Issandr El Amrani
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Egypt has unexpectedly rescinded its support for a lawsuit filed by the US against the European Union...

For Mamdouh, the music that comes out of his creaky radio is one of the few respites from the dense, noisy Cairo traffic...

Demonstrators riot and try to close the U.S. Embassy in a country where protest has been mostly banned for 20 years...

The word "ebullient" seems barely adequate to describe the atmosphere in the austere Cairo courtroom...

Officials at the Arab League's Cairo HQ - an unassuming building in the city's central square that blends modernist and Islamic architecture - wear long faces these days.

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Shelved

Chalabi’s Zionist-friendly family

The Guardian uncovers that Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew is in partnership with an ultra-Zionist lawyer with administration connections to make money in Iraq:

It was established by Salem “Sam” Chalabi, the 40-year-old nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, a Pentagon favourite and now a prominent member of Iraq’s governing council.

Sam Chalabi’s “partner for international marketing” is Marc Zell, a rightwing Zionist lawyer who has offices in Jerusalem and Washington and previously ran a legal practice with Douglas Feith - now a leading Pentagon hawk with responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Until recently, Mr Zell - an Israeli citizen - was the registered owner of the Iraqi firm’s website. Registration was transferred to Sam Chalabi’s name on September 25 - the day after Mr Zell’s ownership of the site was revealed by an article on Guardian Unlimited.

Zell is a pro-settlement, “Greater Israel” militant. Nice company these Chalabis keep.

00:47 | / iraq | link

Ode to Chalabi

The Star Tribune ran this great ode to Ahmed Chalabi a few days ago:

You are Ahmed Chalabi! You left Iraq when you were 12 years old, but history doesn’t matter. You are the future of Iraq, and the very breath of its liberation.

So go, you Armani-clad warrior, to arms, and ride with the wind.

Go read the rest of it immediately.

16:58 | / iraq | link

New group to rule over Iraq

President Bush announced today that Condoleeza Rice will be heading a new group in charge of monitoring the situation in Iraq — the Iraq Stabilization Group. This means tighter White House control over the situation in Iraq, says the Washington Post , because Bush is afraid that with his ratings dropping, a lingering bad situation in Iraq could hurt his bid for re-election:

Administration officials had insisted this summer that the White House did not plan to play a larger role in the reconstruction effort. The reversal reflects the growing awareness among Bush’s aides that the Iraq task is much bigger and more difficult than they had expected, and the consequences could be dire if the pace and perception of progress does not pick up dramatically before the general election race next year.

A little further down:

The stabilization group is to begin functioning this week and created by Rice in a classified memo on Thursday. The group will have divisions focusing on counterterrorism; economics, to develop plans for obtaining financial support; political institutions and governance, to deal with the development of a constitution and the conduct of elections; and communications, to focus on the administration’s U.S. media message about Iraq.

I think it’s interesting that they include that last bit about the group needing to “focus on the administration’s U.S. media message about Iraq.” So the White House is not happy with the picture of the news in Iraq that’s coming back home? It must be a liberal media conspiracy. Condi’ll sort them out.

Also note that Anna Perez, a deputy assistant to Bush and Rice’s counselor for communications. Here’s Perez bio from results.gov, a White House/Bush-related site:

Anna Perez — White House

Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to the National Security Advisor for Communications

Most recently, Anna Perez was General Manager of Corporate Communications and Programs for the Chevron Corporation. From 1995 until 1998, she served as Vice President, California Government Relations for the Walt Disney Company. Previously, she was head of Media Relations for Creative Artists Agency, Inc. in Los Angeles. From 1989 until 1993, she served as Press Secretary to First Lady Barbara Bush. She began her career on Capitol Hill, serving as Assistant Press Secretary and Communications Director to U.S. Senator Slade Gorton in 1981 and as Press Secretary to U.S. Congressman John Miller in 1985. Anna attended Hunter College.

Chevron, Disney, the CAA… I’m sure the US media in Iraq will be in goods hands. Let the spin begin!

23:45 | / iraq | link

More costly lies

The NYT has this story looking at how a secret study of Iraq’s oil production potential was ignored by the neo-cons last fall when they made their case for war:

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that “we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq’s oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.

Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment — and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.

“The problem is this,” L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, asserted at a Senate hearing two weeks ago: “The oil infrastructure was severely run down over the last 20 years, and partly because of sanctions over the last decade.”

Similarly, Bush administration officials announced earlier this year that Iraq’s oil revenues would be $20 billion to $30 billion a year, which added to the impression that the aftermath of the war would place a minimal burden on the United States. Mr. Bremer now estimates that Iraq’s total oil revenues from the last half of 2003 to 2005 will amount to $35 billion, running at a rate of about $14 billion a year.

The administration now plays down the report’s findings.

More lies for the sake of ideology. It’s this kind of self-delusion and manipulation that spelled the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Where are the pragmatists in this administration?

15:23 | / iraq | link

Bush wants more funding for WMD search

Having already spent $300 million looking for Iraq’s WMD program, President Bush now wants another $600 million to continue the search. In the meantime, note that the report on Iraq’s WMD program, while partly leaked to the press last week, is still not finished although it was meant to be released in September. The reason, it seems, is that its findings — that no serious WMD capability was found in Iraq — would seriously embarass an administration that currently has enough political problems in the run-up to the elections. I can’t claim to know much about how weapons inspections work, but considering that Iraq’s top scientists, a good part of the intelligence community and the UN’s weapons inspectors are saying that the WMD threat was blown out of proportion, why do we need to spend so much money and time before getting a straight answer? If we’re asking for twice the money, how much longer before we get a definitive answer? And why is looking for these weapons so outrageously expensive?

Here’s the answer to least that last question:

The group has also concentrated on installing an unnecessarily elaborate infrastructure to support its operations, said several military officials who complained there was a disparity between the resources allotted to the two programs.

While the Exploitation Task Force worked out of an abandoned palace and the servants’ housing quarters near Baghdad airport and remained short of vehicles, air support, computers and even electricity during the initial months of the weapons hunt, the Iraq Survey Group spent its first weeks installing air-conditioned trailers, a new dining facility, state-of-the-art software and even a sprinkler system for a new lawn, according to officials and experts who worked with the group this summer.

“They kept unloading crates and crates of new Dell laptops,” said one Pentagon official who complained that the exploitation force lacked resources.

Yeah, let’s give these people more money…

13:59 | / iraq | link

Bremer on Iraq’s reparations debt

Paul Bremer has apparently suggested that Iraq should not pay reparations back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Good for him, and good for Iraq. Those two states backed Saddam long enough when it suited them, I don’t see any reason why they should get money now.

Follow the links over at Eclectic Chapbook for details.

00:07 | / iraq | link

The liars who helped the liars lie

Ahmed Chalabi and his friends deliberately lied to their friends in Washington about their credentials and the information they had on Saddam and his WMD program:

An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement.

In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.

There’s a good case to arrest Chalabi and his INC friends — after all in the first month after Baghdad was taken it almost happened because of their thieving and banditry. The US should get rid of these guys now before they cause any more damage and deal only with the real political forces in Iraq. And the civilians in the Defense Dept. who wanted to believe the INC should be punished for their incompetence/collaboration.

Or we’re stuck with a monster we’re already losing control over…

01:50 | / iraq | link

Mask of Wanker

When a new William Safire Op-Ed comes out, I always rush to read it because I know it’s going to produce an intense emotional reaction. It’s almost addictive, I want him to make me angry. Sometimes I think he’s getting soft and I merely get mildly irked, but he always comes back to get my blood boiling (especially with those phone-ins to his old friend Arik.) It’s nice to have (ideological) enemies you can rely on.

Anyway, in this column, as he continues to extol the war in Iraq as a “a major victory in the war on terror,” laments European betratal and liberal “failure-mongers” (so many myths, so little time…) he kind of takes me off-guard by making a point I actually agree with:

We should take full advantage of the Franco-German-Russian shortsighted unwillingness to take part in Iraq’s reconstruction. For example, that means the $10 billion claim on Iraq’s empty treasury to pay for Saddam’s arms should be paid by New Iraq on the day Vladimir Putin redeems the czarist debt, including interest, and not a day sooner.

I’m all for the cancellation of all odious debt. Not just the Russians of course, but anyone that Saddam owed money too — French, American, British and especially the Kuwaitis, who are still awaiting reparation money under UN resolutions. Iraq is really not in a position to pay any of this money back anytime soon, and remember all of these countries (and especially Kuwait) were major lenders to Saddam when he fought Iran. In a sense, it was their money that helped keep him in place in one of the most terrible war of attrition of the second half of the twentieth century.

Luckily, this point of agreement didn’t last too long. Here’s the next paragraph:

We should also take the $21 billion portion of the $87 billion budget that Bush earmarked for rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and make that an obligation of an Iraq Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It is right for America to pay the military costs of regime change because it was clearly in our (and the free-riding world’s) anti-terror interest. But New Iraq’s huge oil reserves should be collateral for our low-interest loans to pay for the rebuilding of that nation’s economy.

So basically in one place he cancels debt that the Iraqis never wanted, and on another he wants to make them pay for the costs of cleaning up the invasion of their country? And this without them having a say, since they don’t have a government? Not exactly in the spirit of the Marshall Plan, is it? And what’s this low-interest loan business? I never knew that the $87 billion package was a low-interest loan?

Obviously it seems that the conservatives are worried enough about the costs of their Grand Plan to Remake the Region that they want to play Enron with the accounting, passing it on to people who currently have no choice to decide in the matter.

I wonder who planted this idea with Safire… Expect it to be raised by Congress or the White House soon.

12:31 | / iraq | link

Iraq’s budding media

Baghdad Burning (I’m never sure to call it that or Riverbend, as many others do, but that’s the name in the title) has a really nice post about Iraqi media and eating on the floor. What is it anyway about these Iraqi bloggers, where did they learn how to write so well?

10:39 | / iraq | link

Iraq profiteering galore

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo — which I feel compelled to check several times a day for blogging that puts “real” journalism to shame — has uncovered some interesting links between top Republican party officials, the White House, and companies that are looking to milk the Iraqi cash cow. Check out these entries here, here and here.

The first and third links point to cases where people close to the administration, including President Bush personally, are setting up companies to use their contacts to make a quick buck. But what caught my eye was the second one, where it appears that Bush cronies are teaming up with Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem. Brian Whitaker of the Guardian has more details.

05:04 | / iraq | link

Chalabi vs. neo-cons?

The New York Times can be quite an educating read. If you just count Monday and Tuesday’s issues, you get three Op-Eds on why the answer to the problems in Iraq is not more troops but more power to the Iraqis.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism (all things neo, really) writes:

Making the transition to an Iraqi security force is an imperative for the liberation of the country. But it should not be done cavalierly. Washington’s willingness to grab former Baathists and Saddam Hussein’s security thugs and press them back into service is an enormous mistake, as is the selection of a new “interior minister,” Nouri Badran, whose background consists of defending Saddam Hussein’s military. (The Iraqi National Accord, the minister’s original political home, is made up of former Baathists and military nostalgists.)

Clearly, the job in Iraq is not done. But sending in more troops is not the answer. With the number of ground engagements down and the recruitment of Iraqi players up, the solution lies in thinking about the transition from postwar triumph over Saddam Hussein to the empowerment of Iraqis.

Note the denunciation of the Iraqi National Accord, the main opposition group other than Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Now remember that according to most of the historiography of the war and Iraqi opposition movements, the INA was favored by the Dept. of State and the CIA while the Dept. of Defense preferred the INC. The AIE, of course, is close to the Defense crowd such as Perle, Wolfowitz and company.

Then you have Noah Feldman, the one-time writer of Iraq’s new constitution (before they decided that Iraqis should be seen as being the authors of their own constitution), who argues that Iraqi peace-keeping institutions should quickly be formed but that more time should be given for self-rule:

Still, the answer to this threat isn’t bringing in foreign troops or putting more Americans on the ground, but creating an effective Iraqi security force — fast. Only Iraqi police officers and soldiers, knowledgeable about local conditions and populations, and with access to high-quality local intelligence, stand a chance of breaking Sunni resistance cells and identifying foreign agents. The call by Democrats (and, lately, many Republicans) to internationalize the coalition forces is well taken in terms of saving money and patching up diplomatic relations. But Indian and French troops would have no better luck combating terrorists than the Americans.

As for French and German suggestions that we speed up the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government, it would be just as unlikely to aid security. The violence is not coming from people who would be sympathetic to any such interim government. Worse, unless the police and military have been truly reconstituted, an interim body would be a travesty of a sovereign government. Actual control is the indispensable hallmark of sovereignty. Nothing could be worse for the future of democracy in Iraq than the creation of a puppet government unable to keep the peace.

Then the NYT’s own David Brooks — a conservative columnist who is also an editor at the neo-con magazine The Weekly Standard — adds his own two cents about why all the debate taking place at the UN and in Washington is irrelevant:

It’s time to acknowledge that the reconstruction of Iraq is too important to be left to the foreign policy types, who are trained to think too abstractly to grapple with the problems that matter.

Ah, those foreign policy types! Isn’t it outrageous that decision-making about foreign policy is left to foreign policy professionals!? I tell you, I don’t know where the world is coming to these days…

But luckily, Brooks knows what we really need:

Over the long term, we need to create an apolitical reservist force, made up of of businesspeople, administrators and police officers who have concrete experience in moving societies from dictatorship to democracy. In the meantime, we need to focus on serving the Iraqis first, second and last. We don’t need to get caught up in a distracting round of lofty debates among the world’s Walter Mitty Metternichs, who treat the Iraqi people as pawns in their great game-power struggles.ÊÊ

What’s interesting here is that is these three opinions — which exclude the view among some traditional conservatives, many centrists and some of the left that a stronger military presence is needed to control the violence — is that while they go in the general direction of what Chalabi and his INC allies want, they don’t go quite fast enough.

Here’s what the NYT’s UN correspondents report about the new Chalabi:

Ahmad Chalabi, the president of Iraq’s interim government, is in New York this week to press alternatives to the Bush administration’s occupation policy in postwar Iraq, he and his aides say. In the process, he may complete a personal transformation from protégé of Pentagon conservatives to Iraqi nationalist with a loud, independent voice.

In an interview today in New York, Mr. Chalabi professed gratitude to the Bush administration for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, but his specific proposals were directly at odds with the policies Washington is pursuing in Baghdad and at the United Nations. He demanded that the Iraqi Governing Council be given at least partial control of the powerful finance and security ministries, and rejected the idea of more foreign troops coming to Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi’s strategy, he says, is to get from the United Nations General Assembly sovereign status for the unelected 25-member Governing Council. This move to lobby other nations for a swift transfer of some sovereignty is going down poorly in Washington, according to the Iraqi leader’s aides.

And then at the end of the piece:

“We don’t want to come out in the open and pick a fight with Bremer,” [an aide to Chalabi] said, “but the sovereignty issue is coming to a head, and it is pretty clear that a breach is coming pretty soon between the Governing Council and Bremer.”

Another aide was more blunt: “We are going to find a place where we can pick a fight.”

Is Chalabi getting impatient? It would seem logical that, considering his greatest asset is the support of key administration figures, a transition to self-rule sooner than later would benefit him the most. Parties with a stronger local anchor — whether Sunni, Shia or Kurdish — have more potential in the long-term. But while he and his patrons seem to agree on the general plan — no more troops, more devolvement to the Iraqis, strengthening the Iraqis’ own police and military capability (remember the INC has its own militia) and bringing in the corporate world “to the rescue” — they disagree on the timetable. Watch Chalabi morph from Washington’s man into nationalist-populist hero in the next few months.

13:08 | / iraq | link

Iraq investment law reconsidered

A quick update on Iraq’s new investment laws: the Governing Council has said that the new minister of finance’s comments last Sunday were “unnoficial” and that only the council’s president could officially announce policy.

A statement issued by the US-installed council distanced it from a key part of a sweeping economic package presented by interim Finance Minister Kamel al-Kilani at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Dubai on Sunday.

The text said only the council president could announce policy, “and the statements attributed to the finance minister about the law of investment cannot be considered official.”

It’s worth remembering that Kilani is a member of the Iraqi National Congress, and therefore an ally of Ahmad Chalabi, the current president of the congress. (By the way, wasn’t it awfully handy that Chalabi got the month-long rotating presidency just when the UN was going to hold its first general assembly since the way — enabling him to sit in as the official representative of Iraq? Just sayin’…)

12:25 | / iraq | link

For the record

Nothing very new here, but this interesting transcript of a press conference by Colin Powell and Egypt’s then foreign minister (and current head of the Arab League) Amr Moussa in February 2001 revealed quite a different stance towards Iraq’s WMDs. Colin sez:

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions — the fact that the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

I can understand, after 9/11, the worry that Saddam might pass on WMDs to Osama — even if in practice it all seemed so extremely unlikely that the two would cooperate. But if Powell thought that there was no significant WMD program and that containment had worked (at the time the big issues were dealing with the humanitarian problems caused by the sanctions and illegal oil trade through new “smart sanctions”), why the war?

12:05 | / iraq | link

That Iraq place again

I’m am back from the Western end of the Arab world to its supposed center. In the former, a courageous press (and a few imprisoned journalists) , a timid reform movement that just hopes to hang on against government pressure and those unhelpful Islamists. In the latter, continuing aimlessness under the yoke of a lingering mediocracy. In other words, boring stories about slow changes, small regressions, petty oppression, routinized corruption and technocratic malpractice. Only 100 million people are concerned, so let’s get back to that exciting eye-rack place further East.

Since Sunday, the big story is “the sale of Iraq” — the announcement of new rules that will allow unfettered foreign ownership of Iraq’s non-oil state companies. That means the ability for foreign companies to bid for up to 100% of all the state-owned companies that are going to be put on the privatization block, with the ability of repatriating 100% of the profit they make and both personal and corporate taxes fixed at 15%. Imports, for their part, will only face a tariff duty of 5%. I don’t think an economic set-up like this exists in any country in the world. It’s a neo-liberal economist’s wet dream — except that it’s bound to cause all kinds of problems, is not adapted to the needs of a ravaged country (or even its indiginous business class) and even theoretically, it’s absolutely useless in a world where no one operates this. Anyone remember last week’s Cancun WTO talks?

The Guardian says:

The last big socialist, centralised economy that opted for such sudden and drastic shock therapy was Russia in 1992. The result was economic devastation, rampant corruption and the rise of a powerful class of businessmen, the oligarchs

…

In adopting a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, the US falls into the trap of believing that the state has only to be removed from the sphere of the economy to see a vibrant free market appear. History suggests this process has to be managed by a stable, home-grown government.

I believe in the US we called this the New Deal, and I seem to remember that it got us out of a lot of trouble.

The LA Times gets some local reactions:

“It’s the wrong approach,” said Sam Kubba, who heads the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “It’s a recipe for disaster because it gives the impression that they’re trying to sell off all the Iraqi resources. They should go about it much more slowly. Start by getting a democracy in place first and letting the people elect a government.”

Juan Cole notes that it’s probably illegal under the Geneva Convention, which the US is bound to as an occupying power:

The US occupying forces blatantly contravened the Fourth Geneva Convention on Monday, announcing that they were opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment and setting low trade tariffs. The economy has been plagued by massive unemployment (estimated by many observers at 60%) since the fall of the Baath regime, which had channeled oil money to employees through state industries and patronage. US civil administrator Paul Bremer, a fanatical devotee of the “Washington Consensus” on the absolute benefits of “free trade,” has managed to get the Interim Governing Council to sign off on a wideranging set of new economic regulations.

Iraq Democracy Watch has a series of posts and tons of links on this and related subjects. It’s probably the most comprehensive source if you bother to read them all and see what they add up to. All this reading made him make this interesting point:

Comparing the British and American papers’ coverage of the new economic liberalization laws in Iraq should be a lesson for anyone who thinks that the media is unbiased.Ê The Guardian, Independent, and even the conservative UK Telegraph all had headlines variously proclaiming, “Iraq for Sale.”Ê

The American headlines, in contrast, used phrasing like, “A Free Iraq Economy…” ( LA Times ), or “Economic Overhaul” (Washington Post ).

Also, do dig up his excellent overview of “America’s conflicting interests with Iraqi agriculture” from an older post, which points out that the man currently in charge of the US Department of Agriculture effort in Iraq, Dan Amstutz, is a former executive at one of the biggest agro-business companies in the world, Cargill:

Dan Amstutz had at one time worked for Cargill, a US agribusiness giant — the largest privately-owned corporation in the world and the third largest food processor on the globe, and also a company that controls a sizable portion of US grain exports, according to an article by Emad Mekay from Inter Press News Service and written for the Global Policy Forum.

In a press conference this year, Mr. Amstutz insisted that he no longer had any relationship with Cargill, but an article in The Holland Sentinel from June 22nd, 2003, as late as “ late-October 2000, Amstutz was named chairman of the board of directors of a new company established by ADM, Cargill, Cenex Harvest States, DuPont and Louis Dreyfuss.”

Mr. Amstutz isn’t just drawing the wrath of NGOs and international agriculture ministers. Jeffrey St. Claire, in his article, “The Rat in the Grain, Dan Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture,” reprinted in various news media, quotes George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition as saying,

Daniel Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive, is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not a democratic agenda…He will excel in telling the world that his policy is good for farmers, consumers and the environment when just the opposite is true.

Says Mr. St. Claire,

The small farmers of the grain belt of the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During his stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal farm price supports. As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms and monopolists like Cargill reaped the benefits.

Doesn’t sound good, does it? And why again did those Cancun talks fail?

The Arms and the Man — the definitive blog on “who’s making a killing on killing in Iraq” — notes that big capital is getting ready for all these juicy prospects, for instance by hosting $1500-a-head conferences on “Exploring Business Prospects in Iraq.” In the meantime, Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle himself goes on teevee and counters claims of war profiteering by one of those pesky human rights activists. She (Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange) says:

The resentment will only grow unless the U.S. turns this over to a legitimate authority, which is the United Nations, which will have a quick time line for Iraqi self rule and that the money that is pledged by the U.S. and the international community — and let’s remember the international community will not pledge money unless it is in the hands of the United Nations — and that money should go directly to Iraqis and not to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel that are profiteering from this war.

Perle replies:

What you just heard is a tirade against American companies in the left-wing tradition that she represents.

Those America-bashing left-wing liberals. Why do they hate us?

For a local perspective, if you read anything read this post on Baghdad Burning, which has a few concrete examples of why unfettered foreign investment is bad and how it can lead to serious economic and moral abuse. Here’s the first ‘graf, to set the tone:

For Sale: A fertile, wealthy country with a population of around 25 million… plus around 150,000 foreign troops, and a handful of puppets. Conditions of sale: should be either an American or British corporation (forget it if you’re French)… preferably affiliated with Halliburton. Please contact one of the members of the Governing Council in Baghdad, Iraq for more information.

Read it all.

11:43 | / iraq | link

The wrong Iraqi

David Phillips has a good overview in the NYT of how Ahmad Chalabi’s bad advice before the war was partly responsible for the mess after it. That bad advice was especially listened to the civilians in the Dept. of Defense, who also gave him funding for a militia and made him one of the three key members of the temporary Council, which he presides this month. Many Iraqis must be asking themselves what he’s doing there.

Why such devotion to a man whose prewar advice proved so misguided? For one thing, Mr. Chalabi has shown himself amenable to those in Washington who want to reshape the entire Middle East. They envision Iraq as a springboard for eliminating the Baath party in Syria, undermining the mullahs in Iran and enhancing American power across the region.

I wonder when the people that supported Chalabi are going to start to realize that before enacting their grand plans to transform the region, they’re going to have to deal with stabilizing Iraq and bringing legitimacy to its new government. It doesn’t seem to me that a new government where Chalabi plays an important role would be that legitimate, especially as he continues to base himself and his cronies in property that belongs to the Iraqi people, not some rag-tag militia.

15:38 | / iraq | link

The Iraq situation

“Well, I think we’re fucked.” TPM interviews veteran ambassador Joseph Wilson.

18:09 | / iraq | link

Chalabi’s turn

At the beginning of this month, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, the main exiled Iraqi group allied with the neo-cons in Washington, assumed the presidency of Iraq’s Governing Council. He’ll only be there for a month, but I’m sure he’ll be trying to lay the groundwork for a more permanent position. After all, his allies in Washington are.

Take for instance a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by Bernard Lewis, famed orientalist historian, on the need to “put Iraqis in charge” to solve the growing Iraq crisis, which I saw pointed out by top Chalabi-watcher Josh Marshall:

Fortunately, the nucleus of such a government is already available, in the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. In the northern free zone during the ’90s they played a constructive role, and might at that time even have achieved the liberation of Iraq had we not failed at crucial moments to support them. Despite a continuing lack of support amounting at times to sabotage, they continue to acquit themselves well in Iraq, and there can be no reasonable doubt that of all the possible Iraqi candidates they are the best in terms alike of experience, reliability, and good will. It took years, not months, to create democracies in the former Axis countries, and this was achieved in the final analysis not by Americans but by people in those countries, with American encouragement, help and support. Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress deserve no less.

Marshall of TPM however omits the preceding paragraph, which is more telling of the plans for Iraq that the neo-cons (ideological allies of Lewis even if he may be too old-fashioned to be a neo-con himself) have:

What then should we do in Iraq? Clearly the imperial role is impossible, blocked equally by moral and psychological constraints, and by international and more especially domestic political calculations. An inept, indecisive imperialism is the worst of all options, with the possible exception of subjecting Iraq to the tangled but ferocious politics of the U.N. The best course surely is the one that is working in Afghanistan—to hand over, as soon as possible, to a genuine Iraqi government. In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a period of discreet support would be necessary, but the task would probably be easier in Iraq. Here again care must be taken. Premature democratization—holding elections and transferring power, in a country which has had no experience of such things for decades, can only lead to disaster, as in Algeria. Democracy is the best and therefore the most difficult of all forms of government. The Iraqis certainly have the capacity to develop democratic institutions, but they must do so in their own way, at their own pace. This can only be done by an Iraqi government.

So basically what he’s saying is, put Chalabi in charge but don’t push him to be democratic. Hmmm sounds familiar… oh yes, that’s right, that’s the US policy for every other country in the region. “Discreet support” of dictators with the justification that if democracy is going to develop, these people must to do it “at their own pace.” Nevermind that many Iraqis don’t seem to care much for Chalabi, who let’s remember is still wanted for a large-scale bank fraud in Jordan. But in any case, for Lewis the Arab world is probably — for essentialist “cultural” reasons — probably incapable of democracy in any case. For an in-depth critique of Lewis, take a look at this new article on MERIP by Adam Sabra.

TPM has more on Chalabi, including speculation that he may have been responsible for the failure of a CIA coup attempt in 1996. His thinking is that Chalabi wanted the coup to fail because the CIA was carrying it out with exiled Baathist generals, and not his group. Chalabi, along with his best buddy Richard Perle, may have played the CIA into taking a more hardline stance against Iraq after the failed coup, which Chalabi may have warned Saddam about.

In another post, TPM notes a Washington Post article that refers to an interview with Perle in the conservative French daily Le Figaro. He only quotes a part of the interview that was translated by the post, so I dug up the original Le Figaro interview (now in its paid archives) and translated part of it. It picks up on the new neo-con theme of putting Iraqis in charge as soon as possible (and you know who he means) and has Perle making a ludicrous comparison between the occupation of Iraq and the liberation of France in 1944:

How can you pretend that the situation in Iraq under American control is going well?

The situation in Iraq is in any case much better than under Saddam Hussein, although I will not say that it is easy to change a country that was submitted for thirty years to a dictatorship like Saddam’s.

Do you think that anarchy is preferable to dictatorship?

I don’t think you can speak of anarchy. Yes, there is a lot of violence. But wasn’t there anarchy in France after its liberation in 1944?

Not a single American soldier was then killed, behind the front lines, in liberated French territory. Same thing in Germany, even though it was an enemy country.

But 10,000 French collaborators where killed by other Frenchmen! You cannot, from one day to the next, succeed in transforming a country that has gone through a history like Iraq’s recent history. There are Iraqis who worked for Saddam, belonged to his torture apparatus, his secret police. There are thousands of them and they have nowhere to go. What we are seeing now is a desperate attempt to show that the American administration of Iraq is not working.

Don’t the current problems come rather from militant Islamists who were not there under Saddam and who have succeeded in infiltrating the country in the midst of the anarchy? Don’t you think that the attacks against your soldiers and against the UN come from these Islamists rather than Arab nationalists from the former Baath party?

Evidently, we have problems with both groups. Three groups of people are responsible for the current violence and sabotage in Iraq: the Baathists who have nowhere to go, the Muslim extremists for whom the attacks are part of a global strategy, and, finally, common criminals, many of whom were freed from prison by Saddam. But the vast majority of Iraqis do not support any of these three groups.

Isn’t there a shocking contrast between the quality of military preparation, the rapidity of the invasion, and America’ total lack of preparedness in terms of civilian administration [of Iraq]? All the looting, the vandalized ministries, the burnt archives… Yet, you knew that the world would be judging you foremost on your civilian [as opposed to military] efforts. Isn’t there a historic American failure here?

Of course we didn’t do everything well. Mistakes were made and there will be others. Invading a country in order to run it is not part of American culture. We do not have colonial experience from which we could have pulled a doctrine. Our approach was necessarily empirical. Our main mistake, in my opinion, was to have failed to work in depth with the Iraqis before the war, so that an Iraqi opposition would have been able to immediately take charge of things. Today, the solution is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible.

Perle is right when he says that “Invading a country in order to run it is not part of American culture.” But setting up puppet regimes and not caring about whether they are democratic is. I wonder what tension is now developing between the hawks that truly believe they can install a form of democracy in Iraq and those that just wanted Saddam out and a tame regime — of any kind — in.

17:49 | / iraq | link

Halliburton and Cheney

12:55 | / iraq | link

Salam Pax gets raided

12:28 | / iraq | link

Rendon / Chalabi / Moran

To add a little more to the Chalabi puzzle, there is an interesting story on Australian journalist Paul Moran over at Back to Iraq 2.0. Most of the story itself is concerned with Moran, officially a journalist working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was also working for the Rendon Group, the American PR firm that was more or less handling the Iraqi National Congress dossier for the Pentagon. Naturally there is some outrage that, even if through a proxy, the Pentagon was using a journalist as a spy. It also raises suspicion that the Office of Strategic Interests, set up by Rumsfeld to disseminate false information to foreign journalists, may still be in action through some other name.

But my Chalabi fixation picked up this ‘graf:

In 1992, the Rendon Group helped organize the Iraqi National Congress. The PR firm, in fact, came up with the name and channeled $12 million in CIA funds to the group between 1992 and 1996. In October 1992, John Rendon chose one of his protŽgŽs, Ahmed Chalabi, to head the group.

12:51 | / iraq | link

Israel’s Iraqi oil pipeline

The Prime Minister’s Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a “bonus” the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.

The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.

…

National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit to Washington next month. Paritzky added that the plan depends on Jordan’s consent and that Jordan would receive a transit fee for allowing the oil to piped through its territory. The minister noted, however, that “due to pan-Arab concerns, it will be hard for the Jordanians to agree to the flow of Iraqi oil via Jordan and Israel.”

…

Iraqi oil is now being transported via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border. The transit fee collected by Turkey is an important source of revenue for the country. This line has been damaged by sabotage twice in recent weeks and is presently out of service.

In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.

Sources in Jerusalem suggest that the American hints about the alternative pipeline are part of an attempt to apply pressure on Turkey. Iraq is one of the world’s largest oil producers, with the potential of reaching about 2.5 million barrels a day. Oil exports were halted after the Gulf War in 1991 and then were allowed again on a limited basis (1.5 million barrels per day) to finance the import of food and medicines. Iraq is currently exporting several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.

Naturally, this isn’t something that the Israelis have just thought of now. Plans for the pipeline were first brought up by Minister Paritzky in March, just before the war, in talks with US officials and… Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Josh Marshall of TPM had noted this last April, and has links to three stories about the discussions and a nice juicy quote of Chalabi’s best buddy in Washington, Richard Perle, saying that Chalabi “and his people have confirmed that they want a real peace process, and that they would recognize the state of Israel. There is no doubt about that if they come to power.”

22:40 | / iraq | link

More on Iraq and the occupation

There are a few links I wanted to mention in the earlier post but lost after a computer crash. First, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has published a thorough report on the situation in Iraq. You can get it here in either text or PDF format if you scroll down at the bottom of the page. Perhaps even more interesting will be the latest International Crisis Group report on Iraq — ICG usually gets things spot on.

In light of the growing debate on the need for more soldiers on the ground — something that many people are saying (and I would agree) is needed whether you agreed with the invasion in the first place or not — there seems to be an incredible level of denial at the Pentagon. Faced with requests by congressmen for more support for the troops in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld has proposed a radical reform of the entire military.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seeking to increase the nation’s combat power without hiring more troops, is poised to order a sweeping review of Pentagon policies, officials say. It will include everything from wartime mobilization and peacekeeping commitments, to reservist training and incentives for extended duty.

…

The review will be seen in some circles as answering powerful members of Congress who have demanded more active-duty troops for the military. Lengthy deployments to Iraq drew scattered complaints from families of soldiers, and some reservists criticized their extended call-ups.

So basically, there’s a pressing issue at hand and he’s proposing that instead of solving that with what’s available, the Pentagon wonks put on their policy caps and radically change the way they operate. How exactly is this going to help the immediate situation in Iraq? Also note a little further down:

Other proposals are based in pragmatism. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress he wanted to transfer to civilians or contract workers an estimated 300,000 administrative jobs now performed by people in uniform.

In other words, he wants to apply corporate restructuring to the US military. It’s exactly the kind of thinking that is being applied in Medicare, Social Security, schools and hospitals. I still fail to understand why public services need to be run like corporations. The thinking is fundamentally flawed — corporations are run for profit, whereas public services are run for a greater public welfare that is much harder to quantify. This may be in part free market fundamentalism, which sees the corporate way as the only way and everything else as thinly disguised communism, but you also have to wonder: who’s gonna get the contracts to replace the administrative staff? Sounds like more taxpayer subsidies for corporate America to me.

This just in — the powers that be mount the oh-no-we-don’t-need-more troops PR offensive just as Congress gets more impatient.

Going from evasive Newspeak to plain talk, read this great column by the always interesting Joe Galloway, who says that the US should either “do the job or get out.” I’m sure I probably wouldn’t see eye to eye with this guy on many things (like his view of Egypt and Syria as “volcanos that could erupt at any moment”), but I certainly appreciate his candor:

Unless we are prepared to sit back and watch as our soldiers die by ones, twos and threes day by day in an open-ended occupation of Iraq, it may be time to fish or cut bait.

The alternatives would seem to be that we put an Iraqi face on the situation and swiftly withdraw in the sure and certain knowledge that things there will go to hell in short order - or we follow the prescription of former Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki and put “several hundred thousand troops” into Iraq and clean that place out.

02:27 | / iraq | link

Iraq, the occupation and the future of the UN

Since last week’s bombing of the UN building in Baghdad, there’s been a lot written about whether the UN could be relied on, whether it should have a more important role in the reconstruction of Iraq, and the general state of the institution. Considering that the Bush administration had decided just a few days before the bombing to sideline the UN, the bombing added urgency to an important question.

From what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, the “resistance” or “terrorist” movement against the occupation forces is rising. The bombing indicates that either those behind the violence think the UN is fully complicit with the US-UK invasion of Iraq, or that it is a soft but symbolic target that is easier to hit than, say, the coalition’s HQ. It also raises the question of whether the UN should integrate more closely with the efforts of the CPA, or on the contrary leave as much as possible in the hands of the US, the UK and the coalition of the willing to send troops without the sanction of a UN resolution.

From the reporting that is coming out of Iraq, we can see if not outright hostility towards US troops, at least a degree of frustration and humiliation in having to deal with an occupying army. Many think that this is justification enough to give the UN a greater role, as Juan Cole and Kofi Annan.

Here’s Cole:

The bombing of UN headquarters may reveal that the guerrillas fear most of all the moral authority and legitimacy of the international body. Without this, the US and Britain look suspiciously like neoimperialists to angry young Iraqis, whom the radicals hope to enlist in their fight. Ironically, the wisest American response may be to involve the UN much more extensively in Iraqi security and reconstruction.

And Annan, quoted in the NYT:

But it was clear from Mr. Annan’s public remarks today and a brief interview that he is certain that a new United Nations mandate is required to give the organization a clearly defined role and to allow Iraqis to have confidence that control over Iraq’s future is reverting to them.

“We are focusing a lot on the force, the multinational force, and security,” he said. “I think it’s because of what happened. But that is only part of the answer. The other part of the answer is to move quickly to create an environment where the average Iraqi will support the operation and see that what is happening is in their interest.”

He added, “That’s why I keep saying, let’s come up with a timetable to let them know that the occupation is really time-bound.”

Bringing in the UN may not only be a question of revitalizing an institution that has been enfeebled by the Bush administration and its own past, or even giving a more acceptable face to the occupation for the Iraqis. It may also be a question of necessity to bring the level of commitment to Iraq that the task at hands needs. The situation in Iraq is not under control. Terrorists from abroad are coming in. Some say that, considering the war was based on the wrong reasons, troops should be getting out now before the death toll mounts. But that’s irresponsible — we started this mess, and now we have to clean it up. And the UN, which would hopefully bring in foreign troops experienced in peacekeeping operations (French, German, Canadian, Norwegian etc…), is probably the best way to do that.

17:26 | / iraq | link

Attack on the UN

Yesterday’s car bombing of the UN building in Baghdad (see latest here) was pretty shocking, if only because many of my journalist and photographer friends from Cairo are in Baghdad at the moment. Thankfully, I’ve heard from them and none of them were armed. Still, it’s worrying that the attack timed with a press conference — as if they were trying to get the maximum number of non-Iraqis as possible. It is making me think (but not rethink) about my own plans to move there.

There is a lot of interesting stuff to read about — things I was reading and thinking about before the attack, such as why there have been so many attacks in the past few weeks against civilian services like power stations, sewage treatment plants, water systems and so on. Are these nihilists trying to deprive Iraqis of much needed basic sanitation and services in hope that they’ll get angry at the occupation forces? The mind boggles.

Salam Pax has his usual thoughtful comments to make, although he sounds very down indeed:

I am plunging into a fucking depression, do we have a future? is this country going to be hijacked by shit extremists who want to prove a point? …we have plunged into darkness.

There have been some interesting theories floating out there suggesting that this is Al Qaeda’s work. Possibly. I find the news, reported by the Financial Times, that up to 3000 men have gone missing in Saudi Arabia and may have crossed into Iraq more worrying. They don’t need to be Al Qaeda, just some Wahhabi fanatics who share their ideology. Remember the 9/11 report where 28 pages implicating the Saudis were not released? The Saudis and their backward bedouin religious extremism have been the poison the in the blood of the Arab world for nearly half a century now. When will it end?

The journalist Peter Bergen, one of the rare Westerners to interview Osama bin Laden, thinks that while Al Qaeda and Iraq had nothing to do with each other, the war has caused Al Qaeda to infiltrate Iraq and use an issue with immense appeal across the Arab world to boost its standing:

Bin Laden has long modeled al Qaeda’s tactics on that of Hezbollah in Lebanon during the early ’80s. Hezbollah’s 1983 suicide bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and forty US soldiers, led to the withdrawal of American forces from Lebanon. And bin Laden has reveled in the fact that the deaths of eighteen US servicemen in Somalia in 1993 also precipitated a quick withdrawal of American troops from that country. It is this model that al Qaeda hopes to follow in Iraq, fighting a war of attrition against US soldiers that will eventually lead to a humiliating withdrawal of American forces. It is only a matter of time before al Qaeda is able to pull off a significant terrorist attack that kills a large number of American soldiers. At that point perhaps the American public will ask: “Didn’t we invade Iraq to prevent exactly what is happening now?”

13:31 | / iraq | link

WMD lies

It’s not that we didn’t know it already, but it’s sure is nice to see the authoritative press zeroing in, calling a spade a spade and saying out loud that the administration lied and invented evidence for the war in Iraq — see the Washington Post, Associated Press and Newsweek. The AP story has great list of all the weapons allegedly in Iraq but that haven’t been found, but the choicest morsel comes in this now oft-quoted Post paragraph:

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates — in public and behind the scenes — made allegations depicting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied…

02:03 | / iraq | link