Juan Cole's blog is at: http://www.juancole.com

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Find books by Juan Cole here:

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Blowback from the GOP's holy war

 

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/02/01/islamophobia/

 

The 2008 Republican race has left a bitter legacy of sloganeering against Muslims.

It may well haunt the party this November.

 

By Juan Cole

 

Feb. 1, 2008 | For much of January, one might have thought that the Republican candidates for president were already competing against a single opponent. Not one called Hillary or Barack, but with a moniker even more chilling in the eyes of hard-line Republicans: Islamic fascism.

 

The American public, worried about mortgages, recession and a seemingly interminable war in Iraq, was unimpressed -- those who fear- mongered the most about Muslim terrorists have faltered at the polls. Even the remaining front-runners, John McCain and Mitt Romney, have said bigoted things about Muslims and their religion. But Islamophobia as a campaign strategy has failed, and it may well come back to haunt the Republicans in the general election.

 

Back when the GOP presidential field was still flush with tough- talking right-wingers, no one was more outrageous in targeting Muslims than Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who suggested that Muslim terrorists inside America were plotting the imminent detonation of an atomic bomb on U.S. soil. How to prevent this Tom Clancy scenario? "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo declared. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

 

That sort of wild-eyed bigotry only fuels the cycle of mistrust and vengeance. One can only imagine how much more difficulty Tancredo generated for U.S. diplomats attempting to explain to America's Muslim allies why a presidential candidate was talking about nuking Islam's holiest cities, the larger with a population nearly that of Houston.

 

But the failure of Islamophobia as a campaign strategy is no better illustrated than by the spectacular flame-out of Rudy Giuliani. Throughout his campaign (deep-sixed after his dismal showing in Tuesday's Florida primary), the former New York mayor evoked the Sept. 11 attacks at an absurd rate. Giuliani and his advisors appeared to revel in demonizing Muslims. They also reveled in their own ignorance -- never learning the difference between "Islamic" and "Muslim."

 

"Islamic" has to do with the religion founded by the prophet Mohammed. We speak of Islamic ethics or Islamic art, as things that derive from the religion. "Muslim," on the contrary, describes the believer. It would be perfectly all right to talk about Muslim terrorists, but calling them Islamic terrorists or Islamic fascists implies that the religion of Islam is somehow essentially connected to those extremist movements.

 

Giuliani complained that during their debates, Democratic rivals "never mentioned the word 'Islamic terrorist,' 'Islamic extremist,' 'Islamic fascist,' 'terrorist,' whatever combination of those words you want to use, the words never came up." He added, "I can't imagine who you insult if you say 'Islamic terrorist.' You don't insult anyone who is Islamic who isn't a terrorist."

 

But people are not "Islamic," they are Muslim. And one most certainly does insult Muslims by tying their religion to movements such as terrorism or fascism. Muslims perceive a double standard in this regard: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols would never be called "Christian terrorists" even though they were in close contact with the Christian Identity Movement. No one would speak of Christofascism or Judeofascism as the Republican candidates speak of Islamofascism. Muslims point out that persons of Christian heritage invented fascism, not Muslims, and deny that Muslim movements have any link to the mass politics of the 1930s in Europe.

 

Giuliani's pledge to take the United States on an offensive against Islamic fascism, which he also said would be a long-term battle, failed to excite the imagination of voters. It may well have alarmed them in a way different from what Giuliani intended: If, by Giuliani's logic, the United States is only on the "defensive" now, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what would being on the offensive look like? Would Giuliani have started four wars? Interestingly, Giuliani did especially poorly in Florida among retired and active- duty military personnel.

 

Giuliani was also hurt when the co-chair of his veterans' campaign in New Hampshire, John Deady praised Giuliani for being able to stop "the rise of the Muslims," an effort necessary to continue, he said, until "we defeat them or chase them back to their caves, or, in other words, get rid of them." When asked if he was really condemning all members of the religion, Deady replied, "I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They're all Muslims." Deady was forced to resign after a video of his remarks was put on the web by the Guardian. Other Giuliani advisors have had some bigoted things to say about Muslims as well. Rep. Peter King of New York complained that "unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country." Daniel Pipes, a professional Islamophobe advising Giuliani, once said it would be dangerous to let American Muslims vote.

 

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has done well among evangelicals but has had difficulty attracting votes from other segments of the Republican Party, had a revealing response to the assassination of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. "I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border," he said. He added, "And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders." In fact, there are almost no Pakistani illegal aliens to speak of in the United States. Only 13 percent of the estimated 12 million persons in the United States illegally are estimated to be Asian, but almost all of them are East Asian. Pakistani and Indian immigrants, moreover, are among the wealthiest immigrants in the country.

 

Current GOP front-runner John McCain has been prone to hyperbole and has let some bigoted statements escape his lips as well. He has said that the threat from Islamic extremism is greater than the one presented by the Soviet Union. Recently, McCain proclaimed, "I'm not interested in trading with al-Qaida. All they want to trade is burqas... " The senator seemed to be relating the Muslim custom of veiling to terrorism. The Detroit Free Press, whose city has one of the largest Muslim populations, reported on Jan. 12 that McCain's remarks were hurtful to American Muslims. "Local Muslims say that criticizing al-Qaida is legitimate, but wonder why he would make a snide remark about a dress? The remark was especially bothersome, some said, considering that McCain's adopted daughter, Bridget McCain, is from one of the biggest Muslim countries, Bangladesh." One would think that raising a daughter from the Muslim world in the United States today would be difficult enough, even without the adoptive father's denigrating the customs of the women from that culture.

 

On another occasion, asked whether a Muslim candidate for president would be acceptable, McCain replied, "I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don't say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would -- I just feel that that's an important part of our qualifications to lead."

 

But according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." Secularists and Jews joined American Muslims in condemning McCain's assertion that the United States was founded on Christian principles, and that Christian faith could be a key determinate for taking the Oval Office.

 

McCain's misconceptions about Muslims and perceived hostility toward them predates his 2008 presidential campaign. In 2005, he said on "The Charlie Rose Show" that a Muslim had killed the Indian political and spiritual figure Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, the assassin belonged to a radical Hindu organization, the RSS.

 

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has, like his peers, regularly invoked the dangers of "Islamic fascism." He allegedly told one Muslim-American he would not put a Muslim in his Cabinet, since there were not enough Muslim-Americans to justify it. (Romney later denied the charge).

 

Why might all this rhetoric targeting Muslims be unwise? For one thing, allowing the Christian conservative base to set an agenda that demonizes Muslims contains the danger of turning off more moderate segments of the GOP and American voters at large. McCain's comment on the importance of a president's being Christian appeared to have backfired on him in precisely that way.

 

Moreover, Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans are swing voters in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. While they tended to vote for George W. Bush in 2000, by 2004 these groups overwhelmingly supported John Kerry, and the heavy-handed and bigoted rhetoric of the Republican candidates may drive them away from the GOP altogether.

 

The candidates who played to fears of "Islamic fascism" the most -- Tancredo, Huckabee and Giuliani -- failed to light any fire under partisans in the party, and they have now faded from the scene. But the campaign has already left behind a bitter legacy of sloganeering against a single religious and ethnic community. The Republicans have repeatedly asserted that Islam has been perverted by radicals; their rhetoric effectively reduced American Muslims to second-class citizens and branded them as suspicious. Perhaps most worrisome of all: If any of the remaining candidates does win the presidency, he is going to have to cultivate close relations with Middle Eastern regimes to even begin resolving the mess in that region. And that president will have to do so saddled from the start with a legacy of denigrating Islam and Muslims.

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Guerrilla War 3.0 in Iraq

 

http://www.juancole.com/2007/12/attacks-in-bayji-yusufiya-elsewhere.html

 

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Attacks in Bayji, Yusufiya, Elsewhere, Kill 32, Wound Dozens; Dulaimi's Sunnis Unlikely to Rejoin Government

 

Guerrillas differ from conventional armies in that they typically avoid direct, conventional engagements on the battlefield. They melt away before a conventional army's advance, and then reemerge to engage in sniping, sneak attacks, and bombings from an unexpected quarter. The advantage of Fred Kagan's troop escalation or "surge" is that it allowed a tamping down of violence in Baghdad through a US campaign to disarm the Sunni Arabs there. There were two disadvantages of it. First, it allowed the Shiite militias to take advantage of the disarming of many Sunni Arabs, and to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from the capital during the past six months. As a result, Baghdad is virtually a Shiite city now, like Isfahan or Shiraz. Second, the Sunni guerrillas melted away in West Baghdad, either laying low or relocating to other provinces, so that the violence was displaced to the provinces. Very likely when the extra US troops are removed, the guerrillas will reemerge in the capital, though their loss of so many Sunni neighborhoods to the ethnic cleansing may put them at a disadvantage now.

 

The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has clearly regrouped outside Baghdad and is deploying high explosives with deveastating effect in Diyala, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Kirkuk provinces, to the northeast and due north of Baghdad. Cells also remain active in the northern reaches of Babil province just south of Baghdad, where Saddam had planted Sunni families in what had been a Shiite area, sowing the seeds of conflict when the Shiites returned to reclaim their property from 2003.

 

There were two big bombings in Diyala on Friday and a major attack in Mosul, a city nearly the size of Houston several hundred miles north of the capital On Saturday, the guerrillas deployed two big car bombs in Bayji, an oil refining center just northwest of Saddam's home town of Tikrit north of Baghdad. One car exploded with massive force outside the house of Ali al-Juburi, the counter-terrorism chief in the local police force, killing 11 individuals (7 of them policemen) and wounding 44 other persons. Another bomb targeting a police station killed 6 and wounded 15, and damaged surrounding buildings.

 

South of Baghdad in Babil Province, the US military forestalled a planned attack on American soldiers by a guerrilla cell at Yusufiya. They engaged well-armed cell members and the fighting grew so deadly that the US troops had to call in air strikes on their foe. They killed 10 guerrillas from the air and found a weapons cache. A mortar attack in nearby Mahmudiya killed one child and wounded two others. In addition, in Baghdad itself guerrillas used a roadside bomb to wound two police commandoes (these are usually recruited from the Shiite Badr Corps, the Iran-trained paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (ISCI).

 

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Adnan Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front, has been released from any confinement and is back in his house. But he expressed doubt that his bloc will rejoin the Shiite government of Nuri al-Maliki. He said Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had sent over some Peshmerga (Kurdish) bodyguards to protect Dulaimi. A car bomb was found near his house Thursday a week ago and one of his personal bodyguards had the key. Dulaimi claims that he the target of a Salafi Jihadi assassination plot, with the extremists having infiltrated his staff. (Whether that is true or not, it has happened to other Sunni politicians cooperating with the new government). Al-Hayat says that its sources in ISCI maintain that they are still negotiating with the Iraqi Islamic Party, a constituent of the Iraqi Accord Front, in hopes it will rejoin the al-Maliki government.

 

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Mosul city council has decided to dig a ditch around the northern city of 1.5 million to keep radical Sunni extremists out. The council has seen an uptick of relocation of militants to the city from Baghdad. Cities haven't had moats since the medieval period. Such modern advancement, the Bush administration has brought to Iraq.

 

Leila Fadel's blog from Baghdad is revealing on the fears of a teenager that his mother may end up killed for working for a Western news service. He wishes he had more typical teenage problems, but his are that he cannot bring home friends since they would find out about his mother's employment.

 

Labels: Iraq

 

posted by Juan Cole @ 12/09/2007 06:30:00 AM

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Juan Cole on U.S. War Plans Against Iran, Turkey

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/23/middle_east_analyst_historian_juan_cole

 

October 23, 2007

 

 

Middle East Analyst & Historian Juan Cole on U.S. War Plans Against Iran, Turkey and His New Book “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East” As President Bush seeks $196 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we speak to Juan Cole about Iraq war and whether the war could spread to Iran and Turkey. includes rush transcript

 

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President Bush has asked Congress for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The request brings this year’s total to more than $196 billion—by the far the highest amount since the 9/11 attacks. If the trend continues, war funding could top $1 trillion by the time Bush leaves office. By some measures, that amount would exceed the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

 

The record-high request comes as the drumbeat continues for opening a new war in Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney warned Sunday that Iran faces “serious consequences” over its nuclear program and alleged role in Iraq. His comments came days after President Bush spoke for the first time of “World War III” if Iran obtains the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And the threat has been bipartisan: the three leading Democratic presidential candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards—have all declared that no option is off the table to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

 

Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan. He runs an analytical website called "Informed Comment" where he provides a daily roundup of news and events in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. In his new book, Juan Cole steps back from his widely regarded analysis of contemporary politics to chronicle the first Western invasion of the Middle East since the Crusades. “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East” is a history of France’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, a conquest that still has repercussions today. Rush Transcript This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, More... AMY GOODMAN: President Bush has asked Congress for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The request brings this year’s total to more than $196 billion, by far the highest amount since the 9/11 attacks. If the trend continues, war funding could top $1 trillion by the time Bush leaves office. By some measures, that amount would exceed the cost of the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

 

The record-high request comes as the drumbeat continues for opening a new war with Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney warned Sunday that Iran faces “serious consequences” over its nuclear program and alleged role in Iraq. His comments came days after President Bush spoke for the first time of “World War III” if Iran obtains the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And the threat has been bipartisan: the three leading Democratic presidential candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards—have all declared that no option is off the table to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

 

Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. He runs an analytic website called " Informed Comment," where he provides a daily roundup of news and events in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. In his new book, Juan Cole steps back from his widely regarded analysis of contemporary politics to chronicle the first Western invasion of the Middle East since the Crusades. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East is a history of France’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, a conquest the still has repercussions today.

 

Juan Cole joins us now from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Cole.

 

JUAN COLE: Thanks so much, Amy.

 

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Before we go back in time, can you talk about this latest news, the latest threats against Iran? How serious are they? Do you think a US war with Iran is imminent?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, I think the Cheney camp in the Bush administration very much would like to bomb the nuclear research facilities, which, as far as we know, are civilian facilities near Esfahan. And what has been leaked from their office is that they’ve talked about various stratagems for getting up such an attack and that they have been blocked so far by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and by Secretary of State Condi Rice.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the shifting rationale? I mean, we saw in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—or was it Saddam Hussein was a tyrant?—that didn’t fly with the US, so they went with WMD, and Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD. We hear about the nuclear issue, and then we hear about the shifting rationale, that the American people see it as too similar to the missing WMD in Iraq, so that the rationale would be that Iranian soldiers are fighting in Iraq and killing US soldiers.

 

JUAN COLE: Well, the most disheartening thing for the Cheney war camp must be that a recent poll shows that they’ve actually managed to convince the vast majority of Americans that Iran is trying to get a nuclear bomb and that Iran is actively killing US troops in Iraq. Neither thing is actually in evidence. They’re possible, but it hasn’t been proven. But most Americans have accepted this story. And yet, 78% of Americans say that they don’t want a US attack on Iran. So, so far, all of the rationales that they have trotted out and trumpeted through the media for attacking Iran have not been sufficient to convince the American people that action is necessary.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Cole, I want to ask you about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the US last month. He spoke at Columbia University in a highly contested address. Many who criticized Columbia for hosting the event later praised Columbia President Lee Bollinger for his harsh introduction to Ahmadinejad.

 

LEE BOLLINGER: Frankly—I close with this comment—frankly and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will, in itself, be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do.

 

Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country that this only further undermines your position in Iran, with all the many goodhearted intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country—was at one of the meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations—so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.

 

I am only a professor—I am only a professor who is also a university president. And today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better. Thank you.

 

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. Professor Cole, your response?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, my own analysis is that Bollinger solved a problem that he had, which was that his—one of his deans had invited Ahmadinejad the previous year to speak at Columbia, and Bollinger had shot that down. His faculty were angry at him for suppressing this man’s freedom of speech in the United States. And so, I think he felt he had to extend the invitation this year.

 

On the other hand, he wants to rebuild the area around Columbia University. He wants to put a new theater district up there. He needs the help of the New York real estate community, many of whom are warm supporters of Israel and who would be offended by Ahmadinejad’s invitation. So I think he solved the problem by inviting Ahmadinejad, and so mollifying his faculty, and then attacking Ahmadinejad, and so mollifying his real estate backers.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What about Ahmadinejad’s power in Iran?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, Ahmadinejad is a ceremonial president. He is a little bit more active, has stronger links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps than his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, who, by the way—the previous president of Iran—has upbraided Ahmadinejad for his comments regarding Holocaust denial. So Ahmadinejad is—he is not commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He can’t order anybody to kill anybody. He can’t launch a war. He can’t launch missiles. Those powers are vested in the Supreme Jurisprudent, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad can, you know, cut the ribbons and open bridges and things like that. So the American right’s fascination with him is entirely misplaced, and it’s because he’s a quirky character and he has objectionable views, and so it’s easy to use him to demonize Iran.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about General Petraeus’s report. General Petraeus spoke before Congress last month. He accused Iran of waging a proxy war inside Iraq.

 

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: In the past six months, we have also targeted Shia militia extremists, capturing a number of senior leaders and fighters, as well as the deputy commander of Lebanese Hezbollah Department 2800, the organization created to support the training, arming, funding and, in some cases, direction of the militia extremists by the Iranian Republican Guard Corps Quds Force. These elements have assassinated and kidnapped Iraqi governmental leaders, killed and wounded our soldiers with advanced explosive devices provided by Iran and indiscriminately rocketed civilians in the international zone and elsewhere. It is increasingly apparent to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi special groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.

 

AMY GOODMAN: That’s General Petraeus testifying before Congress. Professor Cole, your response?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, the whole story doesn’t make much sense to me. The main backers of Iran in Iraq are the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was formed in Iran at the suggestion of Ayatollah Khomeini by Iraqi Shiite expatriates, and has a paramilitary, the Badr Corps, which is trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The Badr Corps and the Supreme Council are America’s closest allies among the Shiites of Iraq.

 

I think this is really a jealous girlfriend story. I think the US wants the fundamentalist Shiite parties and militias for itself, doesn’t want to have to compete with Iran for their affection for clientelage, and so is slamming Iran as a way of driving a wedge between them. All of the Iranian personnel that have been kidnapped by the United States, detained by the United States, have been found in territory of US allies—Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council, or up in Irbil among our Kurdish allies. So the idea that the Iranians are building up rogue units of the nativist Mahdi Army, who are slum kids in Iraq, don’t like Iran—I don’t know—doesn’t strike me as very likely. And I think that the US military is getting bad intelligence on these things from some of its contacts, including the cult-like terrorist organization, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, which Saddam used against Iran and which the Pentagon is still using against Iran.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And the fact that there are more Saudi fighters in Iraq than Iranian, but that is almost never raised, either in the press or by the administration?

 

JUAN COLE: To my knowledge, the United States has never captured any Iranian with arms. There were 136 foreign detainees, the last we knew. There are 24,000 Iraqi ones. And the 136 contain no Iranians at all. 45% of them, earlier in the summer, were Saudis. I think that proportion has changed, but it’s such a small number. But, in any case, there is no proof of any actual Iranian military activity inside Iraq whatsoever.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, on the issue of Iran, the resignation of the nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, what is the significance of this?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, it’s very bad news. In many ways, it’s a sign that President Ahmadinejad, who does have the power to appoint ambassadors and some of the diplomatic corps in conjunction with the approval of the Supreme Leader Khamenei, is gradually putting his people into place. Larijani was a very experienced diplomat, well liked among his European interlocutors, and is being replaced by someone of far less experience who, however, is close to Ahmadinejad. So, it’s cronyism. I think it’s a very bad move on Iran’s part and probably worsens their posture with regard to these negotiations over their nuclear program.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break. When we come back to Professor Cole, we’re going to talk about Turkey, Iraq and what the invading army of Napoleon in Egypt has to do with today. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Juan Cole’s book is called Napoleon’s Egypt. Stay with us.

 

break

 

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Juan Cole, professor of history, University of Michigan. He’s joining us from Ann Arbor from the campus. He runs an analytical website called " Informed Comment," and has written a new book called Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

 

Let’s go today’s top story: tension remaining high on the Turkish-Iraq border, following the killing of seventeen Turkish troops by Kurdish militants over the weekend. How significant is this?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, it’s extremely significant. I mean, imagine what would happen in this country if a guerrilla group based in a neighboring country came over the border and killed seventeen US troops. That would be a war. And the Kurdish guerrilla movement, the Kurdish Workers Party, based now in Iraq, but originally from Eastern Anatolia, from the Turkish regions, is conducting a guerrilla war against the Turkish military. It is being given safe harbor by Kurdish politicians on the Iraqi side.

 

And, in essence, the United States has created this situation in which a NATO ally—people forget Turkey fought alongside the United States in Korea; it’s got troops in Afghanistan—a NATO ally of the United States is being attacked and its troops killed by a terrorist organization, so designated by the State Department, that essentially has US auspices. The US is responsible for security in Iraq.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And how connected is the US to the PKK, or is it at all?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, the United States doesn’t like the PKK and doesn’t have much connection to it, but the United States has allied with the Iraqi Kurdish leaders, who are the most reliable allies of the United States in Iraq: Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. And Barzani, in particular, it seems to me, just de facto, is giving harbor to, giving haven to, these PKK guerrillas. So the United States needs Barzani and needs his support. He’s doing an oil deal with Hunt Oil, which is close to the Bush administration. His Peshmurga paramilitary is the backbone of the most effective fires of the new Iraqi army. They do security details in other cities like Mosul and Kirkuk. So the US really desperately depends on the Kurdistan Regional Authority and its paramilitary and can’t afford to alienate Barzani. And since Barzani is—behind the scenes seems to kind of like the PKK and does—giving them a haven, the US is politically complicit in these attacks.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What is the deal with Hunt Oil?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, Hunt Oil, which is, I think, losing its bids in Yemen, is desperate for a new field to develop, and they are exploring a partnership with the Kurdistan Regional Authority in northern Iraq.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of the US Congress taking a vote within one of its committees, Foreign Relations Committee, that Turkey was involved in a genocide against the Armenians, the significance of that vote, though it’s expected to fail at a congressional level with the whole Congress voting, and how it has played in Turkey, leading to the parliament vote to invade northern Iraq?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, I really here would underline that, as a historian, I think it’s important that everybody understand the horrible things that were done to the Armenians during World War I. On the other hand, it’s my duty also to try to understand the Turkish contemporary response, which is that the United States has made enormous trouble for this close ally. Turkey has put itself out over the last decades to help the United States. It was an ally in the Cold War. It was an ally in the Gulf War.

 

And in return, the United States seems to have told Turkey, “Drop dead,” I mean, they invaded Iraq against Turkish advice. They have unleashed Shiite fundamentalism, Sunni fundamentalism, Kurdish separatism on Turkey’s doorstep. There is now a resurgence of the PKK and terrorism against Turkish citizens. And now, on top of all this trouble the United States is making for the Turks, the US Congress was set to condemn the Ottoman government of Turkey, the predecessor government to the present one, for this genocide against the Armenians.

 

So, the Turks are hurt and confused. In Bill Clinton’s last year, 56% of the Turkish public thought well of the United States. That number is down to 9%. So it’s not entirely clear what motive the United States has in so alienating a country that has been a valued and close ally.

 

AMY GOODMAN: The question of history informing what’s happening today—Professor Cole, you’ve just written a book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. Give us the context of that time and how that has parallels to today.

 

JUAN COLE: Well, in a way, it’s a remarkable story. The young French republic, having made this revolution and proclaimed the rights of man, was under attack by a number of foreign enemies, monarchies, that opposed the republican principle, among them England. And the British had naval superiority in the Mediterranean. They had a building colony in India, where they had won a war with the French. The French were kicked out of India by the British.

 

And so, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the time when he was still a general—hadn’t come to power—came up with this idea of a strike at Ottoman Egypt as a way of creating a French Mediterranean, of blocking British naval superiority and of threatening the British colony in India. And so, he convinced the French government to fund this massive expedition, 50,000 men, and he went off to Egypt—of course, easily conquered it. It was a small country compared to France. But then, the British sank his fleet or chased it away, and the French soldiers were trapped in Egypt, and they faced repeated insurgencies and attrition.

 

Bonaparte had proclaimed that he was going to liberate the Egyptians from tyranny, that he was going to install a democratic government. His officers expressed confidence in their memoirs that the Egyptians would be grateful for this bestowal of liberty by a Western power. And so, there are many resonances to today’s quagmire in Iraq.

 

AMY GOODMAN: The graffiti of French soldiers still seen on the pyramids?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, it was an expedition that deeply marked modern Egypt. It was the time when the Rosetta Stone was discovered, although not deciphered until much later, that allowed the recovery of ancient Egyptian civilization. But it was also a very brutal occupation. Bonaparte, if a village rebelled, would order it burned, its men killed. And he did this over and over again. The letters are very clear about the brutality of the policy. It was a take-no-prisoner kind of policy in many instances. And even his own officers began to complain that Bonaparte was increasingly acting like the old French monarchy in an arbitrary way or like an Oriental potentate. And Bonaparte himself attempted to fool the Egyptians into thinking that Enlightenment French Deism, which rejects the Trinity and was opposed to the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy, was essentially a form of Islam, so the Egyptians shouldn’t mind so much being ruled by the French.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What about how the role of women changed under Napoleon—Egyptian women?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, under Napoleon, many restrictions on women were lifted. The Egyptian male chroniclers complained bitterly that the French started going out with women, they appeared publicly, they went to dances together. From an Egyptian Muslim point of view, this was licentiousness and libertinism. But they do admit that the women themselves became intrigued with this new freedom of movement, that they were walking in the streets and laughing and unveiled. And the male chroniclers were fit to be tied by this change. But, it should be remembered, most Egyptian women were peasants, They were not much affected by French policy. And a lot of Egyptian women were victimized by the French, either as mistresses or even as slaves. The French bought women as slaves and used them that way. So it was a mixed picture.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What, Juan Cole, caused the French eventually to leave Egypt?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, Bonaparte himself tried to break out of his box, once the fleet was destroyed, by taking Syria, but he couldn’t succeed in that. The Ottoman forces fought him off, and he therefore slipped out of Egypt after about a year. And he had done propaganda back in France that his victories were glorious. So he came back and used his Egyptian so-called victory as a platform for making a coup and coming to power as First Consul. But his troops were stuck in Egypt. He kind of abandoned them for another two years. Ultimately, the British and the Ottomans made an alliance, and the British gave naval support to an Ottoman expeditionary force that defeated the French. And the soldiers were transported back to France on Egyptian—I’m sorry, on British vessels in a rather humiliating way.

 

AMY GOODMAN: How long was the occupation?

 

JUAN COLE: Three years.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What about parallels to today? Do you see parallels to how the US would leave?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, no, because in that time it was a multi-polar world and France had lots of enemies, including the British and the Russians, who could ally with the Ottomans, and the local Muslim forces found Western Christian allies against the French. In our day, it’s a unipolar world; there’s only one superpower. There’s no other country that would be willing to help the Iraqi guerrilla movement against the United States in an open sort of way. And so, the United States, in some ways, is in a much better position than the French were.

 

But it still faces many of the same problems: lack of legitimacy, the rejection of a Muslim people ruled by essentially a Christian nation, an ongoing attrition and insurgency, volunteers coming from Mecca, which happened also against the French. So the United States’s position in Iraq is tenuous. It’s not as tenuous as the French position had been in Egypt, but it just goes to show that the course of Western colonialism in the Middle East doesn’t flow smoothly.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see the war expanding?

 

JUAN COLE: The Iraq war could expand very easily. I mean, we don’t know, of course, the future, but now we begin to see that the Kurdish separatism in northern Iraq is causing severe tensions and possibly military conflict with Turkey. There’s a possibility of increased Sunni volunteers, if the Shiites were to massacre any large number of Sunni Arabs. It especially seems likely that the US will gradually draw down troops in the next two and three years. If it leaves behind it substantial instability and there are massacres, it could draw in the neighbors. You could have a proxy war. And these things are dangerous to the world economy, because the Persian Gulf is the source of a very substantial amount of the world’s energy, and that energy production could be interrupted by such a guerrilla war. So it’s a very, very dangerous situation.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And the news from Lebanon that a high-ranking leader of Hezbollah has warned the United States not to set up any military bases inside Lebanon, Hezbollah saying it would consider such move a hostile act, and the US increasing their military assistance to Lebanon to $270 million, more than five times the amount they provided a year ago?

 

JUAN COLE: Well, to tell you the truth, Amy, I think the idea of putting a US military base in Lebanon, which is an unstable country and has a very large Shiite militia, is a brain-dead idea, and I can’t imagine that the Lebanese government itself will be so stupid as to go forward with this. And up until recently, of course, Hezbollah, which opposes this plan and which has a substantial number of deputies in the Lebanese parliament, was part of a national unity government. That’s broken down for the moment. It may come back. It seems to me that the politics of that move would be awfully fraught.

 

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Juan Cole, professor of history, University of Michigan. Thanks for joining us from Ann Arbor. His blog is called " Informed Comment." His new book is Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

 

 

 

 

_________________

 

Bush's Napoleonic Folly

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/cole

http://tinyurl.com/yqlrwx

 

(posted online on August 24, 2007)

 

French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration's already failed version of the conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone's mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more than two centuries past, is all too little remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly languished in obscurity. There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.

 

The French general and the American president do not much resemble one another--except perhaps in the way the prospect of conquest in the Middle East appears to have put fire in their veins and in their unappealing tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at least to keep repeating it long after it became completely implausible). Both leaders invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a "Greater Middle East"; both were surprised to find themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics. Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly saw, however, that they faced occupations, not liberations.

 

My own work on Bonaparte's lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I had completed about half of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East before September 11, 2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush's Iraq War. Nor did I guess that the United States would give old-style colonialism in the Middle East one last try, despite clear signs that the formerly colonized would no longer put up with such acts and had, in the years since World War II, gained the means to resist them.

 

The Republic Militant Goes to War

 

In June of 1798, as his enormous flotilla--36,000 soldiers, thousands of sailors, and hundreds of scientists on 12 ships of the line--swept inexorably toward the Egyptian coast, the young General Napoleon Bonaparte issued a grandiose communiqué to the bewildered and seasick troops he was about to march into the desert without canteens or reasonable supplies of water. He declared, "Soldiers! You are about to undertake a conquest, the effects of which on civilization and commerce are incalculable."

 

The prediction was as tragically inaccurate in its own way as the pronouncement George W. Bush issued some two centuries later, on May 1, 2003, also from the deck of a great ship of the line, the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. "Today," he said, "we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians."

 

Both men were convinced that their invasions were announcing new epochs in human history. Of the military vassals of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt, Bonaparte predicted: "The Mameluke Beys who favor exclusively English commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants, and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no longer exist."

 

Bonaparte's laundry list of grievances about them consisted of three charges. First, the beys were, in essence, enablers of France's primary enemy at that time, the British monarchy which sought to strangle the young French republic in its cradle. Second, the rulers of Egypt were damaging France's own commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been elected, and oppressed their subjects whom Bonaparte intended to liberate.

 

This holy trinity of justifications for imperialism-- that the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy of the republic, is endangering the positive interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy because its rule is despotic--would all be trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a succession of European and American leaders whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of phrase has all along been that democracies have a license to invade any country they please, assuming it has the misfortune to have an authoritarian regime.

 

George W. Bush, of course, hit the same highlights in his "mission accomplished" speech, while announcing on the Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" in Iraq "had ended." "The liberation of Iraq," he proclaimed, "is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." He put Saddam Hussein's secular, Arab nationalist Baath regime and the radical Muslim terrorists of al-Qaeda under the sign of September 11th, insinuating that Iraq was allied with the primary enemy of the United States and so posed an urgent menace to its security. (In fact, captured Baath Party documents show that Saddam's fretting security forces, on hearing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, put out an all points bulletin on him, imagining-- not entirely correctly--that he had al-Qaeda links.) Likewise, Bush promised that Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" (which existed only in his own fevered imagination) would be tracked down, again implying that Iraq posed a threat to the interests and security of the U.S., just as Bonaparte had claimed that the Mamluks menaced France.

 

According to the president, Saddam's overthrown government had lacked legitimacy, while the new Iraqi government, to be established by a foreign power, would truly represent the conquered population. "We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq," Bush pledged, "as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people." Bonaparte, too, established governing councils at the provincial and national level, staffing them primarily with Sunni clergymen, declaring them more representative of the Egyptian people than the beys and emirs of the slave soldiery who had formerly ruled that province of the Ottoman Empire.

 

Liberty as Tyranny

 

For a democracy to conduct a brutal military occupation against another country in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war in the name of "democracy," is everywhere in modern history, despite the myth that democracies do not typically wage wars of aggression. Ironically, some absolutist regimes, like those of modern Iran, were remarkably peaceable, if left alone by their neighbors. In contrast, republican France invaded Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Egypt in its first decade (though it went on the offensive in part in response to Austrian and Prussian moves to invade France). The United States attacked Mexico, the Seminoles and other Native polities, Hawaii, the Spanish Empire, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in just the seven-plus decades from

1845 to the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I.

 

Freedom and authoritarianism are nowadays taken to be stark antonyms, the provinces of heroes and monsters. Those closer to the birth of modern republics were comforted by no such moral clarity. In Danton's Death, the young Romantic playwright Georg Büchner depicted the radical French revolutionary and proponent of executing enemies of the Republic, Maximilien Robespierre, whipping up a Parisian crowd with the phrase, "The revolutionary regime is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." And nowhere has liberty proved more oppressive than when deployed against a dictatorship abroad; for, as Büchner also had that famed "incorruptible" devotee of state terror observe, "In a Republic only republicans are citizens; Royalists and foreigners are enemies."

 

That sunlit May afternoon on the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush seconded Büchner's Robespierre. "Because of you," he exhorted the listening sailors of an aircraft carrier whose planes had just dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq, "our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free."

 

Security for the republic had already proved ample justification to launch a war the previous March, even though Iraq was a poor, weak, ramshackle Third World country, debilitated by a decade of sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the United States, without so much as potable drinking water or an air force. Similarly, the Mamluks of Egypt--despite the sky-high taxes and bribes they demanded of some French merchants--hardly constituted a threat to French security.

 

The overthrow of a tyrannical regime and the liberation of an oppressed people were constant refrains in the shipboard addresses of both the general and the president, who felt that the liberated owed them a debt of gratitude. Bonaparte lamented that the beys "tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile"; or, as one of his officers, Captain Horace Say, opined, "The people of Egypt were most wretched. How will they not cherish the liberty we are bringing them?" Similarly, Bush insisted, "Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices; and everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear."

 

Not surprisingly, expectations that the newly conquered would exhibit gratitude to their foreign occupiers cropped up repeatedly in the dispatches and letters of men on the spot who advocated a colonial forward policy. President Bush put this dramatically in 2007, long after matters had not proceeded as expected: "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."

 

Liberty in this two-century old rhetorical tradition, moreover, was more than just a matter of rights and the rule of law. Proponents of various forms of liberal imperialism saw tyranny as a source of poverty, since arbitrary rulers could just usurp property at will and so make economic activity risky, as well as opening the public to crushing and arbitrary taxes that held back commerce. The French quartermaster Francois Bernoyer wrote of the Egyptian peasantry: "Their dwellings are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of liberty, will now allow them to abandon." Bush took up the same theme on the Abraham Lincoln: "Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life."

 

"Heads Must Roll"

 

In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high- minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier's division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and "firing into those crowds," killing "about 900 men," the French confiscated the villagers' livestock--"camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep"--then "finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people."

 

On July 24, Bonaparte's Army of the Orient entered Cairo and he began reorganizing his new subjects. He grandiosely established an Egyptian Institute for the advancement of science and gave thought to reforming police, courts, and law. But terror lurked behind everything he did. He wrote Gen. Jacques Menou, who commanded the garrison at the Mediterranean port of Rosetta, saying, "The Turks Egyptians can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo.... To obey, for them, is to fear." (Mounting severed heads on poles for viewing by terrified passers-by was another method the French used in Egypt...)

 

That August, the Delta city of Mansura rose up against a small French garrison of about 120 men, chasing them into the countryside, tracking the blue coats down, and methodically killing all but two of them. In early September, the Delta village of Sonbat, inhabited in part by Bedouin of the western Dirn tribe, also rose up against the Europeans. Bonaparte instructed one of his generals, "Burn that village! Make a terrifying example of it." After the French army had indeed crushed the rebellious peasants and chased away the Bedouin, Gen. Jean-Antoine Verdier reported back to Bonaparte with regard to Sonbat, "You ordered me to destroy this lair. Very well, it no longer exists."

 

The most dangerous uprisings confronting the French were, however, in Cairo. In October, much of the city mobilized to attack the more than 20,000 French troops occupying the capital. The revolt was especially fierce in the al-Husayn district, where the ancient al-Azhar madrassa (or seminary) trained 14,000 students, where the city's most sacred mosque stood, and where wealth was concentrated in the merchants and guilds of the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. At the same time, the peasants and Bedouin of the countryside around Cairo rose in rebellion, attacking the small garrisons that had been deployed to pacify them.

 

Bonaparte put down this Egyptian "revolution" with the utmost brutality, subjecting urban crowds to artillery barrages. He may have had as many rebels executed in the aftermath as were killed in the fighting. In the countryside, his officers' launched concerted campaigns to decimate insurgent villages. At one point, the French are said to have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them out before a crowd in one of that city's major squares to instill Cairenes with terror. (Two centuries later, the American public would come to associate decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds such beheadings were not carried out at once.)

 

The American deployment of terror against the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed anything the French accomplished in Egypt by orders of magnitude. After four mercenaries, one a South African, were killed in Falluja in March of 2004 and their bodies desecrated, President Bush is alleged to have said "heads must roll" in retribution.

 

An initial attack on the city faltered when much of the Iraqi government threatened to resign and it was clear major civilian casualties would result. The crushing of the city was, however, simply put off until after the American presidential election in November. When the assault, involving air power and artillery, came, it was devastating, damaging two-thirds of the city's buildings and turning much of its population into refugees. (As a result, thousands of Fallujans still live in the desert in tent villages with no access to clean water.)

 

Bush must have been satisfied. Heads had rolled. More often, faced with opposition, the U.S. Air Force simply bombed already-occupied cities, a technology Bonaparte

(mercifully) lacked. The strategy of ruling by terror and swift, draconian punishment for acts of resistance was, however, the same in both cases.

 

The British sank much of the French fleet on August 1,

1798, marooning Bonaparte and his troops in their newly conquered land. In the spring of 1799, the French army tried--and failed--to break out through Syria; after which Bonaparte himself chose the better part of valor. He slipped out of Egypt late that summer, returning to France. There, he would swiftly stage a coup and come to power as First Consul, giving him the opportunity to hone his practice of bringing freedom to other countries--this time in Europe. By 1801, joint British- Ottoman forces had defeated the French in Egypt, who were transported back to their country on British vessels. This first Western invasion of the Middle East in modern times had ended in serial disasters that Bonaparte would misrepresent to the French public as a series of glorious triumphs.

 

Ending the Era of Liberal Imperialism

 

Between 1801 and 2003 stretched endless decades in which colonialism proved a plausible strategy for European powers in the Middle East, including the French enterprise in Algeria (1830-1962) and the British veiled protectorate over Egypt (1882-1922). In these years, European militaries and their weaponry were so advanced, and the means of resistance to which Arab peasants had access so limited, that colonial governments could be imposed.

 

That imperial moment passed with celerity after World War II, in part because the masses of the Third World joined political parties, learned to read, and--with how-to-do-it examples all around them--began to mount political resistance to foreign occupations of every sort. While the twenty-first century American arsenal has many fancy, exceedingly destructive toys in it, nothing has changed with regard to the ability of colonized peoples to network socially and, sooner or later, push any foreign occupying force out.

 

Bonaparte and Bush failed because both launched their operations at moments when Western military and technological superiority was not assured. While Bonaparte's army had better artillery and muskets, the Egyptians had a superb cavalry and their old muskets were serviceable enough for purposes of sniping at the enemy. They also had an ally with advanced weaponry and the desire to use it--the British Navy.

 

In 2007, the high-tech U.S. military--as had been true in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as was true for the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s--is still vulnerable to guerrilla tactics and effective low-tech weapons of resistance such as roadside bombs. Even more effective has been the guerrillas' social warfare, their success in making Iraq ungovernable through the promotion of clan and sectarian feuds, through targeted bombings and other attacks, and through sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure.

 

From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics--and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)

 

For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush's boast that, with "new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.

 

It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable.

 

 

 

 

 

_________________

 

Saddam: The death of a dictator

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/30/saddam/

 

Through the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime, justice becomes revenge, and a despot becomes a martyr.

 

By Juan Cole

 

Dec. 30, 2006 | The body of Saddam, as it swung from the gallows at 6 a.m. Saturday Baghdad time, cast an ominous shadow over Iraq. The execution provoked intense questions about whether his trial was fair and about what the fallout will be. One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare.

 

Saddam Hussein was tried under the shadow of a foreign military occupation, by a government full of his personal enemies. The first judge, an ethnic Kurd, resigned because of government interference in the trial; the judge who took his place was also Kurdish and had grievances against the accused. Three of Saddam's defense lawyers were shot down in cold blood. The surviving members of his defense team went on strike to protest the lack of protection afforded them. The court then appointed new lawyers who had no expertise in international law. Most of the witnesses against Saddam gave hearsay evidence. The trial ground slowly but certainly toward the inevitable death verdict.

 

Like everything else in Iraq since 2003, Saddam's trial became entangled in sectarian politics. Iraq is roughly 60 percent Shiite, 18 percent Sunni Arab and 18 percent Kurdish. Elements of the Sunni minority were favored under fellow Sunni Saddam, and during his long, brutal reign this community tended to have high rates of membership in the Baath Party. Although many members of Saddam's own ethnic group deeply disliked him, since the U.S. invasion he has gradually emerged as a symbol of the humiliation that the once-dominant Sunni minority has suffered under a new government dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

 

Saddam was a symbol of Sunni-Shiite rivalry long before the U.S. occupation. In 1991, while he was in power, he had ferociously suppressed the post-Gulf War Shiite uprising in the south, using helicopter gunships and tanks to kill an estimated 60,000. After the invasion, many Shiites wanted him to be captured, while many Sunnis helped him elude capture. When Saddam was finally caught by U.S. forces in late 2003, Shiites in the Baghdad district of Kadhimiya crossed the bridge over the Tigris to dance and gloat in the neighboring Sunni Arab district of Adhamiya, provoking some clashes. After his capture, students at Mosul University, in Iraq's second-largest and mostly Sunni Arab city, chanted, "Bush, Bush, hear our refrain: We all love Saddam Hussein!" and "We'll die, we'll die, but the nation will live! And America will fall!"

 

As the U.S. consolidated control over Iraq, meanwhile, Sunni alienation increased. The American occupiers adopted punitive measures against members of the Baath Party, who were disproportionately though by no means universally Sunni Arab. The army was dissolved, sidelining 400,000 troops and the predominantly Sunni officer corps. Thousands of Sunni Arab civil servants and even schoolteachers were fired.

 

A "de-Baathification" committee, dominated by hard-line Shiites like Nouri al-Maliki (now prime minister) and Ahmed Chalabi, denied large numbers of Sunni Arabs the right to participate in political society or hold government positions on grounds of links to the Baath Party. Sometimes politicians were blackballed simply because a relative had been high in the party.

 

As Iraq spiraled down into a brutal civil war with massive killing and ethnic cleansing, many Iraqis began to yearn for the oppressive security of the Saddam period. After the destruction of the golden dome of the Shiite Askariya mosque in Samarra last February, Iraqis fell into an orgy of sectarian reprisal killings.

 

By the time of Saddam's trial, sectarian strife was widespread, and the trial simply made it worse. It was not just the inherent bias of a judicial system dominated by his political enemies. Even the crimes for which he was tried were a source of ethnic friction. Saddam Hussein had had many Sunni Arabs killed, and a trial on such a charge could have been politically savvy. Instead, he was accused of the execution of scores of Shiites in Dujail in 1982. This Shiite town had been a hotbed of activism by the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, which was founded in the late 1950s and modeled on the Communist Party. In the wake of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini's 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran, Saddam conceived a profound fear of Dawa and similar parties, banning them and making membership a capital crime. Young Dawa leaders such as al-Maliki fled to Tehran, Iran, or Damascus, Syria.

 

When Saddam visited Dujail, Dawa agents attempted to assassinate him. In turn, he wrought a terrible revenge on the town's young men. Current Prime Minister al-Maliki is the leader of the Dawa Party and served for years in exile in its Damascus bureau. For a Dawa-led government to try Saddam, especially for this crackdown on a Dawa stronghold, makes it look to Sunni Arabs more like a sectarian reprisal than a dispassionate trial for crimes against humanity.

 

Passions did not subside with time. When the death verdict was announced against Saddam in November, Sunni Arabs in Baquba, to the northeast of the capital, staged a big pro-Saddam demonstration. They were attacked by the Shiite police that dominate that mixed city, who killed 20 demonstrators and wounded a similar number. There were also pro-Saddam demonstrations in Fallujah and Mosul. Baghdad had to be put under curfew.

 

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

 

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

 

The political ineptitude of the tribunal, from start to finish, was astonishing. The United States and its Iraqi allies basically gave Saddam a platform on which to make himself a martyr to Iraqi unity and independence -- even if by unity and independence Saddam was really appealing to Sunnis' nostalgia for their days of hegemony.

 

In his farewell address, however, Saddam could not help departing from his national-unity script to take a few last shots at his ethnic rivals. Despite some smarmy language urging Iraqis not to hate the Americans, Saddam denounced the "invaders" and "Persians" who had come into Iraq. The invaders are the American army, and the Persians are code not just for Iranian agents but for Iraqi Shiites, whom many Sunni Arabs view as having Iranian antecedents and as not really Iraqi or Arab. It was such attitudes that led to slaughters like that at Dujail.

 

In his death, as in his life, Saddam Hussein is managing to divide Iraqis and condemn them to further violence and brutality. But the Americans and the Shiite- and Kurd-dominated government bear some blame for the way they botched his trial and gave him this last opportunity to play the spoiler.

 

Iraq is on high alert, in expectation of protests and guerrilla reprisals. Leaves have been canceled for Iraqi soldiers, though in the past they have seldom paid much attention to such orders. But perhaps the death of Saddam, who once haunted the nightmares of a nation, will soon come to seem insignificant. In Iraq, guerrilla and criminal violence executes as many as 500 persons a day. Saddam's hanging is just one more occasion for a blood feud in a country that now has thousands of them.

 

 

 

 

 

_________________

Pope Gets it Wrong on Islam

 

Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University, which mentioned Islam and jihad, has provoked a firestorm of controversy.

 

The address is more complex and subtle than the press on it represents. But let me just signal that what is most troubling of all is that the Pope gets several things about Islam wrong, just as a matter of fact.

 

He notes that the text he discusses, a polemic against Islam by a Byzantine emperor, cites Qur'an 2:256: "There is no compulsion in religion." Benedict maintains that this is an early verse, when Muhammad was without power.

 

His allegation is incorrect. Surah 2 is a Medinan surah revealed when Muhammad was already established as the leader of the city of Yathrib (later known as Medina or "the city" of the Prophet). The pope imagines that a young Muhammad in Mecca before 622 (lacking power) permitted freedom of conscience, but later in life ordered that his religion be spread by the sword. But since Surah 2 is in fact from the Medina period when Muhammad was in power, that theory does not hold water.

 

In fact, the Qur'an at no point urges that religious faith be imposed on anyone by force. This is what it says about the religions:

 

 

' (2:62) Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish

(scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians-- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. '

 

 

See my comments On the Quran and peace.

 

The idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join, and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away. The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims. Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts and certainly weren't imposing their religion.

 

The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith.

 

But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.

 

In fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe it out.

 

The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendant that he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably. He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John, where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.

 

But there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The Mu'tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know them. The Mu'tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash'ari school, in contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view within Christianity than he is).

 

As for the Quran, it constantly appeals to reason in knowing God, and in refuting idolatry and paganism, and asks, "do you not reason?" "do you not understand?" (a fala ta`qilun?)

 

Of course, Christianity itself has a long history of imposing coerced faith on people, including on pagans in the late Roman Empire, who were forcibly converted. And then there were the episodes of the Crusades.

 

Another irony is that reasoned, scholastic Christianity has an important heritage drom Islam itself. In the 10th century, there was little scholasticism in Christian theology. The influence of Muslim thinkers such as Averroes and Ibn Rushd reemphasized the use of Aristotle and Plato in Christian theology. Indeed, there was a point where Christian theologians in Paris had divided into partisans of Averroes or of Ibn Rushd, and they conducted vigorous polemics with one another.

 

Finally, that Byzantine emperor that the Pope quoted, Manuel II? The Byzantines had been weakened by Latin predations during the fourth Crusade, so it was in a way Rome that had sought coercion first. And, he ended his days as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.

 

The Pope was wrong on the facts. He should apologize to the Muslims and get better advisers on Christian-Muslim relations.

 

posted by Juan Cole @ 9/15/2006 06:24:00 AM

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A US attack on Iran could lead to the end of Americastan in Iraq

 

http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/israel-kills-38-civilians-on-eve-of.html

 

Informed Comment

 

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

 

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

 

Monday, August 14, 2006

 

Israel Kills 38 Civilians on Eve of Ceasefire Hersh: Israeli Campaign Dress Rehearsal for War on Iran 250 Hizbullah Rockets Slam into northern Israel, Kill 1

 

Seymour Hersh says that sources knowledgeable about Israeli and Bush administration planning maintain that the Israelis laid out last spring in Washington and gained administration support for a plan for a bombing campaign against Hizbullah in Lebanon based on the Kosovo campaign. Moreover, the exercise was intended as a demonstration project and a preparation for a Bush administration war on Iran. The campaign against Hezbollah would have two major benefits. It would remove Hezbollah's rocket capability, which was a form of deterrence against Israeli or American bombing of Iran. And, what Israel learned from attacking Hezbollah would be useful in formulating tactics in the American assault on Iran.

 

Let me say this loud and clear, drawing on Pat Lang. Any US attack on Iran could well lead to the US and British troops in Iraq being cut off from fuel and massacred by enraged Shiites. Shiite irregulars could easily engage in pipeline and fuel convoy sabotage of the sort deployed by the Sunni guerrillas in the north. Without fuel, US troops would be sitting ducks for rocket and mortar attacks that US air power could not hope completely to stop (as the experience of Israel with Hizbullah in Lebanon demonstrates). A pan-Islamic alliance of furious Shiites and Sunni guerrillas might well be the result, spelling the decisive end of Americastan in Iraq. Shiite Iraqis are already at the boiling point over Israel's assault on their coreligionists in Lebanon. An attack on Iran could well push them over the edge. People like Cheney and Bush don't understand people's movements or how they can win. They don't understand the Islamic revolution in Iran of

1978-79. They don't understand that they are playing George III in the eyes of most Middle Eastern Muslims, and that lots of people want to play George Washington.

 

By the way, Hersh maintains that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has at least some inkling of all this, which is one reason he hasn't been enthusiastically cheering on the Lebanon war.

 

I had this second hand, from someone who knows someone in the know. It confirms Hersh's account:

 

' Rumsfeld is very uneasy with the unquestioning support for the Israeli offensive because of the impact it will have on American troops in Iraq. His point to Bush and Rice is that Iraq's Shias will not stand by while their Lebanese Shia brothers are destroyed. He has pointed out to them -- to Rice and Bush -- that there are close family and political ties between the Moqtada al-Sadr family and the Musa al-Sadr and the close friendship between Maliki and Nawaf Moussawi, the foreign minister of Hezbollah. That Hezbollah worked to free the Dawa 17 at one point in its history was a surprise to Rice, as well as to Bush. With American casualties mounting in Iraq Rumsfeld does not believe we need to make enemies of the Shia. The demonstration of last week shook him -- and American commanders. '

 

If Hersh and my correspondent are correct, we are beginning to see an "India Office" effect in the US government. When Britain ruled India, the British Government of India often developed its own foreign policy and priorities that were not the same as London's Foreign Office. Rumsfeld does have Iraq interests for which he has to speak, however much he hates Hizbullah and Iran.

 

As for the Israelis, the Kosovo analogy is plausible, since Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instanced Kosovo as justification for his actions. The irony is that the Israelis misunderstood Kosovo. Hizbullah is like the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), not like Milosevic's Serbs. If Wesley Clarke had bombed the KLA, the Kosovo war would have failed completely. More ironically, in its decision to expel the Shiite population from the area of Lebanon south of the Litani river, and to make nearly 1 million Lebanese homeless, the Israelis acted more like Milosevic himself than like NATO.

 

Hersh reports that Bush and the Israelis expected the rest of the Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah and police them for Tel Aviv and Washington, and they expected Sunni Arab powers like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to help with curbing Hizbullah. Although Saudia condemned Hizbullah adventurism early on, the Saudis and others soon began calling for an immediate ceasefire once they saw the damage the Israelis were doing to the Lebanese infrastructure.

 

The Israeli attacks on the Lebanese infrastructure, and the disregard for civilian life in the urban bombing campaigns, were the biggest miscalculations of the war, in my view. They clearly would have the effect of weakening the Siniora government and of strengthening Hizbullah politically. They also had the effect of uniting Lebanese public opinion against Israel. In short, they were stupid strategy from a political point of view, and weren't of much use militarily, either, as Sunday's barrage of

250 rockets against Israeli cities by a still-defiant Hizbullah demonstrated.

 

In the end, Hizbullah is unbowed, and there is no early prospect of its being weakened. Although the Lebanese government is demanding that it disarm, no one can understand how they think they could make it, given the weakness of their army (can they do something Israel cannot?)

 

Israel is launching an immediate diplomatic blitz aimed at ensuring[Ar.] that Hizbullah is not allowed to re-arm. Since the re-arming would be done by Iran and Syria, who are not open to Israeli blandishments, it is hard to see how this will work very well. Nor is it clear that Hizbullah's armaments have been exhausted to begin with.

 

Al-Hayat draws on Defense News and other sources to conclude that Israel's carefully nurtured image of military invulnerability has been badly tarnished, with perhaps important downstream effects. This article suggests that the key lesson of the Lebanon War was that anti-tank weapons are back after two decades of innefectuality. The Russian RPG-29, in use by the Russian army since 1989, and the Iranian Tufan and Ra'd- T, all in Hizbullah's arsenal, succeeded in destroying a fair number of Merkava tanks and Israeli armored troop transports. (RPG = rocket propelled grenade). In contrast, Iraqi guerrillas fighting US Abrams tanks only had RPG-7s, and their shells just bounced off the tanks. The RPG-7s were largely useless when wielded by Palestinians against Israeli Merkava tanks, as well.

 

Hizbullah's successful use of a Chinese-designed guided missile to hit an Israeli ship must also give pause to anyone thinking of deploying the Fifth Fleet against Iran in the Persian Gulf (al-Hayat also says that there are problems with US minesweeping capability in the Gulf.)

 

Anthony D'Amato, a law professor at Northwestern U. analyzes the UN Security Council ceasefire resolution.

 

Naharnet/ AFP write:

 

' A U.N.-brokered ceasefire to end the month-old conflict in Lebanon came into force on Monday but intense fighting continued right up to the deadline for the guns to fall silent. In the first reaction to the truce, Israel Army Radio said the Jewish state's naval and air blockade will remain in effect for the present, Haaretz reported.

 

Israel launched an 11th-hour wave of air strikes on Lebanon and Hizbullah fighters unleashed a barrage of rockets just hours before the agreed "cessation of hostilities" took effect at 8 a.m. Beirut time (0500 GMT).

 

Israeli forces shelled areas around Tyre and Khiam in the war-battered south of the country, while combat jets flew over Beirut, dropping warning leaflets, and bombarded the ancient eastern city of Baalbek.

 

At least 38 Lebanese civilians and four soldiers were killed by Israeli fire Sunday as fighter jets kept up their deadly bombing in Beirut and across the country. Five Israeli soldiers were also killed in action. '

 

In one of the villages hit, Brital near Baalbak, Israeli planes collapsed 3 buildings and it is feared a lot of civilians were in them. Naharnet continues:

 

' In one of the deadliest raids Sunday, at least 15 people were killed, including three children, by Israeli air strikes that hit eight buildings and a mosque in Beirut's southern suburbs, emergency services said . . .

 

At least eight people were also killed near Baalbek in eastern Lebanon, security officials said. '

 

The Lebanese state led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is using the $800 mn. in aid given it by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to help Shiite refugees from the south who are living in schools and makeshift shelters in Beirut and elsewhere. There is a race, al-Nahar suggests, between the government and Hizbullah for the loyalty and affection of this large displaced population, amounting to hundreds of thousands of persons.

 

Hizbullah rained 250 rockets down on Israel on Sunday, mostly without hitting much of anything. But they did kill one man (a Palestinian Israeli) and injured 52.

 

I'm a grizzled old bird by now, having lived through wars and riots and having lost friends to everything from revolution to AIDS. But this story about David Grossman's son being killed in the Lebanon war brought tears to my eyes. Grossman, a writer with a conscience, is a noble man. As a father with a son, I cannot imagine or understand, only share the horror.

 

Thousands of Americans protested the Lebanon War in Washington over the weekend.

 

posted by Juan @ 8/14/2006 06:30:00 AM

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Sistani Threatens US over Israeli War on Lebanon

 

by Juan Cole

 

The US punditocracy and ruling elite is fixated on Hizbullah as a "terrorist group" even though the organization hasn't engaged in international terror against American civilians in many years. What they forget about Hizbullah is that it is also a Shiite religious party, and that that is how it is perceived for the most part by Iraqi Shiites. Some 45 percent of Lebanese are probably Shiites.

 

The other thing to remember is that the United States is now a Shiite Power in part, insofar as it semi-rules a Shiite-majority country, Iraq.

 

The Associated Press is carrying the story that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has demanded an immediate ceasefire in Israel's war on Lebanon, in the wake of the Qana massacre:

 

"Islamic nations will not forgive the entities that hinder a cease-fire," al-Sistani said in a clear reference to the United States.

 

``It is not possible to stand helpless in front of this Israeli aggression on Lebanon, he added. ``If an immediate cease-fire in this Israeli aggression is not imposed, dire consequences will befall the region.

 

Sistani had earlier condemned Israeli air raids on Lebanon but had confined himself to ordering the Iraqi Shiite religious establishment to provide aid to victims of the war in Lebanon.

 

Sistani's statements of early Monday morning (which are not yet reflected at his website in Arabic) go substantially beyond his earlier statement.

 

Several questions arise: 1) Why is Sistani speaking like this? 2) What can he do about it all? and 3) What are the possible consequences if he turns anti-American in practice, not just in rhetoric, as in the past?

 

Sistani is taking such a hard line on this issue not only because he feels strongly about it (his fatwa against the Jenin operation of 2002 was vehement) but also because he is in danger of being outflanked by Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr's Mahdi Army is said to be "boiling" over the Israeli war on Hizbullah, since after all the Sadrists are also fundamentalist Shiites and they identify with the Lebanese Hizbullah. There have already been big demonstrations in Baghdad against the Israeli attacks, to which Sadrists flocked but probably also other Shiites.

 

Sistani cannot allow Muqtada to monopolize this issue, or the young cleric's legitimacy will grow among the angry Shiite masses at the expense of Sistani's.

 

Sistani is not linked to Hizbullah, which is strongly Khomeinist in orientation. Sistani largely rejects Khomeinism. He told an Iraqi acquaintance of mine, "Even if I must be wiped out, I will not allow Iraq to repeat the Iranian experience." When Sistani had his heart problems in summer, 2004, he flew to London via Beirut. He stopped in Beirut several hours, and Nabih Berri came out to the airport to consult with him. Berri is the speaker of the Lebanese parliament and the leader of the Amal Party. Amal is the party of the secularizing, moderate Lebanese Shiites. It was more militant in the 1980s but it mellowed.

 

So Sistani's political ties in Lebanon go to Amal much more than to Hizbullah. Sistani has many followers or "emulators" (muqallidun) among the Lebanese Shiites, though the hard core Hizbullahis tend to follow Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran instead. Some Lebanese Shiites follow the Lebanese grand ayatollah, Husain Fadlullah.

 

Note that Amal is allied with Hizbullah in parliament, and some Amal fighters have been killed in clashes with Israelis in the deep south. Amal abandoned its paramilitary during the 1990s, but seems to have kept some units active down near the Israeli border.

 

So Berri would have been in a position to implore Sistani to intervene. Sistani is hoping for something like a moderate Amal party to coalesce in Iraq and would want to help Berri any way he could.

 

Sistani has issued a warning to the United States. He wants Bush to intervene to arrange a ceasefire, i.e. the cessation of israeli air raids on Lebanon in general.

 

What could he do if he were ignored? Sistani could call massive anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations. Given Iraq's profound political instability, this development could be extremely dangerous. US troops in Baghdad and elsewhere are planning offensives against Shiite paramilitary groups, so tensions are likely to rise in the Shiite areas anyway. But big demonstrations could easily boil over into actual attacks on US and British troops. Both depend heavily on fuel that is transported through the Shiite south. Were the Shiites actively to turn on the US for its wholehearted support of continued Israeli air raids, the US military could be cut off from fuel and supplies. The British only have around 8,000 troops in Iraq, and they would be in profound danger if Iraq's Shiites became militantly anti-occupation.

 

Since the Israeli treatment of Arabs is an issue on which Sunnis and Shiites agree, there is also a possibility that Sistani could finally get some respect from the Sunni community if he led such a compaign. That development would be more dangerous to the continued US military presence in Iraq than any other I can think of.

 

The US is already not winning against a Sunni Arab insurgency, backed by around 5 million Iraqis. If 16 million Shiites turned on the US because of its wholehearted support for Israel's actions in Lebanon, the US military mission in Iraq could quickly become completely and urgently untenable. In this case, the British troops in particular would be lucky to escape the country with their lives.

 

Sistani does not issue threats lightly, and he has repeatedly shown a willingness to back them up with action. Bush and US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad will ignore him to their peril.

 

posted by Juan @ 7/31/2006 06:34:00 AM

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War on Lebanon Planned for at least a Year

 

The Bush Administration's Grand Strategy and the Birth Pangs of Terror

 

Israeli war planes hit the cities of Sidon, south Beirut and Baalbak on Saturday and Israeli ground troops fought a hard battle to take over the village of Maroun al-Ras, said to be a Hizbullah rocket-launching site. The Israeli bombing of Sidon hit a religious complex linked to Hizbullah. The BBC reports that 'The UN's Jan Egeland said half a million people needed assistance - and the number was likely to increase. One-third of the recent Lebanese casualties, he said, appeared to be children. '

 

Matthew Kalman reveals that Israel's wideranging assault on Lebanon has been planned in a general way for years, and a specific plan has been in the works for over a year. The "Three Week War" was shown to Washington think tanks and officials last year on powerpoint by a senior Israeli army officer:

 

"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail."

 

 

The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part because they know that European and American universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers. It is a long-planned war to increase Israel's ascendency over Hizbullah and its patrons.

 

But since Hizbullah's short-range katyushas can only hit targets 3-4 miles away, and were mainly being fired at the occupied Shebaa Farms, why worry about it so much?

 

1. If Hizbullah forced Israel out of the Shebaa Farms, it might increase pressure for it to give back the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and all of the West Bank-- the other territories stolen by Israel in 1967. The Israelis have their own Domino Theory, which haunts them the way the original haunted Lyndon Johnson-- and just as foolishly.

 

2. Some of Hizbullah's missiles might have been able to hit sensitive Israeli chemical or nuclear sites, or just cause panic by hitting Israeli cities. There was zero likelihood of Hezbollah launching such a strike unprovoked. But this capacity formed at least a slight drag on the Israeli ability to strike Iran and the Palestinians with impunity. The destruction of the Hizbullah arsenal may be the precursor of even more drastic action against the Palestinians and perhaps a bombing raid on Iran's nuclear research facilities near Isfahan.

 

Israel is a regional superpower, the only nuclear power in the Middle East proper, and possessing the most technologically advanced military capability and the most professional military. Since Egypt opted out of the military struggle for economic reasons and since the US invasion broke Iraq's legs, there is no conventional military threat to Israel. Israel seeks complete military superiority, for several reasons. One impetus is defensive, on the theory that it has to win every contest and can never afford to lose even one, given its lack of strategic depth (it is a geographically small country with a small population, caught between the Mediterranean and potentially hostile neighboring populations). But the defensive reasons are only one dimension.

 

There are also offensive considerations. The Right in Israel is determined to permanently subjugate the Palestinians and forestall the emergence of a Palestinian state. This course of action requires the constant exercise of main force against the Palestinians, who resist it, as well as threats against Arab or Muslim neighbors who might be tempted to help the Palestinians. Thus, Iraq and Iran both had to be punished and weakened. Likewise, the Israeli Right has never given up an expansionist ideology. For instance, the Israelis have a big interest in the Litani River in south Lebanon. If and when the Israeli military and political elite felt they needed to add territory by taking it from neighbors, they wished to retain that capability.

 

The remaining challenges to complete Israeli military superiority and freedom of movement are 1) asymmetrical forces such as Hamas and Hizbullah guerrilla cells wielding rockets and 2) the menace of future unconventional challenges such as an Iranian nuclear weapon (circa 2016 if in fact the Iranians are working on it, which is not proved). Given the alliance of Shiite Hizbullah with Shiite Iran, one capability shielded the other.

 

That this war was pre-planned was obvious to me from the moment it began. The Israeli military proceeded methodically and systematically to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure, and clearly had been casing targets for some time. The vast majority of these targets were unrelated to Hizbullah. But since the northern Sunni port of Tripoli could theoretically be used by Syria or Iran to offload replacement rockets that could be transported by truck down south to Hizbullah, the Israelis hit it. And then they hit some trucks to let truck drivers know to stay home for a while.

 

That is why I was so shaken by George W. Bush's overheard conversation with Tony Blair about the war. He clearly thought that it broke out because Syria used Hizbullah to create a provocation. The President of the United States did not know that this war was a long-planned Israeli war of choice.

 

Why is that scary? Because the Israeli planning had to have been done in conjunction with Donald Rumsfeld at the US Department of Defense. The US Department of Defense is committed to rapidly re-arming Israel and providing it precision laser-guided weaponry, and to giving it time to substantially degrade Hizbullah's missile capabilities. The two are partners in the war effort.

 

For the Bush administration, Iran and Hizbullah are not existential threats. They are proximate threats. Iran is hostile to US corporate investment in the oil-rich Gulf,, and so is a big obstacle to American profit-making in the region. Rumsfeld is worried about Iran's admission as an observer to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is to say, that he is worried about a budding Chinese-Islamic axis that might lock up petroleum reserves and block US investments. If Chinese economic and military growth make it the most significant potential challenger to the Sole Superpower in the coming century, a Chinese alliance with the oil-rich Muslim regions, including Iran, would be even more formidable. The Shanghai group has already pulled off one coup against Rumsfeld, successfully convincing Uzbekistan to end US basing rights in that country.

 

Rumsfeld also believes, contrary to all available evidence, that Iran is actively destabilizing Iraq and is conniving with Syria and Hezbollah to do so.

(In fact, the Iraqis had shaped charges in their depots and did not need to learn about them from Iran or Hizbollah). At some points, the Pentagon has even tried to blame Iran for the radical Sunni Arab violence in Iraq, which makes no sense at all (and thus that propaganda campaign has been put on the back burner).

 

Rumsfeld is so eager to stop what he believes is an Iranian nuclear weapons program that he reportedly has considered using tactical nuclear weapons against it preemptively. After all, a nuclear-armed Iran would forestall American gunboat diplomacy in the oil-rich Gulf.

 

Iran also supports Syria, and Rumsfeld believes that Syria is helping destabilize Iraq, and is also a patron for Hizbullah.

 

Clearly, if one could get rid of Iran and Hezbollah, in Rumsfeld World, Iraq is much more likely to turn out a delayed success than an absolute disaster. And then the stalled-out rush to Bush's vision of "democracy" (i.e. Big Private Property) in the region could proceed. In fact, the instability in Iraq mainly comes from Sunni Arab guerrillas, who hate Iran and it is mutual.

 

The Bush administration's perceived economic and geopolitical interests thus overlap strongly with Israel's perceived security interests, with both benefitting from an Israeli destruction of Hizbullah. It is not impossible that the US Pentagon urged the Israelis on in this endeavor. They certainly knew about and approved of the plan.

 

What is scary is that Cheney and Rumsfeld don't appear to have let W. in on the whole thing. They told him that Bashar al-Asad of Syria stirred up a little trouble because he was afraid that Iraq the Model and the Lebanese Cedar Revolution might be such huge successes that they would topple him by example (just as, after Poland and the Czech Velvet Revolution, other Eastern European strongmen fell). (Don't fall down laughing at the idea of Iraq and Lebanon as Republican Party success stories; people in Washington, DC, coccoon a lot and have odd ideas about the way the world is.) So, Bush thought, if that is all that is going on, then someone just needs to call al-Asad and reassure him that we're not going to take him out, and get him to rein in Hizbullah. And then the war would suddenly stop. No one told Bush that this war was actually an Israeli war of choice and that al-Asad had nothing to do with it, that, indeed, it could only happen because al-Asad is already irrelevant.

 

That is why Administration hopes of using the Israeli attempt to destroy Hezbollah as a wedge to convince Syria to give up rejectionism and detach itself from Iran are crazy.

 

Syria is not going to give up its stance toward Israel unless it at the very least gets back the occupied Golan Heights. That is non-negotiable for Damascus. Since the Israeli Right is diehard opposed to making that deal, Israel will go on occupying part of Syrian soil. Syria cannot accept that outcome. Likewise, the Alawi regime in Syria faces a powerful challenge from the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The high Baath officials would be afraid that if they made peace with Israel and got nothing out of it for Syria, there would be a mass popular Islamist uprising. A separate peace that leaves the Palestinians to the Israelis' tender mercies would also stick in the craw of the Syrian public. The administration plan will fail.

 

Because of their fetish for states, the Neoconservatives of the Bush administration are unable to see that the Levant and points east are now the province of militia-parties that dominate localities and wield asymmetrical paramilitary force in such a way as to stymie states, whether local host states, local adversaries, or imperial Powers. Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and other groups in Gaza and the West Bank, al-Qaeda/ radical Bedouins in the Sinai, the Muslim Brotherhood in some Sunni areas of Syria, the tribes and gangs of Maan in Jordan, the Peshmerga of the Kurds, the guerrilla groups of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, Badr Corps and Marsh Arabs of the Iraqi Shiites, the Basij and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran, the party-tribes of Afghanistan--whether the Tajik Jami'at-i Islami or the Pushtun Taliban--and the biradaris and ethnic mafias of Pakistan, are all arguably as significant actors as states, and often more significant.

 

By its assault on Middle Eastern states, whether it takes the form of military confrontation or of "pressure" to "democratize, Neoconservatism in Washington and Tel Aviv has increased the power and saliency of militia rule throughout the region. The transition under American auspices of Iraq from a strong if odious central state to equally odious militia rule and chaotic violence is only the most obvious example of this process. More people have been killed in terror attacks in Iraq every month since February than were killed on September 11, 2001 in the US, and since Iraq is 11 times less populous than the US, the 6,000 killed in May and June are equivalent to 66,000 killed in civil war violence in the US. Condi Rice echoes the old Neocon theory of "creative chaos" when she confuses the Lebanon war with "the birth pangs" of a "new" Middle East. The chief outcome of the "war on terror" has been the proliferation of asymmetrical challengers. Israel's assault on the very fabric of the Lebanese state seems likely to weaken or collapse it