Month: October 2006

The coup option in Iraq

I don’t believe a coup in Iraq will happen, but it’s interesting that this is being reported — it suggests that there are feelers out there at the very least. (Sorry, no link.)

Oct 23, 2006- United Press International: Coup against Maliki reported in the making

Iraqi army officers are reportedly planning to stage a military coup with U.S. help to oust the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Cairo-based Iraqi and Arab sources said Monday several officers visited Washington recently for talks with U.S. officials on plans for replacing Maliki’s administration by a “national salvation” government with the mission to re-establish security and stability in Iraq.

One Iraqi source told United Press International that the Iraqi army officers’ visit to the United States was aimed at coordinating the military coup in case the efforts of Maliki’s government to restore order reached a dead end.

He said among the prominent officers were the deputy chief of staff, a Muslim Shiite, the intelligence chief, a Sunni, and the commander of the air force, a Kurd. It is believed the three would constitute the nucleus of the next government after the army takes over power.

The proposed plan, according to the source, stipulates that the new Iraqi army, with the assistance of U.S. forces, will take control of power, suspend the constitution, dissolve parliament and form a new government. The military will also take direct control of the various provinces and the administration after imposing a state of emergency.

An Arab source also told UPI that certain Arab countries were informed of the plan and requested to offer their help in convincing the former leaders of the deposed Baath Party regime residing in their countries to refrain from obstructing the move and stop violence perpetrated by the party in Iraq. In return, they will be invited to participate in the government at a later stage.

Washington is becoming increasingly impatient with the failure of Maliki’s government in quelling sectarian violence threatening to plunge Iraq in an all-out civil war.

One possibly related thing I’ve noticed being the US for the past week is that much of the Bush administration’s comments in Iraq revolves around the meme that the Iraqis must now stop the civil war, that things are in the Iraqis hands, etc. Well obviously they are not, things are out of control, and this is just a pre- midterm election attempt to avoid responsibility for the mess that is Iraq. A responsibility, it must be emphasized, rests largely on the current administration, even if there are many other forces at play in Iraq.

I don’t think it could have been predicted three years ago that things would be as bad as to make this kind of reporting from Iraq routine:

OUTSIDE BALAD, Iraq — At midweek, Shiite Interior Ministry commandos and their Shiite militia allies cruised the four-lane hardtop outside the besieged city of Balad, trying to stave off retaliation for a deadly four-day rampage in which they had all but emptied Balad of Sunnis.

Sunni insurgents pouring in to take that revenge patrolled the same highway, driving battered white pickups and minivans, their guns stashed out of sight. Affecting casualness, more Sunni men gathered on rooftops or clustered on the reed-lined edge of the highway, keeping an eye on the Shiite forces and the few frightened civilians who dared to travel the highway past Balad.

What brought this Tigris River city north of Baghdad to this state of siege was a series of events that have displayed in miniature the factors drawing the entire country into a sectarian bloodbath: Retaliatory violence between Sunnis and Shiites has soared to its highest level of the war, increasingly forcing moderates on both sides to look to armed extremists for protection.

The Shiite-led government’s security forces, trained by the United States, proved immediately incapable of dealing with the sectarian violence in Balad, or, in many cases, abetted it, residents and police said.

More than 20,000 U.S. troops are based within 15 miles of Balad, but, uncertain how to respond, they hesitated, waiting for Iraqi government forces to step up, according to residents, police and U.S. military officials.

And all that was left holding Balad, and Iraq, together — the desire for peace and normality still held by the great majority of Iraqis, and the generations of intermarriage and neighborliness between ordinary Shiite and Sunni Muslims — was ripping apart.

I can understand in this context how a return to military dictatorship may seem like a tempting move. I remember Daniel Pipes was advocating that “Iraq needs a strongman” immediately after the invasion. Well I suppose Iraq does if it is going to be a docile client state like Egypt. But at this point, it’s probably already too late to install a military dictator (not to mention this would presumably involve the help of US troops.)

Iraq = Mordor

According to Rick Santorum, anyway:

In an interview with the editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times, embattled Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has equated the war in Iraq with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” According to the paper, Santorum said that the United States has avoided terrorist attacks at home over the past five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been focused on Iraq instead.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said. “It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

So then Bin Laden is Sauron, Bush is Aragorn, Cheney is Gandalf, Rumsfeld is Gimli and American special forces are hobbits? Hmm, it seems they’re having a hard time finding the One Ring and defeating (even catching) Sauron. Oh, Sam…

Update: Paul sends this pic with the caption “Frodo failed.”

Bushring

HRW and the Lobby

Since I attacked Human Rights Watch on this site for what I still maintain was a biased (in favor of Israel) coverage of the first two weeks (at least) of this summer’s Lebanon war, it seems fair to me to bring attention for the virulent attack against HRW and its head, Kenneth Roth, by the usual Zionist agitators in response to its more balanced coverage starting about three weeks into the war. This NYRB article looks at that in depth, especially the role of a newspaper that regular readers will know I consider one of the most dangerous and hateful mainstream publications in the US, the New York Sun:

To the extent that the current campaign against Human Rights Watch is organized the driving force has been a newspaper launched in 2002, The New York Sun, which accused Kenneth Roth of anti-Semitism in a two-column editorial. The Sun is edited by Seth Lipsky, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was the founding editor in 1990 of The Forward, an English-language Jewish weekly that sought to link itself to the tradition of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper with a social-democratic political outlook that had a wide readership among Yiddish-speaking immigrants. (Isaac Bashevis Singer published most of his work in the Jewish Daily Forward.) But Lipsky was forced out in 2000 because some of the owners of The Forward found him too right-wing. He launched The New York Sun with investments from the publishing tycoon Conrad Black (who is now being prosecuted for corporate crimes) and other financial backers intent on promoting neoconservative views. Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, became a columnist and the Sun’s contributors have included right-wing commentators such as R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. and Peggy Noonan.

On July 25, just two weeks after the beginning of the war in Lebanon, the Sun published an attack on Human Rights Watch by Avi Bell, whom it identified as a law professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and a visiting professor at Fordham University Law School. Bell attacked a Human Rights Watch statement published the previous week entitled “Questions and Answers on Hostilities Between Israel and Hezbollah”; he particularly objected to a question it posed, “What is Hezbollah’s status in relation to the conflict?,” and to the answer supplied by HRW:

Hezbollah is an organized political Islamist group based in Lebanon, with a military arm and a civilian arm, and is represented in the Lebanese parliament and government. As such a group, and as a party to the conflict with Israel, it is bound to conduct hostilities in compliance with customary international humanitarian law and common Article 3.

This was deficient, according to Bell, because it did not address the question of aggression, and he accused Human Rights Watch of “whitewashing Hezbollah’s crimes of aggression.” Another alleged fault was the failure to label Hezbollah’s acts as genocide despite the fact that Hezbollah’s leader had made statements indicating a desire to kill Jews. In early September Joshua Muravchik, writing in The Weekly Standard, also criticized HRW’s failure to denounce aggression and claimed that HRW failed to accuse Hezbollah of genocide because this would divert it “from its main mission of attacking Israel.”

Read on — it’s really a fascinating piece about how some media institutions such as the Sun and that act as an informal right-wing Israel “lobby” of the kind Walt and Mearsheimer wrote about — as well as about how an institution such as HRW (which despite its different standards for Israel and other states does a great job reporting on the Arab world generally, especially Egypt and Iraq) has to do to defend itself from these attacks.

(By the way: what is it about New York City; it has no decent daily newspaper!?! Don’t even bring up the Times…)

The Syrian opposition and Washington

Credit where credit is due: the generally anti-Arab, uber-neocon New York Sun does a decent job of keeping track of Arab opposition movements and their interaction with Washington. Here it writes about a Syrian opposition group — a rather loose group that includes Islamists — that is about to open a formal Washington office:

The National Salvation Front also has been wary of working with the Americans. But in the past two months, the leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, has taken a series of steps aimed at casting himself in a more moderate light. In August, Mr. Bayanouni told Al-Jazeera that he would be open to negotiations with Israel over the return of the Golan Heights. Mr. Dairi said yesterday that Mr. Bayanouni would even be open to meeting with American officials.

“Mr. Bayanouni would not have a problem meeting with Americans. If he is invited, he will not refuse the invitation. He has told this to me personally, and I believe him,” Mr. Dairi said.

Over the last six months, the Bush administration has expressed cautious interest in a coalition that includes the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, in part because of its frustration with the Assad regime, which the Brotherhood opposes. In March, for example, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, David Welch, noted that the State Department was interested in what the Front had to say. Those remarks came a few weeks after a summit between a former Syrian vice president who defected in 2005, Abdul Halim Khaddam, and Mr. Bayanouni, who agreed to work together toward the ouster of the Assad regime.

This new group is apparently anchored by old regime stalwarts such as Khaddam (remember his odd pan-Arab media appearance and then, when the Saudis got tired of promoting him, disappearance) and old opposition stalwarts from the local Muslim Brotherhood. The article mentions that the Reform Party of Syria, the more “liberal” Chalabi-like opposition movement, is not happy about the new office opening. Perhaps the lesson learned here from the administration, as it reportedly considers imposing a “strongman” on Iraq, is that you’re better off going with the strongmen in the first place rather than take a chance with “liberals” in the Chalabist mold. Or quite simply, that taking people with no support base in the country, no matter how impeccable their credentials might seem, is not a solution that’s going to work.

The 4:34 dance

An interesting article about Islam, the Quran, and wife-beating. The author tackles the kind of issue that is fundamentally difficult when talking about “liberal interpretation” of Islam: if it’s written pretty unambiguously in the Quran, it’s difficult to justify change. What these interpretations miss out however is that just because something is written in the Quran doesn’t mean it’s universally followed or even known about. Not to mention that certain patriarchal practices are probably more about traditional conservatism and misogyny (two traits certainly prevalent among both Arab Muslims and Arab Christians) than an understanding of religion.

Fernandez and Arabic public diplomacy

I completely agree with Abu Aardvark’s analysis of the Fernandez controversy (the State Dept. spokesman who said that the US had on occasion been stupid and arrogant in the region on Al Jazeera):

The State Department, and especially Karen Hughes, must back Alberto Fernandez to the hilt in this StupidStorm. If he’s fired, or transfered to Mongolia, the United States unilaterally disarms in the ‘war of ideas’ as currently waged in the Arab media. While we do have ‘rapid reaction’ units coming online in Dubai and London, and CENTCOM has its own media outreach team, the fact is that Fernandez has been single-handedly carrying the American flag on the Arab broadcast media for years. America simply can not afford to lose him over a silly partisan media frenzy. And if Fernandez is punished, it’s safe to guess that nobody will be foolish enough to step up and take his place and do what he did.  And that will be a major loss for America in a place where it can ill-afford any more losses at all.

Another point is that sympathy for the US in the region, which is deservedly low after the Lebanon war fiasco, is bound to stay low unless American officials begin to admit that they have made mistakes in the region. President Bush did so a few days ago with regards to Iraq — at last. Why can’t a State Dept spokesman admit that mistakes were made too? One other point is that, among my American friends, I know a lot of people who speak at least some Arabic and were at one point interested in a government career. Most of them declined to pursue a foreign service career (or, despite lucrative offers, go work in Iraq even when it was relatively safe) because of the administration’s policies and arrogance. They have so few people with skills because those tend to know more about the region and refuse, for moral reasons, to work with this administration (and under the likes of Elliott Abrams).

The first step to correcting the Bushies’ disastrous Middle East policy would be to admit they are wrong (as the president vaguely, reluctantly but partly has) and begin with a strong change of direction, notably in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (this is what the Egyptians have been asking for a long time now, by the way). Part of that change of direction will have to be a public acceptance that mistakes were made.

Just a passing phase (19)

October 22, 2006

They beat up one of our photographers today.

And smashed his cameras. Now that’s pretty tough – not so much slapping around our photographer and threatening to drag him into a car so that he could join the ranks of nameless corpses, that’s common. But destroying these big clunky professional Canons, with metal frames takes a lot of effort.

Apparently, though, grabbing a camera by its lens and hurling it with all force onto a stone floor, will do the trick.

He was taking pictures of worshippers, something this Shiite photographer does every Friday, but this was a Sunni mosque and this time he didn’t come with the Sunni journalist and he was taking pictures of people’s faces.

Maybe he was going to deliver those pictures to a Shiite death squad, went the thinking.

So the guards grabbed him, hurt him, checked his wallet, and found a few too many pictures of soulful eyed Shiite imams – not too mention the fact that he does have his connections with the Shiite militias, but then you have to if you’re going take pictures out in Sadr City.

They hit him a lot, and were prepared to take him away, when the mosque imam said that actually he had been there just a week before taking pictures with a nice Sunni fellow who was okay in those circles.

If not for that…

So they took is id, no doubt to circulate it around to the wrong people and let him go. Not surprisingly he was a bit put out when he came back to the office. The last time I saw him this furious was when he was going to the hospital to take picture of bomb victims and a photographer from a rival agency had paid off the Shiite militia hospital guards not too let any other photographers in to take pictures and he got shot at.

Photography in Baghdad is a competitive business.

Which isn’t too say we don’t all help each other out. A while back, Reuters wire service reported (correctly) that the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia, was involved with death squad activity. Apparently that article got translated in Arabic, or someone from Badr was monitoring the English wire because word soon went out that if any of their photographers were seen on the street they would be shot.

So for about a month, our agency shared photos with them. Friend in need and all that.

You see, the thing is, you can cover a war from inside a building, on a desk with a telephone. Not well, but it can be done. You can’t take pictures of it that way. You have to go out there.

The photographers are the unsung heroes, the lions of the bureau. They are the ones who actually go out and roam the streets and actually see what’s happening. Most of the rest of us huddle in our tower and watch it all fall apart from a distance.

When the former photo editor, a portly mustachioed Lebanese fellow, finally left after working Baghdad for most of the past few years, the photographers he’d trained up gave him a little ceremony and plaque. It was quite sweet.

Especially because the guy who organized it clearly was taking his cues from a Baath party farewell ceremony.

In his speech, in Arabic, the photo editor told them, “you are the real AFP, don’t forget it. You are the soul of this bureau.” Interestingly enough, his remarks in English didn’t quite go that way.

We sent some of our Sunnis out to get the photographer’s id back. The mosque guards sort of apologized – you can’t be too careful – and after all, he was taking pictures of people’s faces and maybe he shouldn’t come back to this mosque ever again, hmmm?

But every day, they will still go out and take pictures.

A few weeks earlier, I walked out of a hotel, walked down a darkened street, and walked into a restaurant full of strange people and ordered food. The place was crowded, and a few minute later, two guys I didn’t know sat down at my table.

It’s an innocent and ordinary enough thing to do in most places of the world and, as it turned out, I was in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, and it was pretty safe, but after almost a year of living the unreal life in Baghdad, even something that simple was incredibly difficult.

It’s hard to believe the three northern provinces are part of Iraq – something not lost on the inhabitants – because the streets are full of people just, like, walking, shopping, wandering around… after dark. In the capital Arbil people sit in parks, sip cokes, and watch live music in grassy parks decorated with cheesy, faux Greek columns.

In mountains Dohuk, I found a street with five liquor stores selling beer from Turkey during Ramadan.

I traveled around without a flak jacket or helmet, catching a ride in people’s cars without a bodyguard, interviewing people for a stories as though I was just an ordinary journalist.

I didn’t at first talk with my impromptu dinner companions. I assumed they were Kurdish, and I’d learned pretty early on that many Kurds don’t always feel the need to learn Arabic.

So we ate our meals in silence. The salads, the meat, the tea, the toothpicks. Finally faced with the implacable politeness of the Middle East, one of them had to offer me a cigarette before he smoked one himself.

“Want smoke,” he grunted.

“No smoke,” I grunted back.

“No, I do not smoke,” corrected the other one. There was a pause.

It turned out my two silent dinner companions not only spoke perfect English, but were Iraqi Arabs.

“I thought you were a Turk,” confessed one them, explaining his reticence to talk. “I thought a northern Turk from the way you ate.” What’s wrong with how I eat?

They were refugees, in a way. Educated, cultured multilingual Iraqis who had fled Baghdad when life at home became a pale mockery. Constantly dogged by fear for their families, always home by sunset, living an increasingly closed in life.

They came to Kurdistan so they could hear people play music at night, said one, with a sudden catch in his voice. He described the first time he took his family on a drive around Arbil, after dark. Just driving after sunset was a novelty.

The other one talked about how back in 2001 he took his family up to visit Dohuk, to see the mountains, and then, as night fell, decided it was time to go home and drove the six hours back to Baghdad through the night.

We all chuckled – the thought of driving through central Iraq in the middle of the night was just farcical now.

Kurdistan certainly has its issues. There are two political parties with an intense rivalry, there is corruption in the government, people aren’t happy with their social services and there’s unemployment – but it’s safe.

The Kurds are generally a fiercely proud lot, but they are especially fiercely proud that their areas aren’t the awful disintegrating mess of the rest of the country, it wasn’t always this way.

I spent a fair amount of time with our photographer stringer up there, a Kurd, who back in the 1980s had Egyptian school teachers so we could communicate. He told me about the dark days of the 90s. For most of that decade, rival militias battled it out in the streets of the capital and by nightfall everyone huddled inside and hoped the shooting would end.

“We had our militia phase, maybe the rest of the Iraq will get over its own.”

It’s a nice thought, that maybe it’s just a matter of time before Iraq works its way through this “phase” – sort of like braces or heavy metal music or something.

The word is that tomorrow will be Eid, ending a particularly nasty month of Ramadan here. Except that it won’t be Eid for everyone, Sunni Eid is earlier and the Shiites will do it a few days later.

Today some guy blew himself up on city bus carrying shoppers away from one of the big city markets. People were laden down with bags of children’s toys and clothes to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Four dead, 15 wounded, mostly women and children.

I know this happened because the photographer came back and showed me his pictures of children’s clothes and toys scattered all over the highway.

It’s a bit of a nasty phase.

religious art

Virgin-Mary-Ams.jpg

So here we are in Antwerp, where it seems that the friendly face of the diamond trade is now a Russian with watermelon forearms and eyes like a three-day-dead fish. Passed on the diamond-rimed .357 pendant and hit the Koninklijk Museum for a bit of high-culture in low-land light.

An hour of perusing paintings of martyrdom and judgment and I’d had my fill of the burning, hacking, drowning, beating and skewering (the kind of stuff New York Times pieces on Iraq report generically as “signs of torture�) that were, until relatively recently, the centerpiece of public diplomacy here.

Back on the street, there was a heavily made-up lady busking in the shadow of the Gothic cathedral. She was pretending—quite credibly—to be a statue of the Virgin Mary (she even had a little Baby Jesus on her lap), except, when you tossed a coin in her plate, she came alive and blew you a kiss.

This in the heartland of a vicious, protracted, sectarian conflict that took as a centerpiece Rome’s idolatry and venality. That smashed statues and people with equal abandon.

Nice to see they’ve learned to crack a smile, toss a coin, and move on. And it only took five-hundred years, a few dozen major wars and a mountain range of corpses.

There are a few more pics of my current European tour here.

Hassan al-Banna: the movie

A few days ago, Muslim Brothers celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hassan al-Banna, their movement’s founder. Among the things planned to mark this event is a new film biopic of al-Banna’s life:

Muhsin Radi says too little is known about Hasan Al-Banna, the founder of a movement which would become Egypt’s strongest opposition group and inspire Islamists across the Arab world.
   
“I hope that there will not be fears about this production. We do not want, as some people think, to spread the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Radi said. “Rather, we want people to be acquainted with the character of Hasan Al-Banna.”    

I wonder if it will be banned in the current environment… It will definitely be seen as MB propaganda, especially with all the nationalist overtones of al-Banna’s leadership in the fight against the British.

On a related note: Last night I found out that NYU was hosting a talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, featuring prominent middle-generation Muslim Brother Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh as well as Western “experts.” I rushed to get there on time only to find out that Aboul Fotouh and a Jordanian Islamist who was also due to speak were prevented from entering the United States. No reasons were officially given for this, although the NYU people said they were looking into it.

Making this stupidity worse, we were left with a panel on the Muslim Brotherhood manned entirely by Western terrorism experts — the chair was Peter Bergen — and people who seem to have a rather sophomoric understanding of the MB. I don’t claim expertise myself, but former Sunday Times journalist Nick Fielding talked about the Muslim Brothers in the vaguest possible terms and mentioned it existing across the region, including in Morocco and Algeria (where he said it was similar to the FIS). The other panelist, a researcher called Alexis Debat, was a bit better but started talking about the MB’s economic policy based on its writings in the 1940s and 1950s (or more accurately, Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam). It’s an interesting topic, but since then the global economic system has changed two or three times, so it all seemed rather beside the point. None of the panelists mentioned, except in passing, the MB’s parliamentary performance, the ongoing crackdown against it (biggest since the 1960s, remember), or more specific internal issues of governance and changes in the way it operates. And since Peter Bergen is an al-Qaeda expert, much of the discussion (at least until the point I walked out in disgust) revolved around whether the MB is a violent group, or whether it will get violent, and how Osama Bin Laden joined the MB in Jeddah when he was 17. I’m not saying that’s not interesting, but surely a little academic precision would be in order and focusing on the MB’s role in Egyptian politics would be more useful, especially as it’s highly dubious that a world Muslim Brotherhood really exists as an organized institution — a country-by-country approach seems much more fruitful.

In any case, NYU students and staff could have had information about the MB from the horse’s mouth, and in Aboul Fotouh they would have had one of its most articulate spokesmen. I would have loved to grill him on a number of issues, but instead I got Whitey and Whitey. A waste of time.