to get the electricity grid back up, using indigenous methods, in less than a year.

It was widely alleged that the Americans spent far too much on the work done, and that local Iraqi firms could have done it better, cheaper and more quickly. And the problem of putting in a lot of unfamiliar American equipment may well be that Iraqi technicians don't know how to work it or keep it up without special training.

Miller doesn't appear to have spoken to any of the Iraqi engineers at the plants, who might have been able to say something about all this. The Iraqi bureaucrats to whom he spoke complained that they did not have the money it took to keep up the facilities. (Since sabotage of oil pipelines has been very successful, this excuse may well be true).

Someone with knowledge of the matter also suggested to me that some problems may derive from just jerry-rigging a patchwork of old, dilapidated French, German and Russian equipment, hastily and somewhate haphazardly, and that this method, too, might be producing the subsequent failures.

Imagine what a few billion dollars from US AID could do for downtown Detroit. Bush is wasting it instead on plants in Iraq that probably can't even be kept up afterwards.

Note to self: Just getting angry without a joke is not cool.

Allawi resigns, Joins New Government

Iyad Allawi has consented to join the new Iraqi government. He is demanding 4 of 31 cabinet posts for his Iraqiya Party, which only has 40 seats in the 275-member parliament, including at least one important cabinet post.

Allawi has now submitted his resignation as prime minister and is dissolving his government, in accordance with the interim constitution, according to al-Zaman.

BBC world monitoring for April 10 reported:
"Al-Dustur publishes on the front page a 50-word report quoting Sa'd Jawad, official spokesman of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, as announcing that it is expected that the National Assembly will discuss today, 10 April, a number of issues related to "violations" committed by Iyad Allawi's former government."

NPR, April 7, reported on corruption scandals in the Allawi government as well:

Mr. RADHI AL-RADHI (Commission on Public Integrity): (Through Translator) The Allawi government used secrecy in all its financial proceedings, and this is against the transparency principle which was adopted in the new Iraq. In the coming days, Iraq will witness many prosecutions concerning the corruption that happened in the ministries.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Radhi says that almost no ministry in Iraq has clean hands, but the most egregious examples of corruption have come from the ministries of housing, electricity and health.
Makes you wonder if Allawi decided to join the government because if he remained in the opposition he was open to being investigated by his religious Shiite enemies, who were already threatening to proceed in that way.

Allawi was the candidate backed by the CIA and US ambassador John Negroponte. Despite his enormous advantages of incumbency, and his blanket presence on Iraqi television and radio in the run-up to the election, his Iraqiya list got only 14 percent of seats in parliament and did even worse in provincial elections. His only signfificant support appears to have been the secular-leaning middle classes of Baghdad and Basra, who were easily outvoted by the religious Right among the Shiites. Allawi shot himself in the foot by becoming too associated with the Americans, who are no longer popular in Arab Iraq, and by enthusiastically endorsing the destruction of Fallujah late last fall.

Allawi's crushing defeat in the open elections engineered by Grand Ayatollah ended President George W. Bush's forward policy in the Middle East. The religious Shiite parties would never put up with a US attack on Iran, and they are likely to find ways of supporting Amal and Hizbullah in Lebanon over time. Nor is it likely that they will moderate Hizbullah.

Initially Allawi had decided to remain in the opposition, which would have been just fine with the religious Shiites who won the election. But the Kurds and the Americans wanted to see a government of national unity where Allawi and the secular, largely ex-Baathist Shiites retained at least a little influence inside the new state.

Al-Zaman reports that the cabinet posts set aside for Sunnis have been reduced from 6 to 4 (to accommodate Allawi's list?) This is not good news for national reconciliation.

The change came in part because the religious Shiites and Kurds have decided that the distribution of cabinet posts will be in accordance with the percentage of seats each major bloc gained in parliament. Thus, 27% will go to the Kurds, 53% to the religious Shiites, etc. Allawi's list would get about 4 or 14%, and the Sunni Arabs if they also got four would actually be much over-represented (they won't see it that way).

In addition to the prime minister, there will now be two vice premiers, according to the same newspaper. One will be Ahmad Chalabi, as vice premier for security affairs. The other will be a Kurd, Barham Saleh. The interim constitution had not specified any office such as vice premier.

Jalal Talabani was on Wolf Blitzer on Sunday on CNN. He seemed constantly confused. He referred to the new prime minister as "Ibrahim Allawi" (He meant Ibrahim Jaafari, whose name he forgot when he was nominating him as PM last week!) And he clearly confused Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with Muqtada al-Sadr for a while. Blitzer pressed him on Muqtada and Talabani at length said he was also a criminal like Zarqawi. Since Muqtada has something close to 30 supporters in parliament, and since Talabani may at some point need their votes, this equation of Muqtada with Zarqawi might have been unwise. I couldn't even tell if that is what Talabani really meant to say.

Of Bents and Teaching

Daniel Drezner maintains that there are virtually no political science courses that deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict in the United States that have a "Zionist bent."

Well, I disagree, and I have lots of evidence for disagreeing.

But anyway, Drezner has misunderstood my point. I don't give a rat's ass whether those courses have a Zionist bent or not. I am saying that "bent" is not a relevant category of analysis when evaluating university teaching. Everybody has some bent. The question is, whether students come out of the class having learned to reason about a set of problems or not. The content is not as important, since they'll forget a lot of the content anyway, and will receive it selectively, both during and after the class. But if you teach them to take things apart and see how they work, to think about social and political causation, to see how things work together, in a particular field, then they can produce their own knowledge and understanding about it thereafter. They can also question their own and the professor's premises because they will have learned about hidden premises and how to bring them out in the open and interrogate them.

All this is as true of left/right issues, as well.

Up to 300,000 Demonstrate in Baghdad

Edmund Sanders reports that the crowds in downtown Baghdad protesting the US troop presence in the country may have been as large as 300,000. If it were even half that, these would be the largest popular demonstrations in Iraq since 1958! To any extent that they show popular sentiment shifting in Shiite areas to Muqtada al-Sadr's position on the American presence, they would indicate that he is winning politically even though the US defeated his militia militarily.

Big demonstrations were also held in Ramadi and in Najaf.

In Baghad, Shaikh Mu'ayyad al-Khazraji, a Sadr aide, said that the demonstrations would continue, to pressure the parliament to demand a US withdrawal.

Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada urged his followers not to bear arms and were not to reply with gunfire if they were shot at by the Americans, saying that God would be responsible for defeating the Occupiers." The demonstrators demanded a swift trial of Saddam Hussein, a timetable for US withdrawal, the release of Iraqis detained by the US, and an end to the marginalization of the opposition. The demonstrators carried effigies of Saddam Hussein, President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, each labeled "International Terrorist." Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that the crowds also demanded an end to torture in Iraqi prisons.

Off to the side a small crowd of Iraqi Christians joined in the demonstration, with placards saying, "We support the call of Sayyid Muqtada for national unity."

In a sermon read for him, Muqtada accused the United States of double standards-- allowing Israel to have the bomb but bothering Muslim powers who have a nuclear program.

The demonstration's magnitude appears to have convinced prime minister designate, Ibrahim Jaafari of the Dawa Party, to begin speaking once again of a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

The United Arab Front in Kirkuk demanded the creation of a militia to protect the Arabs of that city from the Kurdish "security militias" [i.e. the Kurdish-dominated police force in the city]. Shaikh Wasfi al-Asi, the leader of the Front, said that Iraq is an Arab country and an inseparable part of the Arab world, and that it is inappropriate for Jalal Talabani to be president, because he is a Kurd and is trying to evict Arabs from Kirkuk. (Al-Asi is a good representative of the peculiar Iraqi Baath racism that ran wild in the Saddam era).

Telling Tidbits from Iraqi newspapers via BBC World Monitoring for April 5:


"Al-Mu'tamar publishes on the front page a 120-word report citing a source as saying that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani expressed reservations about giving ministerial posts to the members of the United Iraqi Alliance because they will be distracted from the most important task - drafting the constitution." . . .

Al-Adalah carries on page 1 a 300-word report citing National Assembly member Ali al-Dabbagh as saying that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called on the assembly members to grant the Sunni Arabs "complete freedom" in nominating their candidate for the vice-presidential post . . .

Al-Da'wah carries on the front page a 100-word report citing Ahmad al-Safi, Al-Sistani's representative and National Assembly member, as calling for taking into consideration the minorities' rights in drafting the constitution . . .

Al-Da'wah publishes on page 2 a 75-word report citing National Assembly member Maytham Hanzal in Dhi Qar as resigning from the National Assembly and that he wants to dedicate his time to teaching . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on the front page a 220-word report citing Khalid al-Marsumi, member of the Iraqi Communist Party's Central Committee, describing the attack on his party's headquarters in Al-Sadr City in Baghdad on 3 April as "ideological terrorism".

Al-Zaman publishes on the front page a 200-word report citing Sunni Waqf Chairman Dr Adnan Muhammad Salman al-Dulaymi urging the Iraqi government and US forces to release the more than 80 mosque imams, who have been detained since 9 April 2003 . . .

Al-Furat publishes on the front page a 120-word "exclusive" report citing a Saudi national, a former detainee at Abu Ghurayb Prison, describing the killing of a baby in front of his mother in the prison . . .

Al-Ufuq runs on page 4 a 200-word report citing Dr Hasan al-Janabi, the former adviser in the Water Resources Ministry, as saying that there is a shortage of drinking water, especially in the southern governorates.

Al-Ufuq publishes on page 5 a 100-word report stating that the cabinet has issued a resolution that bans dealing with 74 international pharmaceutical companies because they did not fulfil their commitments towards Iraq . . .

Al-Dustur publishes on page 6 a 1,000-word report describing life in Al-Batawiyyin District in central Baghdad. The report says that it is the main centre for criminal gangs, drug trafficking, prostitution, the trafficking of human organs, and other organized crimes . . .

Al-Da'wah runs on page 2 a 100-word report citing Karbala Municipality Director Abd Un as saying that the delay in municipality services in Karbala is due to the absence of the allocations for carrying out a campaign for removing the trash in the governorate . . .

Al-Bayan publishes on page 2 a 100-word report citing Municipality and Public Works Minister Nisrin Mustafa Barwari as saying that the ministry has reinstated 2,800 persons, who were dismissed for political reasons during the former regime . . ."

Friedman's Slander of Middle East Studies and How it is Wrong and Ignorant

On April 7, 2005, in his New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman wrote:

' Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West.

In the West, it was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies -- to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk of being labeled an "Orientalist" or an "essentialist." '
I don't know Tom Friedman well. I once had dinner with him and Lee Bollinger, just after September 11, at the university president's house here at the University of Michigan, so I can say I've met him. I remember some of our conversation at that time. I argued, at a time when it seemed clear that the US would go to war with Afghanistan, that simply bombing the Taliban and al-Qaeda would not be enough. I said that the US had a responsibility to do nation-building in Afghanistan. Not only did we owe the country for helping devastate it by using it in as a proxy in our war with the Soviets, but if we did not help it out, it might well fall back into chaos and generate forces that might hit us again. Tom absolutely disagreed and, on free market grounds, argued that no attempt at government state building should ever be undertaken. I explained why I thought it was not only desirable but inevitable. He said, "Well, someone would have to show me how it could be done." I am glad to say that I clearly won this argument after the fact, and Tom seemed rather more enthusiastic about US nation-building a year later, when considering Iraq. Indeed, he now seems to want the US government to engage in vast social-engineering projects throughout the Middle East. Tom, I was just talking about Afghanistan. Even if I convinced you, I didn't mean you to go quite this far.

In the friendliest of ways, I would now like to address the two paragraphs above, in which Tom rather surprisingly lashed out at the field to which he himself belongs. (He has a master's degree in Middle East studies from St. Anthony's at Oxford University, and surely that training-- with some of the same people who trained or influenced the rest of us in the field-- is part of the secret of Tom's success as a journalist of the area).

He begins by wondering why the winds of democracy have not blown in "the Arab world" except recently "in Iraq and among Palestinians" (sic) (why not "and in Palestine"?). He says it is an important question that has been avoided by the academic Middle East studies field in the West, because that field was "infected" with a "political correctness" that made it impossible to speak of the problem of authoritarianism in the Middle East without risking being branded an "essentialist."

Now, there are at least four things wrong with these assertions.

First, it is not true that the recent elections in Palestine and Iraq were so unique. Lebanon had regular elections from 1943 until the civil war of the mid-1970s, which resumed in the 1990s. The Palestinians had what were widely regarded as relatively free and fair elections in 1996. And, important steps toward democratization were begun in Jordan in 1989, in Yemen after unification, in Morocco in 2002, and in Bahrain in 2002. Tom himself praised some of these developments at the time. These parliamentary elections were all flawed in important ways, and marred by continued aspects of authoritarianism, but they can't be dismissed as insignificant. And, the elections in Palestine and Iraq, both held under conditions of foreign military occupation with substantial portions of the electorate engaged in a boycott and poor security conditions, were also deeply flawed. (In Iraq, where the very names of the candidates were largely kept secret for fear they would be assassinated, the election was anonymous and therefore in some real sense not a democratic election at all, but a sort of national referendum on a set of party lists.)

So Tom's premises here are, well, downright weird, and contradict other things he has said in the past.

Then there is the inconvenient fact that political scientists such as Michael Hudson and others have in fact attempted to understand why the Arab world was an exception to the "third wave" of democratization. There is a fair literature on the subject by political scientists, of which Friedman seems, to my astonishment, completely unaware. Tom might enjoy reading Michael Hudson's "Obstacles to democratization in the Middle East," Contention, vol. 5, no. ii, pp. 81-105, 1995, which took up the subject he says has been absent, and did it ten years ago! Then there is Tim Niblock, "Democratization: a theoretical and practical debate," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 25, no. ii, pp. 221-233, 1998. Or how about Fred Lawson's "Syria resists the end of history," Middle East and North Africa: governance, democratization, human rights. Ed. P.J.Magnarella. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, pp. 67-82. Then there is Raymond Hinnebusch, "Liberalization without democratization in "post-populist" authoritarian states: evidence from Syria and Egypt," in Citizenship and the state in the Middle East: approaches and applications. Ed. N.A.Butenschon, Uri Davis, & M.Hassassian. Syracuse (USA): Syracuse University Press, 2000, pp. 123-145. Try Curtis Ryan and Jillian Schwedler's "Return to democratization or new hybrid regime? The 2003 elections in Jordan," Middle East Policy, vol. 11, no. ii, pp. 138-151, 2004. This is just a small sample of an enormous scholarly literature. Is it really true that Tom has departed so far from his earlier training that he can't even look articles up in Index Islamicus online, much less bother to read them?

Third, the way you would get accused of essentialism is to engage in it. This fancy word just means that you say things that depend on there being eternal essences of things. So, for instance, if you said, "Palestinians are now and always have been a violent, fanatical, and duplicitous race." -- that would be essentialism (also racism). You would be assuming that Palestinians have a shared and unvarying essence. If you said, "Arabs are incapable of democracy because their political instincts are always authoritarian"-- that would be essentialism. If you said that most Arab governments are authoritarian, and tried to explain why that was with reference to changing political, social or economic factors, then that would not be essentialist. It would be social science.

The fourth problem is that what Friedman has alleged about lack of critiques of authoritarianism in the region is completely untrue. I am going to be charitable and attribute his lapse of judgment to ignorance, or to listening to the wrong people and not reading enough in the field.

But I just did a few keyword searches in Lexis Nexis and on google, putting in the names of a few random major American scholars of Middle East studies. I tried to go back in time a bit, before the most recent controversies stemming from 9/11, so as to show that critiques have been being offered all along. I'll let readers judge if "political correctness" deterred the persons below, who are central to the field, from critiquing authoritarian governance in the Middle East. Most academics mainly write journal articles and books, rather than op-eds, and relatively few get quoted in the press. So if I could keyword search the books written by Middle East studies scholars, I could give many more examples. But even what is below is enough to show that Tom is dead wrong.

Michael Hudson, Political Science, Georgetown University, and a past president of the Middle East Studies Association, quoted in The Toronto Star May 12, 1994, "Killing an Arabic dream The civil war in Yemen is destroying the region's experiment in democracy and unity"

"Basically what you have in Yemen that's causing it to fall apart are two regimes that never really were able to shake off their exclusivist, dictatorial mentality even though unity was, and still is, something that on the popular level Yemenis wanted and still want," Michael Hudson, professor of international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, told The Star.

Along with thousands of other foreigners, including Canadian oil company workers, Hudson was evacuated from San'a just a few days ago."
Rashid Khalidi (a past president of the Middle East Studies Association and professor of history at Columbia University) et al., The New York Times, January 20, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final


Human Rights Activist Disappears in Cairo

To the Editor:

Last Dec. 10, Mansour Kikhia, former Libyan Foreign Minister and twice Libya's United Nations representative, disappeared while in Cairo for the annual meeting of the Arab Organization of Human Rights, of which he was a founder and director. The evidence suggests he was abducted and is alive but detained in Libya.

Since he left his United Nations post in 1980, Mr. Kikhia, a distinguished jurist and human rights activist, has been a prominent member of the Libyan opposition. In 1984 he joined other well-known Arab opponents of despots and oligarchies to establish the human rights organization, placing himself on the front line of the battle for democracy and decent government in the Middle East.

Now his enemies have struck back at him in a lawless and cowardly fashion. We call on the Egyptian authorities -- from whose territory Mr. Kikhia disappeared -- to mount a vigorous investigation of this breach of human decency. We call on the Libyan Government to cooperate fully in the search for him.

As friends and colleagues of Mansour Kikhia, whose bravery and principles we have long admired, we urge Arabs, Americans with an interest in the Arab world and human rights organizations not to rest until he regains his freedom. Nothing could be worse than to let the governments concerned think he will be forgotten.

EDWARD W. SAID, CLOVIS MAKSOUD
RASHID KHALIDI, SAMIH FARSOUN"
New York, Jan. 12, 1994

Joel Beinin, Professor of History, Stanford,

former president of the Middle East Studies Association,

from his 2002 MESA Presidential Address:

' The holders of state power have always tried to impose an intellectual agenda compatible with their interests, as students of Middle East history know from the attempts of the `Abbasid Caliphs al-Ma’mun (813-33) and al-Mu`tasim (833-42) to impose the rationalist mu`tazili doctrine on their subjects. And there have always been those who have struggled against the imposition of doctrines associated with state power, as we know from the ardent resistance of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855) to the mu`tazili doctrine. As some would have it, the victory of ibn Hanbal in this confrontation is part of "what went wrong" in Islamic societies. We could just as easily draw a different lesson: that when states attempt to impose an intellectual orthodoxy – even an "enlightened" one such as rationalism, secularism, modernization, Arab socialism, Marxism-Leninism, or neo-liberal economics and "freedom" – they inevitably generate a resistance, which may or may not itself be enlightened. And in combating that resistance they may very likely adopt cruel and authoritarian measures that will undermine the legitimacy of whatever "enlightened" ideas they espoused. The recent histories of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, and Turkey offer volumes of evidence for this proposition. '
Andrew J. Pierre and William B. Quandt, "The 'Contract' With Algeria; One Last Chance for the West to Help Stop the Civil War" The Washington Post, January 22, 1995, Sunday.

Quandt is a Vice Provost for International Affairs and professor of government at the University of Virginia, and long-time member of the Middle East Studies Association.

. . . leverage exists precisely because any Algerian regime will depend on solid relations with France and Europe, and to a lesser extent with the United States. Thus, a coordinated policy among all these external parties could help to strengthen the chance of Algerian democracy.

As the United States stakes out its position, several points are of particular importance:

A high-level American official should convey to Paris, the Algerian regime and opposition groups the United States' strong support for the end of violence through political dialogue between the military government and opposition forces. Algerians should be urged to begin a transitional process designed to create a legitimate government through free presidential and parliamentary elections. The Sant'Egidio document represents one step in this direction, and the regime's own commitment to early elections is another potentially positive element. One may doubt the sincerity of some in the opposition and some in the regime who have spoken of democratic processes, but each side should now put the other to the test by engaging in serious talks."

Lisa Anderson, Dean and Political Scientist, Columbia University and a past president of the Middle East Studies Association, in Jane Perlez, "A Middle East Choice: Peace or Democracy," The New York Times, November 28, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

(- on the rise of a new generation of Arab leaders:)

' One common thread runs through the process: the new leaders are likely to emerge for reasons of bloodline rather than merit, and it gives some analysts pause, no matter how pro-Western or pro-peace these leaders are.

"These people are not being chosen for competence in modern society but for loyalty and kinship," said Lisa Anderson, the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. "There is not a layer of technocrats who appear to be poised to take the reins of power." '
That should be enough to show that Friedman's statement is not only wrong but bizarre. Let me just add two other documents. Although Edward Said was trained in literary criticism and mainly taught and wrote about literature, and was not trained as or employed as a Middle East studies academic, he is clearly one of Friedman's targets in the quote above, since he wrote against "Orientalism." But Said himself was a consistent and harsh critic of the lack of democracy in the Arab world.

Edward Said in The Guardian (London), January 12, 1991

"Because of this lopsided state of affairs militarism asumed far too privileged a place in the Arab world's moral economy. Much of it goes back to the sense of being unjustly treated, for which Palestine was not only a metaphor but a reality. But, I ask myself, was the only answer military force of one sort of another: huge armies, brassy slogans, bloody promises, and, alas, a massive series of concrete instances, starting with wars at the top and working down to such things as physical punishment and menacing gestures at the bottom? I speak superficially and even irresponsibly
here, since I cannot have all the facts at my command, and I perhaps have no right to be passing judgments such as these.

BUT I do not know a single Arab who would disagree with these impressions in private, or who would not readily agree that the monopoly on coercion given the state and its army and police have almost completely eliminated democracy in the Arab world, introduced immense hostility between rulers and ruled, placed a much higher value on conformity, opportunism, flattery and getting along than on risking new ideas, criticism or dissent.

Taken far enough this produces exterminism, a notion that if you don't get your way or something displeases you it is possible simply to blot it out. I do not doubt that that notion is behind Iraq's aggression against Kuwait. What sort of muddled and anachronistic idea of Bismarckian 'integration' is this, that wipes out an entire country and smashes its society with 'Arab unity' as its goal? The most disheartening thing is that so many people, many of them victims of exactly the same brutal logic, appear to have identified with Iraq and not Kuwait. Even if one grants that Kuwaitis were unpopular (does one have to be popular not to be exterminated?) and even if Iraq claims to champion Palestine in standing up to Israel and the US, surely the very idea that a nation should be obliterated along the way is a murderous proposition, unfit for a great civilisation like ours. It is a measure of the dreadful state of political culture in the Arab world today that such exterminism is current, maybe even prevalent."
Although Iran is not an Arab country, you never know what the unit of analysis is in American journalism. So here's something I wrote about Iran fully 15 years ago for a wide-circulation popular magazine.

Juan Cole writing in

History Today, Mar., 1990:

"As measured by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic Republic of
Iran has for the past decade achieved one of the worst human rights records of any country in the world. Of course, many of the government-sponsored summary arrests and executions carried out have targeted political groupings that posed an alternative to the clerical state. But the Khomeini regime has also persecuted communities that posed no particular threat to the Islamic Republic's stability, most prominently the Baha'is."

Breaking News: Tens of Thousands Protest Americans in Baghdad

Tens of thousands of Shiites came out Saturday to Firdaws Square in downtown Baghdad to protest the continued US military presence in Iraq. It is the largest demonstration ever achieved by the Sadr Movement, who are Shiite nationalists. The crowds reenacted the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein two years ago by pulling down effigies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, dressed in orange jumpsuits to recall torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

They chanted, "Yes, yes to Islam, No, no to America!".

Thousands of Sunnis gathered in downtown Ramadi to protest, as well. The Association of Muslim Scholars declined to have their Sunni Arab followers join the Shiites at Firdaws Square, which points to continued sharp ethnic divisions that have made it difficult for Iraqi nationalists to unite against the American presence.

Protests Called for Saturday Against US Troop Presence

Wire services and Arab News report:

"In the main southern city of Basra, three masked men shot dead an officer in the new Iraqi Army as he was dining Thursday, an army spokesman said. The same night, four US soldiers were wounded in the northern town of Shurgat when insurgents hurled a hand grenade at them, a US military statement said. Another US military statement yesterday said a US Marine died two days ago in a vehicle accident during combat operations in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah, west of the capital. Also, a US soldier was killed by a bomb in northern Iraq yesterday, the US Army said. The soldier was killed around noon when a homemade bomb exploded near Hawijah, in Kirkuk province, a statement said without providing further details.

Newly installed Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said Friday that Iraq needed technocrats and nationalists in high office. According to another official from the United Iraqi Alliance, Jawad al-Maliki, the Shiite religious parties will get the ministries of finance, petroleum, and interior. (The Interior ministry is like the US Homeland Security plus FBI, i.e. domestic security). The Sunni Arabs will be given the defense ministry, but ex-Baathists will be purged from it. The Kurds had badly wanted the petroleum ministry, but appeared to have lost out and have been offered the ministry of planning as a consolation prize.

Shiite religious nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr and some Sunni clerics have called for a demonstration at Firdaws Square in downtown Baghdad for Saturday against the continued presence of US troops in Iraq 2 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003.

As Sadrist clerics traveled Friday from the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala up to Baghdad, they came under sniper attack just south of Baghdad, and one was killed and two wounded killed. Sunni guerrillas have targeted many Shiites in the region south of Baghdad.

Jaafari Appointed Prime Minister

Jalal Talabani appears to have had a senior moment of some magnitude. In the course of announcing that Ibrahim Jaafari will be Iraq's new prime minister, he says he suffered a memory lapse and had to leave the podium so an aide could remind him of Jaafari's name. The superstitious took it as an ill omen.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Jaafari pledged to make headway on Iraq's poor security, and that he sharply criticized the outgoing government of Iyad Allawi for letting Baathists serve in the security and intelligence forces. Jaafari appears set to purge them.

The same newspaper says that 10 Iraqis were killed in separate incidents in the ongoing guerrilla war on Thursday, and another 11 corpses were discovered near Ramadi (usually these turn out to be police or police recruits).

Mahdi Army still a Factor

Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post continues his world-beating coverage of Iraq with an article on the reemergence of the Mahdi Army in the south, in places like Nasiriyah and Basrah.

Look, if all the Mahdi Army amounts to is angry young men with guns persuaded to support puritanical morality and to give their political loyalty to Muqtada al-Sadr, then it can never be "defeated" by the US military. It is just an urban social movement. You'd have to change the character of the Shiite slums to make an impact on it, which won't happen tomorrow.

The US military thought that it had defeated the Mahdi Army by late May 2004. Then when fighting broke out again in August, the militia fought tenaciously in Najaf and seemed to come from nowhere. One reporter told me that the US generals in Iraq were frantically trying to discover how Muqtada had recruited so many new fighters in only a couple of months. But that's easy. The fighters in August were the angry cousins of the ones killed in May. In Iraq you can't let a thing like foreigners killing your cousin pass without action. Young men who had been on the fence now picked up guns and rpg launchers. Their lack of professional fighting skills ensured their military defeat, but by holing up in the shrine of Ali they gained political capital outside Najaf itself. If Sistani had not intervened, and had Allawi gone ahead with plans to invade the shrine of Ali, it could well have provoked a Shiite social revolution against the interim government and against the Americans. Mahdi Army militiamen are easy to kill, hard to defeat.

So far the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has gotten a pass from the Americans, on the whole. But its fighters can be just as thuggish and intrusive as Sadr's.

Cairo Blast at Khan al-Khalili

The analysis of the bombing of a tourist area of Cairo, which killed 4 and wounded 18 on Thursday given by the Egyptian social scientists interviewed by China's Xinhuanet seems to me quite sophisticated. They pointed to increased wealth stratification (social contradictions) in Egypt-- where the poor have stayed poor and the rich have gotten a bit better off during the past 25 years. They also pointed to the destabilizing effect on the region of the Iraq War and other American policies.

The bombing was likey the work of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami, which
is part of al-Qaeda. That Bush wimped out on destroying Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and instead poured $300 billion into the Iraq quagmire has left the jihadis free to plot and act. Egypt gets billions of dollars every year in revenue from tourism, which helps prop up the Egyptian government. The al-Jihad al-Islami wants to overthrow the Egyptian government, so it is trying to deprive it of the tourist revenue. The tactic works, but it has the disadvantage of making all the other Egyptians, who depend on the tourist revenue, angry at the jihadis and unwilling to support them politically.

New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt

I am cancelling my subscription to the New York Times, and I urge others to do the same.

The New York Times editorial board went over to the Dark Side on Thursday, with an editorial that blasted the end results of a panel at Columbia University that investigated whether students had been intimidated by professors at Columbia University. The panel found that there was no evidence of any such thing, that no students had been punished for their views by lowered grades, that there was no evidence of racial bigotry.

The NYT nevertheless praised the neo-McCarthyite "film" (actually it is large numbers of films that are constantly re-edited and have never been publicly shown) produced by the shadowy anti-Palestinian "David Project." But the "film" is not an objective document. I could interview on film lots of people who ascribed all sorts of bad behavior to the editors of the New York Times and call it a "damning documentary." Students, including Israelis, who have actually taken classes in Middle East studies at Columbia dispute the films' allegations.

The real question here is whether it is all right to dispute the Zionist version of history. The David Project, AIPAC, the American Jewish Congress, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, MEMRI, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Zionist Organization of America, etc., etc., maintain that it is not all right. Some of them have even been known to maintain that disputing Zionist historiography is a form of hate speech.

Historians are unkind to nationalism of any sort. Nineteenth century romantic nationalism of the Zionist sort posits eternal "peoples" through history, who have a blood relationship (i.e. are a "race") and who have a mystical relationship with some particular territory. The Germans, who were very good at this game, called it "blood and soil." Nationalism casts about for some ancient exemplar of the "nation" to glorify as a predecessor to the modern nation. (Since nations actually did not exist in the modern sense before the late 1700s, the relationship is fictive. To explain what happened between ancient glory and modern nationalism, nationalists often say that the "nation" "fell asleep" or "went into centuries of decline. My colleague Ron Suny calls this the "sleeping beauty" theory of nationalism.)

But there are no eternal nations through history. People get all mixed up genetically over time, except for tiny parts of the genome like the mitochondria or the Y chromosome, on which too much emphasis is now put. Since there are no eternal nations based in "blood," they cannot have a mystical connection to the "land." People get moved around. The Turks now in Anatolia once lived in Mongolia (and most Turks anyway are just Greeks who converted to Islam and began speaking Turkish).

The David Project wants Middle East historians to reproduce faithfully in the classroom the Zionist master narrative as the "true" version of history. We aren't going to do that, and nobody can make us do it, and if anyone did make us do it, it would be destructive of academic, analytical understandings of history. Next the Serbs will be demanding that we explain why the Bosnians had to be suppressed, and the Russians will object to any attempt to understand the roots of Chechen terrorism, and the Chinese will object to our teaching about Taiwan. The American Nazi Party will maintain that the Third Reich is presented unsympathetically in university history classes, etc. etc. Ethnic nationalisms if allowed to dictate the teaching of history would destroy the entire discipline.

The NYT editorial concludes:

"But in the end, the report is deeply unsatisfactory because the panel's mandate was so limited. Most student complaints were not really about intimidation, but about allegations of stridently pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on the part of several professors. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the university to follow up on complaints about politicized courses and a lack of scholarly rigor as part of its effort to upgrade the department. One can only hope that Columbia will proceed with more determination and care than it has heretofore."

What the editors mean by "anti-Israeli" is not spelled out. But generally the term means any criticism of Israel. (You can criticize Argentina all day every day till the cows come home and nobody cares in the US, but make a mild objection to Ariel Sharon putting another 3500 settlers onto Palestinian territory in contravention of all international law and of the road map to which the Bush administration says it is committed, and boom!, you are branded a racist bigot. And if you dare point out that Sharon's brutality and expansionism end up harming America and Americans by unnecessarily making enemies for us (because we are Sharon's sycophants), then you are really in trouble.

Personally, I think that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the American academy. Mostly this sort of thing is taught by International Relations specialists in political science departments, and a lot of them are Zionists, whether Christian or Jewish. Usually the narrative blames the Palestinians for their having been kicked off their own land, and then blames them again for not going quietly. It is not a balanced point of view, and if we take the NYT seriously (which we could stop doing after they let Judith Miller channel Ahmad Chalabi on the front page every day before the war), then the IR professors should be made to teach a module on the Palestinian point of view, as well. That is seldom done.

Academic teaching is not about balance or "fairness" or presenting "both sides" of an issue. It is about teaching people to reason analytically and synthetically about problems. The NYT approach would ruin our ability to do this and would impose a particular version of history on us all by fiat. It even implies that some committee should sanction anyone critical of Israel.

Universities are about skewering sacred cows. Anyone who doesn't want their views challenged or their feelings hurt should stay away from them. If you can't handle an intellectual challenge, you shouldn't be on campus. And you certainly shouldn't be editing a major newspaper.

Links:

Rashid Khalidi on Democracy Now..

Links to the report and to Joseph Massad's response.

Baruch Kimmerling,

the eminent Israeli sociologist,

denounces the witch hunt at Columbia.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which hasn't done squat for professors faced with the New McCarthyism, rejected Kimmerling's piece, and they are another good candidate for cancelled subscriptions.

Scott Sherman in the Nation,

"The Mideast Comes to Columbia."

Note: The links aren't "balanced." You'll have to find the McCarthyites on your own.

Bush Less Popular than Dick Nixon

Could Iraq be the undoing of both major political parties that backed the war in the West?

President Bush is suffering from the worst poll numbers of any second-term president in the spring after his reelection since World War II. If the rest of his second term goes like this, it could hand the Democrats the White House in 2008.

Editor and Publisher put the poll in historical context and found that Bush is relatively unpopular.

Mark Murray gives some of the reasons for the fall in Bush's popularity, but sees Bush's pitiful 45-48 percent poll numbers as solid or good. The whole picture looks much worse in historical context, which is further proof that judgment about contemporary affairs made in a historical vacuum is always flawed.

Murray points to public dislike of Bush's plan for privatizing social security and its disgust at the Republicans' grave-robbing grandstanding in the Schiavo case, as well as a general feeling that the country is going in the wrong direction (51%), as explanations for Bush's poor showing.

Murray mysteriously leaves out the petroleum factor. I have been amazed that a doubling of gas prices was just accepted by Americans as a matter of course and did not become an issue in last year's presidential campaign. The public still hates Jimmy Carter for allowing such a thing (as if he could have done anything about it). I presume that stoicism over petroleum prices was a by-product of the war mentality. Maybe Americans felt that their country had come under attack on September 11, and the subsequent wars and gas price hikes just had to be borne.

But the issue is finally emerging. In a recent poll, 58 % said the gas prices were creating a serious financial hardship for them. USA Today reports, "Nearly half of those polled — 48% — said they already have cut driving to reduce their fuel bills, and 38% say they've trimmed other household spending." People are also buying fewer SUVs, which isn't going to help the US auto industry. The present concern probably comes because the public has begun to suspect that prices are not going back down. About $10 a barrel of the current $57 a barrel for petroleum probably derives from speculation and anxiety in the oil markets resulting from the Iraq war and ongoing crisis. Prices at the pump might be $1.80 rather than $2.20 if it weren't for Iraq.

And then there is Iraq. In a recent poll, "53 percent of Americans said the war was not worth fighting, 57 percent said they disapprove of the president's handling of Iraq and 70 percent said the number of U.S. casualties, including more than 1,500 deaths, is an unacceptable price to pay there."

My American readers seem completely uninterested in British politics, to my amazement. But it is worth noting that Tony Blair has called for elections May 5, isn't doing well in the polls, and admits that the Iraq debacle has hurt him. His government has been dogged by questions of whether Blair knew the war to be illegal before he helped launch it, whether he promised Bush to support such a war early in Bush's presidency, and whether he knew or should have known how bad was the intelligence on the basis of which it was set in motion. The British public, unlike the American, actually cares, moreover, about things like the Geneva Conventions and international law, and the Iraq prison abuse scandals have hurt Blair's image, as well. (Bush, on the other hand, has been teflon in the US in the face of torture, intelligence failures, and gross mismanagement of the country he conquered, apparently because a majority of Americans just doesn't care).

Italy's Silvio Berlusconi is also running away from the Iraq issue by announcing he'll start pulling out troops in September, for the purposes of positioning himself in his own upcoming election. He knows what happened to Aznar in Spain.

Is Iraq becoming an electoral albatross around the necks of the victors?

Provincial Elections Stir Trouble

My comments on the Lehrer News Hour

about the implications of the formation of a presidency council are now online.

I was challenged by Dr. Karim on some facts. But I stand by what I said. 1) Adnan al-Janabi was in fact rejected as speaker by the Shiites and Kurds because they said his brother had Baath connections. 2) Mishaan al-Juburi was in fact put forward by the Sunni caucus in parliament. 3) The man who became speaker, Hajem al-Hassani, was thrown out of the Iraqi Islamic Party for declining to resign when that party withdrew from the interim government in protest against the Fallujah campaign, and he does not have grass roots among the Sunni Arabs on the ground in Iraq.

Karim's insistence that Sunnis with any Baath links at all be ostracized and that the Kurds absolutely must have Kirkuk is a good illustration of the nationalist passions that threaten the stability of Iraq. Nationalism is always very selfish. By the way, Kirkuk was "historically" a Turkmen city probably until the 1950s. And we haven't lost over 1500 US troops killed and 11,000 wounded to make sure the Kurds can grab Kirkuk. They owe us the basic decency of being willing to compromise for the sake of social peace in Iraq.

Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times

has gotten the story.

This piece is to my knowledge the first major article in the American press on the story of the provincial elections and all the problems attending them.

He reveals that the struggles over who controls the Najaf police in part involve former American-appointed governor Adnan Zurfi, who was displaced by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq but has attempted to maintain control of the security forces. Al-Zaman, the reports from which I had earlier summarized, had cast the struggle as one between federal Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib and the local Najaf politicians, and had not see Zurfi as a player in the disturbances.

Sanders' version raises the question of whether the Americans and the Iranians are fighting a proxy war for control of Najaf, with Zurfi acting with Rumsfeld's backing, while SCIRI is close to Tehran. Najaf province has a population of over half a million, and is home to the extremely important religious pilgrimage site of the Tomb of Ali (the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law).

Sanders also reveals that SCIRI, which has 20 out of 41 seats on the Basra council, has been outmaneuvered by the Fadila Party, which has made alliances with smaller groups allowing it to come to power. Fadila is an offshoot of the Sadr Movement and is loyal to Shaikh Muhammad Yaqubi, a rival of Muqtada al-Sadr, who studied with Muqtada's father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Yaqubi can claim to be a fully fledged jurisprudent, unlike Muqtada, and has picked up the support of Qom-based Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri. All the Sadrists are puritanical Shiite extremists aiming for an Islamic state not so different from what is in Iran. The Sadrist attacks on more secular students at Basra University, Sanders says, may be related to Fadila's ascendancy in Basra politics. Basra has a strong secular middle class, but its politics has ended up being dominated by Fadila and SCIRI, both of them aspects of political Islam.

Al-Zaman reported on Tuesday that the Diyala city council had finally been elected, tithout giving a breakdown by party or saying who the new governor is. Sanders reveals that the Diyala council is afraid to hold a meeting for fear of being assassinated, as 8 of the members of the previous council were.

And, the Tamim council can't meet because the Turkmen and Arab members are boycotting, to protest what they see as the victorious Kurds' high-handedness. Tamim is the province in which Kirkuk is now situated, and the Kurds are making a play for dominance in that city, where they are not the majority and haven't traditionally been the majority (in the early 20th century it was a Turkmen city).

I have been telling anyone who would listen that the provincial councils are a big story not being covered by the US press, and send Kudos to Sanders for nailing it.

But what about Sadrist dominance in Maysan and Wasit? Did that pan out. And what is this "Wolves" militia that is attacking "terrorists" in Maysan according to the Iraqi press. It is like a noir movie. There are a million stories in the cities of Iraq.

Thanks to Christine Prince for the tip.

Yalla Ya Jama'ah (Hurry up, folks!)

The Department of Defense is having difficulty, according to Fred Kaplan at Slate, in coming up with a policy on teaching Arabic to Pentagon personnel. Not a program, not a class. A policy.

The University of Michigan and other Title VI (federally-supported) centers, in contrast, are training thousands of Americans in Arabic every year, and doing the language teaching at a very high level, with great professionalism and innovation. The critics of those Centers would have you believe that they aren't serving the interests of the United States, but in fact they are at the vanguard of helping Americans understand the Middle East at this fateful juncture.

Oil Workers and Privatization of Iraqi Petroleum

An oil workers union in Basra, organized after the fall of the Baath regime, may be the strongest guarantee against the privatization of the Iraqi oil industry.

But given how broke the Iraqi government would be without the petroleum income, I don't think there is any chance it will privatize, anyway. That particular dream of the Washington consensus people was always a fantasy.

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