THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

This idea hinges on the assumption that Sadr is or is willing to be a reasonable man. Can anyone reasonably suggest that recent events offer any evidence that this is the case?

Despite the sense of nausea it engenders, I have to agree with scrat. Sadr, as a pawn of the Revolutionary Council of Iran, is not someone who should be negotiated with at this time. We should have attempted to strengthen indiginous Iraqi rule, not wasted time with the puppet council. Since (joanie loves)Pachachi was crittical of US policy yesterday, look for him to be tossed, and radicalized.

I don't know quite why, but I am inclined to believe that Sadr is a pawn of some group, just don't know which.

Is that how the terrorists do it? They sing songs to block out the horror of what they cause there and what they do there? Incredible! Take away those terrorists and aljazeera will not have such "pretty pictures" to broadcast.

Sound familiar?


OnWar.com
Armed Conflict
Events Data

The Great Iraqi Revolution 1920

[also called Arab Revolt]
State Entry Exit Combat Forces Population Losses
Britain 1920 1920 50000 45000000 3000
Iraq 1920 1920 75000 3750000 10000

Local outbreaks against British rule had occurred even before the news reached Iraq that the country had been given only mandate status. Upon the death of an important Shia mujtahid (religious scholar) in early May 1920, Sunni and Shia ulama temporarily put aside their differences as the memorial services metamorphosed into political rallies. Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, began later in that month; once again, through nationalistic poetry and oratory, religious leaders exhorted the people to throw off the bonds of imperialism. Violent demonstrations and strikes followed the British arrest of several leaders.

When the news of the mandate reached Iraq in late May, a group of Iraqi delegates met with Wilson and demanded independence. Wilson dismissed them as a "handful of ungrateful politicians." Nationalist political activity was stepped up, and the grand mujtahid of Karbala, Imam Shirazi, and his son, Mirza Muhammad Riza, began to organize the effort in earnest. Arab flags were made and distributed, and pamphlets were handed out urging the tribes to prepare for revolt. Muhammad Riza acted as liaison among insurgents in An Najaf and in Karbala, and the tribal confederations. Shirazi then issued a fatwa (religious ruling), pointing out that it was against Islamic law for Muslims to countenance being ruled by non-Muslims, and he called for a jihad against the British. By July 1920, Mosul was in rebellion against British rule, and the insurrection moved south down the Euphrates River valley. The southern tribes, who cherished their long-held political autonomy, needed little inducement to join in the fray. They did not cooperate in an organized effort against the British, however, which limited the effect of the revolt. The country was in a state of anarchy for three months; the British restored order only with great difficulty and with the assistance of Royal Air Force bombers. British forces were obliged to send for reinforcements from India and from Iran.

Ath Thawra al Iraqiyya al Kubra, or The Great Iraqi Revolution (as the 1920 rebellion is called), was a watershed event in contemporary Iraqi history. For the first time, Sunnis and Shias, tribes and cities, were brought together in a common effort. In the opinion of Hanna Batatu, author of a seminal work on Iraq, the building of a nation-state in Iraq depended upon two major factors: the integration of Shias and Sunnis into the new body politic and the successful resolution of the age-old conflicts between the tribes and the riverine cities and among the tribes themselves over the food-producing flatlands of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The 1920 rebellion brought these groups together, if only briefly; this constituted an important first step in the long and arduous process of forging a nation-state out of Iraq's conflict-ridden social structure.

The 1920 revolt had been very costly to the British in both manpower and money. Whitehall was under domestic pressure to devise a formula that would provide the maximum control over Iraq at the least cost to the British taxpayer. The British replaced the military regime with a provisional Arab government, assisted by British advisers and answerable to the supreme authority of the high commissioner for Iraq, Cox. The new administration provided a channel of communication between the British and the restive population, and it gave Iraqi leaders an opportunity to prepare for eventual self-government. The provisional government was aided by the large number of trained Iraqi administrators who returned home when the French ejected Faisal from Syria. Like earlier Iraqi governments, however, the provisional government was composed chiefly of Sunni Arabs; once again the Shias were underrepresented.

At the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British set the parameters for Iraqi political life that were to continue until the 1958 revolution...
Last Update: December 16, 2000
www.onwar.com [email protected]

Yes, but Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld would assure that that was different. We are Americans!

And I don't know quite why, but I am inclined to think that George Dubya Bush is a pawn of some group also.

Fact is, he is helping the enemies of this country more by what he is doing that if he simply sat on his hands.

This administration is incompetent. They have totally miscalculated every aspect of this undertaking.

America...and the world...will be much, much better off when they are gone.

Frank, good to see you. I have missed your gift for gentle understatement over the last few days.

You playing any Poker tonight Ross?

In joke, Occam?

Interesting book review in Saturday's NYTimes. (I know, I know. Not only should I refrain from patching in long pieces, but I also ought not engage in criminal misconduct and misuse of copyright. Hey, at least I don't attack whole countries...)

April 10, 2004
When U.S. Aided Insurgents, Did It Breed Future Terrorists?
By HUGH EAKIN

In the varied explanations for the 9/11 attacks and the rise in terrorism, two themes keep recurring. One is that Islamic culture itself is to blame, leading to a clash of civilizations, or, as more nuanced versions have it, a struggle between secular-minded and fundamentalist Muslims that has resulted in extremist violence against the West. The second is that terrorism is a feature of the post-cold-war landscape, belonging to an era in which international relations are no longer defined by the titanic confrontation between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

But in the eyes of Mahmood Mamdani, a Uganda-born political scientist and cultural anthropologist at Columbia University, both those assumptions are wrong. Not only does he argue that terrorism does not necessarily have anything to do with Islamic culture; he also insists that the spread of terror as a tactic is largely an outgrowth of American cold war foreign policy. After Vietnam, he argues, the American government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global Communism to one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private armed groups.

"In practice," Mr. Mamdani has written, "it translated into a United States decision to harness, or even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet." The real culprit of 9/11, in other words, is not Islam but rather non-state violence in general, during the final stages of the stand-off with the Soviet Union. Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan, he argues in his new book, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror" (Pantheon).

"The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing of arms and money," he writes, " but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence ?- the formation of private militias ?- capable of creating terror." The best-known C.I.A.-trained terrorist, he notes dryly, is Osama bin Laden.

Other recent accounts have examined the ways in which American support for the mujahedeen in the 1980's helped pave the way for Islamic terrorism in the 90's. But Mr. Mamdani posits a new ?- and far more controversial ?- thesis by connecting the violent strain of Islam to a broader American strategy.

"Mahmood's argument is that terrorism is a defining characteristic of the last phase of the cold war," said Robert Meister, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has followed Mr. Mamdani's work for three decades. He added, "It was a characteristic that took on, especially in Africa, a logic of its own, a logic that eventually broke free of the geopolitics that started it."

In a telephone interview from Kampala, Uganda, where he has a second home, Mr. Mamdani explained, "What I have in mind is the policy of proxy war." As his book recounts, the African continent became a major front in the cold war after the rapid decolonization of the 1960's and 70's gave rise to a number of nationalist movements influenced by Marxist-Leninist principles.

For the United States, caught in the wave of antiwar feeling set off by Vietnam, the only way to roll back this process was to give indirect support to violent new right-wing groups. Mr. Mamdani asserts, for example, that the United States policy of constructive engagement with apartheid in South Africa helped sustain two proto-terrorist organizations ?- Unita, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, and Renamo, the Mozambican National Resistance ?- that were armed and trained by the South African Defense Force. Renamo became what Mr. Mamdani calls Africa's "first genuine terrorist movement," a privatized outfit that unleashed random violence against civilians without any serious pretension to national power.

In the 1980's, Mr. Mamdani argues, the American use of proxy forces became increasingly overt. "What had begun as a very pragmatic policy under Kissinger was ideologized by the Reagan administration in highly religious terms, as a fight to the finish against the `Evil Empire,' " Mr. Mamdani said.

Drawing on the same strategy used in Africa, the United States supported the Contras in Nicaragua and then created, on a grand scale, a pan-Islamic front to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Whereas other Islamic movements, like the Iranian revolution, had clear nationalist aims, the Afghan jihad, Mr. Mamdani suggests, was created by the United States as a privatized and ideologically stateless resistance force.

A result, he writes, was "the formation of an international cadre of uprooted individuals who broke ties with family and country of origin to join clandestine networks with a clearly defined enemy."

According to Mr. Mamdani, the strategy of proxy warfare continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the United States looked for new ways to sponsor low-intensity conflicts against militantly nationalist regimes. In a final section on the current conflict in Iraq, the book suggests that it, much more than the end of the cold war in 1989, closed the "era of proxy warfare" in American foreign policy.

Scholars familiar with the book say that Mr. Mamdani's account of the late cold war, and its emphasis on Africa in particular, is likely to be disdained by specialists on Islam, some of whom are criticized by name in the opening chapter.

"The book is most original in the skewer it puts through what Mamdani calls the `culture talk' that has substituted for serious explanations of political Islam," said Timothy Mitchell, a political scientist at New York University. "Scholar-pundits like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami tell us that the culture of Muslims or Arabs cannot cope with modernity. Mamdani shows us that the origins of political Islam are themselves modern, and, in fact, largely secular."

But John L. Esposito, a Georgetown University expert on political Islam, warns that an attempt to explain Islamic terrorism through international politics alone risks the same flaw as the cultural approach. "To say it's simply politics, without taking into account religion, misses the causes behind a lot of these conflicts, just as the reverse misses them," he said. "It's religion and politics together."

Mr. Mamdani's unusual perspective is partly a result of his own experience in Africa. A third-generation East African of Indian descent, Mr. Mamdani, 57, grew up in the final years of colonial Uganda.

"Idi Amin was my first experience of terror, and I understood how a demagogue could ride a wave of popular resentment," Mr. Mamdani said, recalling how he and other Asians were expelled in 1972.

After completing a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1974, he took a faculty position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, at the time a hotbed of radical African politics. Among his colleagues were the future Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, as well as Laurent Kabila, the future president of Congo, and Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, leader of one of the revolutionary factions against Kabila.

Mr. Mamdani returned to Uganda during the civil war that ousted Amin and took a deanship at the national university in Kampala, where he became a leading expert on agrarian administration and its relation to post-colonial unrest. Often outspoken against the Ugandan government, he was exiled a second time in 1985, during another civil war. In the late 1980's, he led a Ugandan commission on local government; later he taught at the University of Cape Town in South Africa during the tumultuous early years after apartheid.

His previous book, "When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda," sought to overturn the view that those atrocities had deep tribal roots. Much of the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic rivalry, he argued, could be traced to the colonial period. (The Belgians had introduced and enforced Hutu and Tutsi racial identities in a segregated social system.)

Mr. Mamdani, who now directs Columbia's Institute for African Studies, lives in New York and Kampala with his wife, the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, and their son.

To understand political Islam, Mr. Mamdani says Africa's experience is instructive. "Africa is seen as exceptional, as not even part of the rest of the world," he said. "But on the contrary, it's an illuminating vantage point."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

U.S. Targeted Fiery Cleric In Risky Move

A very instructive and illuminating chronological documentation of the hows and whys of Sadr's rise in influence, and the formation of his military. Relevant circumstances are convincingly linked to actual violent behavior by Sadr supporters.

However, there is certainly the hint of an organization behind all of this. Planning and execution. For instance, the arrival of busloads of men from Baghdad in buses. And where did all the guns come from that these thousands of militiamen carry, and the rocket launchers, etc.? Not from Sadr, I would think.

Someone, or some organization, is directing the activity. It is not spontaneous behavior on the part of hotheaded militiamen.

It is also clear, from this reporting, that the local occupation command in Iraq made many, many mistakes in dealing with Sadr in a timely and effective fashion. There is no mention of directives from on high either.

Cease Fire
I read elsewhere that al Sadr has declared a cease fire and is open to negotiations. Al Sastini has probably been in contact with him. If the US doesn't ease off al Sistani might not be so laid back in the next few weeks. All it would take is for him to declare an Infitada and the sheeit would hit the fan.

I haven't read that, or heard it, but I will keep my eyes and ears open. But it will hit the fan, sooner or later, I fear. And Bush's intransigence is not helping matters.

Rejecting Calls for Delay, Bush Sticks to June 30 Iraq Transfer

The White House has released a slightly redacted declassified text of the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Ladin [sic!] determined to strike in US", along with an explanatory fact sheet.
The document was the subject of questioning during the public testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on Thursday, April 8, when she characterized it as "historical", rather than a warning .

CNN has posted images of the original documents HERE [PDF].

Source

Brand X, we taught the word about proxy fighters. See the book review above.

I would like to see that story re: Iran confirmed by a little more reputable organization than the NY Post. I'll go looking.

NY Post story has not been run by AP, Reuters, or NYTimes.

genius commentary

KILL THE TERRORIST PERPETRATORS AND THEY WILL PERPERTRATE LESS.

BUT KILL THE TERRORIST PERPETRATORS AND BREED MORE PERPETRATORS.

SO LET'S SIT ON OUR HANDS.

BUSH IS INCOMPETENT.

BUT KERRY IS???

KILL THE NAZI & SHINTOIST PERPETRATORS AND THEY WILL PERPERTRATE LESS.

BUT KILL THE NAZI & SHINTOIST PERPETRATORS AND BREED MORE PERPETRATORS.

SO WE SHOULD HAVE SAT ON OUR HANDS.

ROOSEVELT WAS INCOMPETENT.

BUT WILLKIE WAS???

But the west won wwii anyway.

Will the west win wwiii anyway?