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Iraq’s elections

Here’s a few notes on some recent stories that have come out about Iraq’s elections following the recent confusion about whether they might take place in January as planned, later, not at all, or only in the half of the country that is not under the control of insurgents.

Time reveals, probably for the first time but in a disappointingly short article, that it took a House democrat to scuttle a CIA plan to covertly provide funds to pro-US candidates in Iraq:

U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving those elections — a secret “finding” written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates — whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran — but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections. But lawmakers from both parties raised questions about the idea when it was sent to Capitol Hill. In particular, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi “came unglued” when she learned about what a source described as a plan for “the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections.” Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue.

Juan Cole has a good analysis of the situation, and I personally can’t wait to see coverage of this in the Arab press. This kind of stuff confirms everything people in this part of the world believe already, and I only hope that armchair political scientists (or even the real ones) will stop pretending that this administration cares about democracy. The fact is, the same people who stridently called for war in the name of reforming the region now only want to go so far. The neo-cons aren’t as ideologically committed to democracy as everyone things, which is kind of obvious if you believe the whole Leo Strauss legacy and their belief in enlightened elitism.

I like the straight-forward by Condoleeza Rice’s spokesman though:

“I cannot in any way comment on classified matters, the existence or nonexistence of findings.”

All this being said, you can’t deny that the money Iran is pumping into groups like SCIRI and into the elections is a problem. It might be something one could address through diplomacy, if that kind of thing was practiced anymore. Mind you it’s not unusual in democracies for foreign countries to have influence over elections, it it?

The cunning plan to counter this is to have an overt election financing scheme, which will be open to all parties:

The Bush administration is exploring several steps aimed at containing Tehran’s growing influence in Iraq, according to U.S. officials, who say a split between the Pentagon and the State Department has paralyzed the administration’s ability to craft a long-term policy on Iran for three years.

As one measure, the United States has earmarked $40 million to help Iraq’s political parties mobilize — and, subtly, to counter Iran’s support for its allies in an emerging race to influence the outcome, U.S. officials said.

With the election in Iraq four months away, the administration has grown increasingly alarmed about the resources Tehran is pouring into Iraq’s already well-organized Shiite religious parties, which give them an edge over struggling moderate and nonsectarian parties, the officials said.

Over the past year, Iran has provided tens of millions of dollars and other material support to a range of Iraqi parties, including the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party and rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army, U.S. officials say. The U.S. funds will in theory be available to all Iraqi parties, although the U.S. goal is to bolster the prospects of secular groups — on the premise that Iranian-backed parties are unlikely to turn to America for training or money, U.S. officials said.

Of course no one’s taken money from both the US and Iran before.

Hold on a minute. There is a friend of Iran who’s taken quite a lot of money from his friends in Washington. And he’s back in the game: Ahmed Chalabi has been acquitted from the evidence against him, who were found by an Iraqi judge to be without merit:

The judge, Zuhair al-Maliky, said in a telephone interview that he decided about a week and a half ago that “the evidence was not enough to bring the case to trial.” If more evidence emerges, he said, the case will be reopened.

The move appears to be a minor victory by Mr. Chalabi over the interim government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a longtime rival of Mr. Chalabi’s. The government announced the counterfeiting charge against Mr. Chalabi in August, while he was on vacation at a summer home in Iran. At the time, it appeared to many that the charge was a move by Mr. Allawi to dissuade him from re-entering the country.

But Mr. Chalabi did return to Iraq and proceeded to denounce the government, meeting with reporters to proclaim his innocence and vow to return to political life. He aligned himself with Shiite religious leaders here, recasting himself as a champion of Shiite rights.

It was the latest twist in Mr. Chalabi’s fortunes since he returned to Iraq in the spring of 2003 after decades in exile. Once favored by the Bush administration to be Iraq’s first leader after Saddam Hussein’s fall, he has spent the last few months fighting for his political future.

Well he probably has his financing sorted out by now, as well as the advantage of not being seen as a US puppet like Allawi. Ahmed Chalabi may be one of the early twenty-first century’s great political survivor, you have to hand it to him.

Kevin Drum reminds us that there recently was an election in Iraq for four vice-chairmen of the Iraqi National Accord and that the candidates who were elected were, in order, a Shia fundamentalist, a communist, a member of interim prime minister Allawi’s group, and a sunni fundamentalist. He asks if this is a taste of things to come. It’s been little-reported and there are some good links to follow up, so read it.

Even King Abdullah is getting lukewarm about elections (mind you, he’s always felt that way about elections at home):

“It seems impossible to me to organize indisputable elections in the chaos we see today,” the king told French daily Le Figaro before meeting President Jacques Chirac in Paris.

“If the elections take place in the current disorder, the best-organized faction will be that of the extremists and the result will reflect that advantage.”

Trust the Tehran Times to be interested in the conference on the election planned in Egypt in mid-November. If things were going to happen as planned — i.e. the elections held in January — would there be a need for a conference? Why isn’t the election-monitoring being planned right now with the OSCE or some other organization with election-monitoring experience? There might not be anything intrinsically wrong with postponing the election, but it would be nice that the planning is taking place with the help of organizations with a proven reputation at running elections.

From my hotel room I just watched Thomas Melia, a Georgetown professor and “expert on democracy and governance” argue on BBC World that “commentators should be careful” and refer to the upcoming elections in Iraq as only “partially democratic.” He’s just returned from Baghdad where he conducted a survey on the issue, so I hope that what this means is explained further when it’s published.

I think I’ve said it before, but you really couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

They picked the wrong one

A little break from coverage of the Arab world, but worth noting:

Minister: N. Korea Has Nuclear Deterrent:

UNITED NATIONS – North Korea says it has turned the plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into nuclear weapons to serve as a deterrent against increasing U.S. nuclear threats and to prevent a nuclear war in northeast Asia.

Warning that the danger of war on the Korean peninsula “is snowballing,” Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon provided details Monday of the nuclear deterrent that he said North Korea has developed for self-defense.

He told the U.N. General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting that Pyongyang had “no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent” because of U.S. policies that he claimed were designed to “eliminate” North Korea and make it “a target of preemptive nuclear strikes.”

So it’s not like the only member of the Axis of Evil not to have WMDs was attacked while the other two rushed to finalize their production lines or anything. North Korea has them now and is willing to say so publicly. Iran perhaps already has them or is about to make them, is barely concealing its ambitions and doesn’t really want to collaborate with the IAEA. And there isn’t much anyone can do about any of this at the point.

You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

Packer on Bush and Iraq

George Packer holds no punches in a recent New Yorker article, which is well worth a read for a clear look at what should be the central issue of the election and why Kerry seems to be losing it.

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:

“He forced a congressional vote on the war just before the 2002 midterm elections. He trumpeted selective and misleading intelligence. He displayed intense devotion to classifying government documents, except when there was political advantage in declassifying them. He fired or sidelined government officials and military officers who told the American public what the Administration didn’t want it to hear. He released forecasts of the war’s cost that quickly became obsolete, and then he ignored the need for massive expenditures until a crucial half year in Iraq had been lost. His communications office in Baghdad issued frequently incredible accounts of the progress of the war and the reconstruction. He staffed the occupation with large numbers of political loyalists who turned out to be incompetent. According to Marine officers and American officials in Iraq, he ordered and then called off critical military operations in Falluja against the wishes of his commanders, with no apparent strategic plan. He made sure that blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib settled almost entirely on the shoulders of low-ranking troops. And then, in the middle of the election campaign, he changed the subject.”

. . .

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town: “In refusing to look at Iraq honestly, President Bush has made defeat there more likely. This failing is only the most important repetition of a recurring theme in the war against radical Islam: the distance between Bush’s soaring, often inspiring language and the insufficiency of his actions. When he speaks, as he did at the Republican Convention, about the power of freedom to change the world, he is sounding deep notes in the American political psyche. His opponent comes nowhere close to making such music. But if Iraq looks nothing like the President’s vision—if Iraq is visibly deteriorating, and no one in authority will admit it—the speeches can produce only illusion or cynicism. In what may be an extended case of overcompensation, so much of the President’s conduct in the war has become an assertion of personal will. Bush’s wartime hero, Winston Churchill, offered his countrymen nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Bush offers optimistic forecasts, permanent tax cuts, and his own stirring resolve.”

Hersh and the Egyptian abductees

The Guardian is running excerpts from Seymour Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. The one linked to below is particularly interesting for those of us who have been following this from Egypt, explaining how US intelligence kidnapped two Egyptian Islamists (at least one of whom was a member of Islamic Jihad, Ayman Al Zawahri’s organization before he joined Al Qaeda) from Sweden and handed them over to the Egyptian security services, who used their favorite information-gathering methods — electrodes attached to genitals — to make them more cooperative.

Rumsfeld’s dirty war on terror:

On December 18 2001, American operatives participated in what amounted to the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had sought asylum in Sweden. The Egyptians, believed by American intelligence to be linked to Islamic militant groups, were abruptly seized in the late afternoon and flown out of Sweden a few hours later on a US government-leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they underwent extensive and brutal interrogation. “Both were dirty,” a former senior intelligence official, who has extensive knowledge of special-access programmes, told me, “but it was pretty blatant.”

The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed. Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance. Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama bin Laden. In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison.

There are a number of other alleged Egyptian Islamists that are thought to have been kidnapped from whatever country they were in and flown to Cairo for torture and interrogation, including one who was apprehended in Syria and is thought to have died while in custody. We’re not likely to find much more about them, though, at least not if we don’t have the kind of contacts Hersh has in the US intelligence community.

Novak: Bush will get out of Iraq quickly

Bob Novak, the conservative columnist who outed Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, says he believes the Bush administration, if re-elected, will leave Iraq as quick as it can:

“Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush’s decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

Getting out now would not end expensive U.S. reconstruction of Iraq, and certainly would not stop the fighting. Without U.S. troops, the civil war cited as the worst-case outcome by the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate would be a reality. It would then take a resolute president to stand aside while Iraqis battle it out.

The end product would be an imperfect Iraq, probably dominated by Shia Muslims seeking revenge over long oppression by the Sunni-controlled Baathist Party. The Kurds would remain in their current semi-autonomous state. Iraq would not be divided, reassuring neighboring countries — especially Turkey — that are apprehensive about ethnically divided nations.

This messy new Iraq is viewed by Bush officials as vastly preferable to Saddam’s police state, threatening its neighbors and the West. In private, some officials believe the mistake was not in toppling Saddam but in staying there for nation building after the dictator was deposed.”

Perhaps not particularly credible — although I don’t quite see how it helps the Bush administration except by signaling hesitant voters that Bush might end US involvement in Iraq — but intriguing. If Novak wrote about it, then someone must have leaked it to him and it was probably on purpose considering how leak-proof this White House has been. If true, I doubt there will ever be a “humanitarian” preemptive war again.

“Blaming Saddam for everything”

Jimmy Breslin’s editorial in Newsday is mind-boggling for two reasons: one, that such a great number of Americans seem to think that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks despite all the media attention that he is getting since his arrest, and secondly that the role of the Bush administration in spreading that notion is still not seriously attacked. Here’s what one person told Breslin, who was interviewing people near the World Trade Center:

“For me Hussein did it, the other guy, too. These people both is together in Iraq and in the trade center,” Garcia said. “If Saddam don’t do nothing, why he go into a hole? Because he is afraid we catch him for the World Trade Center that he did with bin Laden? The both of them together.”

Saddam has plenty to blamed for in his own country. Perhaps the misguided notion that he was involved in 9/11 will dissipate when he is put on trial and not charged with conspiring in that attack.

Bush launches sanctions against Syria

I missed a few days ago with the whole Saddam capture thing, but it’s worth noting that President Bush has (reluctantly?) signed the Syria Accountability Act.

The legislation says Syria has provided a safe haven for anti-Israel terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad and is accused of pursuing the development and production of biological and chemical weapons.

It states that Syria must end its support of terrorists, terminate its 27-year military presence in Lebanon, stop efforts to obtain or produce weapons of mass destruction and long-range ballistic missiles and interdict terrorists and weapons from entering Iraq.

If Syria fails to meet those conditions, the president must ban sales of dual-use items, which can have both civilian and military applications.

He also must impose at least two out of a list of six possible penalties: a ban on exports to Syria, prohibition of U.S. businesses’ operating in Syria, restrictions on Syrian diplomats in the United States, limits on Syrian airline flights in the United States, reduction of diplomatic contacts or a freeze on Syrian assets in the United States.

At the White House’s insistence, the law gives Bush broad leeway to waive both the dual-use ban and the two sanctions on the basis of national security, or after determining that Syria has taken the actions required.

The White House may therefore choose to limit the effects of the Act, and it seems that for now that none of it has been implemented yet. Syria has called for dialogue with the US, and other Arab countries have also urged Washington to use a different approach to deal with Damascus, and this may a type of negotiating tactic. On the other hand, the Bush administration is usually direct about its feelings and some think that this is opening the way to war against Syria:

The Accountability Act sets out, in even more detail than the administration had done over Iraq, a host of reasons for an invasion of Syria. And of course President Bush did not forget to mention the lack of democracy in Syria in his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6th, where he invoked democratization as his expediently retrospective rationale for invading Iraq.

I’m not sure whether the Bush administration could afford another war even if it wanted to, but a doubt lingers in my mind. I still remember when Richard Armitage went to Lebanon and said that Hizbullah was the “A-Team” of terrorism and Al Qaeda only the B-Team. Speaking of Hizbullah, it’s worth mentioning that it is hardly the terrorist group it used to be, having morphed into a thriving political party and provider of social services for disaffected Lebanese Shias.

Congress to consider “National Security Language Act”

Rush Holt, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, and 34 others (mostly Democrats) have cosponsored a bill that would provide increased federal funding for languages considered to be critical to national security.

Al Qaeda operates in over 75 countries, where hundreds of languages and dialects are spoken. However, 99 percent of American high school, college and university programs concentrate on a dozen (mostly European) languages. In fact, more college students currently study Ancient Greek (20,858) than Arabic (10,596), Korean (5,211), Persian (1,117), and Pashto (14) put together. We need to do more to make sure that America has the language professionals necessary to defend our national security. This cannot be done overnight. We are already years overdue.

As reported by the 911 Joint Inquiry in July, our intelligence community is at 30 percent readiness in languages critical to national security. Despite this alarming statistic, we do not appear to be taking aggressive action to address this problem. When I asked a panel of intelligence experts at a recent Intelligence hearing what the federal government is doing to increase the pool of critical need
language professionals, they answered with silence. Two years after the events of September 11, we are still failing to address one the most fundamental security problems facing this nation.

This National Security Language Act would:

* Provide loan forgiveness of up to $10,000 for university students who major in a critical need foreign language and then take a job either in the federal workforce or as a language teacher.

* Provide new grants to American universities to establish intensive in-country language study programs and to develop programs that encourage students to pursue advanced science and technology studies in a foreign language.

* Establish grants for foreign language partnerships between local school districts and foreign language departments at institutions of higher education.

* Commission a national study to identify heritage communities here in the United States with native speakers of critical foreign languages and make them targets of a federal marketing campaign encouraging students to pursue degrees in those languages.

Here are the languages covered in the text of the bill (pdf) as submitted to Congress:

The term less-commonly taught foreign languages includes the languages of Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Pashto, Persian-Farsi, Serbian-Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and any other language identified by the Secretary of Education, in consultation with the Defense Language Institute, the Foreign Service Institute, and the National Security Education Program, as a foreign language critical to the national security of the United States.

This can only be a good thing. Since 9/11 intelligence officials and others have noted that there is a dearth of Arabic and other Middle Eastern language speakers in the intelligence community. The targeting of “heritage communities” is a particularly good thing, especially considering that these have often been historically under-represented compared to other groups in certain parts of the federal government for political reasons — see for instance the State Dept. Near Eastern Affairs bureau, which for a good part of the 1990s was dominated by pro-Israeli appointees at the senior level.

NYT: Iraqi agent denies ever meeting Muhammad Atta

It’s incredible this story has been kept around for so long considering the lack of evidence, but it seems that there is a new nail in the coffin of the alleged Iraqi intelligence-Muhammad Atta Prague meeting. The New York Times’ excellent intelligence correspondent, James Risen, reported today that the Iraqi agent who was supposed to have been at the meeting, Ahmed Khalil Al Ani (under US custody since July) has told his American interrogators that the meeting never happened, as had Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubayda beforehand. This also confirms the analysis given from the beginning by the CIA and the FBI, which was at odds with what other members of the intelligence community wanted to believe.

That put the intelligence agencies at odds with hard-liners at the Pentagon and the White House, who came to believe that C.I.A. analysts had ignored evidence that proved links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Eventually, the Prague meeting became a central element in a battle between the C.I.A. and the administration’s hawks over prewar intelligence.

Since American forces toppled the Hussein government and the United States gained access to captured Iraqi officials and Iraqi files, the C.I.A. has not yet uncovered evidence that has altered its prewar assessment concerning the connections between Mr. Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, officials said.

American intelligence officials say they believe there were contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 1990’s, but there is no proof that they ever conducted joint operations.

Senior operatives of Al Qaeda who have been captured by the United States since Sept. 11 have also denied any alliance between the organization and Mr. Hussein.

It’s good that the NYT is giving this story its due. I remember buying a copy of the Times in May 2002 and being dismayed that a CIA denial that a meeting ever took place was buried in a 100-word article on page 14. The story reporting the administration’s allegation of Saddam-Osama ties, and the Prague meeting, must have been front page news — but they buried the denial.

This new evidence will no doubt be ignored by those who continue to want to link Saddam’s Iraq with Al Qaeda, as the Weekly Standard did recently with “Case Closed“, a story essentially peddling a Douglas Feith memo that contained no new information. But that was quickly debunked here and here.

State Dept. Arabist found dead

A story about the death of John Kokal, a State Department official working in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (INR/NESA), is making the rounds on the alternative websites, but not the mainstream press. Many are reminded of the death of Dr. David Kelly, the British WMD expert:

In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal’s body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal’s death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on November 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media.

Kokal had reportedly worked on Iraq’s WMD program and had been part of the State Dept. team that doubted the case put forward by the Defense Dept. on Iraq. A French news site suggests that Kokal may have been part of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an organization of intelligence officials that have denounced in the press and in open letters the White House’s manipulation of intelligence on Iraq.