U.S.Forces Work to Secure Sadr City

U.S. Forces Work to Secure Sadr City
1 hour, 11 minutes ago

By DENIS D. GRAY, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Six months after Sadr City erupted in rebellion, U.S. forces are launching a renewed campaign to wrest control of the vast Baghdad neighborhood from radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's forces.

"We're going fishing tonight," says one major as a column of U.S. tanks and Humvees creeps up dimly lit, trash-strewn streets into one of Iraq (news - web sites)'s most tenacious bastions of insurgency.
Above the seething slum of 2 million people — who make up roughly 40 percent of Baghdad's population — unmanned aircraft known as Predators are spotting for the "fish" the Americans hope will surface from urban hide-outs long enough to be taken.
Down below, perhaps on rooftops or up dark alleys near the U.S. force, Maj. Hugh McGloin suspects young men with mobile telephones are watching and warning their fellow insurgents ahead of the column. Surprise is difficult in Sadr City, says the battalion operations officer with the 1st Cavalry Division.
The gun-mounted Humvees draw up expectantly in a semicircle. The Predators have sounded an alarm. An AC-130 gunship sails high overhead, its spectral outline faintly visible by the light of a three-quarter moon. Then it unleashes torrents of machine gun fire, sounding like a pneumatic drill juddering through the sky.
Dubbed "Iron Fury 2," the military's latest push into Sadr City is the biggest since fighting in early August and probably will have to be escalated to achieve its aim.
The most recent attack came before dawn Monday, with U.S. jets pounding suspected militant positions. Dr. Qassem Saddam of the Imam Ali hospital said the strikes killed at least five people and wounded 46 — including 15 women and nine children. The U.S. military said the claim of such high casualties was "suspect."
Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the U.S. land forces commander, has said that Iraq's three major centers of rebellion — Fallujah, Samarra and Sadr City — may have to be subdued before general elections in January. Metz speculated that Sadr City — named after the cleric's late father — could prove the easiest of the three to tackle.
U.S. officers on the ground, although still expressing optimism, say they're faced with a "hard nut to crack" both militarily and in winning hearts and minds across 23 square miles of concrete jungle.
Maj. Bill Williams, executive officer of the division's 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, says al-Sadr's militia — known as the al-Mahdi Army — has used cease-fire negotiations over the past two months as a screen behind which to reinitiate its influence in the slum and plant more, increasingly sophisticated roadside explosives. Mortar attacks against Fort Eagle, the U.S. base astride Sadr City, have increased.
On the table is a 12-point proposal calling for fighters to disarm in exchange for millions of dollars in reconstruction money and compensation for victims. The U.S. insists on disbanding the al-Mahdi Army, which refuses to do so.
"We can go anywhere we want to go in Sadr City. But there are places we don't go into without considerable combat force," says Capt. Steven Gventer, commander of the 2nd Battalion's Charlie Company, which conducted the night operation.
The Americans claim that only some 10 percent of Sadr City's residents are hostile. But only a small southern corner of the city, Jamilah, could be classed as relatively safe. Beyond, to the north, across what U.S. troops call the "no smile line," lies a battleground in which scores have been killed and hundreds wounded, many of them civilians, since al-Sadr and his Shiite followers rose up in Baghdad and elsewhere against the American occupation.
"It's tough," Gventer, of Grapevine, Texas, says. "A guy will shoot a weapon at you, hand it to someone and then run into his cousin's house to wave at passing U.S. troops. They have a great ability to melt into the neighborhood."
How tough is reflected in the 20 purple hearts awarded Charlie Company, some 150 strong, during the past two months of Sadr City duty. Gventer, a burly, energetic officer, was shot through the lower leg and must still have shrapnel removed from his right arm. His battalion commander was evacuated to Germany after sustaining wounds.
And the fighting has not yet escalated to a house-by-house, street-by-street intensity, often being reactive.
"We let the al-Mahdi army choose the time and place they want to attack us," said Lt. Tye Graham, a platoon leader of the battalion's Bravo Company, on an earlier patrol. The battalion had previously staged its own ambushes of the insurgents, but these were called off and Graham doesn't know why.

Officers say that in the end, only better livelihood in Sadr City rather than military operations will wean the populace from al-Sadr and stop the seeming ease with which he can recruit angry, impoverished men to his ranks.
"It's in his interest not to let us set up development projects," said Willliams.
"It's a tit-for-tat. We say, `If you lay down your arms you will be able to flush your toilet,' literally," says Lt. Dan Lucitt, an engineer trying to solve Sadr City's crucial problems — sewage and trash, electric power and clean water.
Increased violence in early September forced the military to suspend two-thirds of its aid projects in the slum, telling the Iraqi contractors to go home for the time being. Work on five vital sewage pumping stations had to be shut down, but Lucitt said they could be restarted overnight if a cease-fire is worked out.
Hence the military pressure on the militia, or in the words of McGloin, the operations officer, a "synchronized ballet of combat power."
The night's expedition is actually a feint rather than an attack, with planners hoping the oncoming eight tanks and 17 Humvees will draw out the militia to lay roadside explosives and otherwise expose themselves. Spotted from the air, the deadly accurate gunship can then destroy both the explosives and the fighters.
The C-130 rakes an area around the Jolan Club, a ramshackle, abandoned sports complex said to be a favorite al-Mahdi hangout, but radio reports indicate no targets have been hit. Meanwhile, Humvee-borne soldiers search a five-story building to find a smiling man guarding chickens stacked in freezers. They talk to a shopkeeper who agrees that violence in Sadr City is bad for business.
It appears that no fish have been netted tonight.
___
Denis Gray spent a week with U.S. troops inside Sadr City.

Khomeini Man of the Year

1979Ayatullah KhomeiniFROM THE TIME ARCHIVEJan. 7, 1980The dour old man of 79 shuffles in his heel-less slippers to the rooftop and waves apathetically to crowds that surround his modest home in the holy city of Qum. The hooded eyes that glare out so balefully from beneath his black turban are often turned upward, as if seeking inspiration from on high—which, as a religious mystic, he indeed is. To Iran's Shi'ite Muslim laity, he is the Imam, an ascetic spiritual leader whose teachings are unquestioned. To hundreds of millions of others, he is a fanatic whose judgments are harsh, reasoning bizarre and conclusions surreal. He is learned in the ways of Shari'a (Islamic law) and Platonic philosophy, yet astonishingly ignorant of and indifferent to non-Muslim culture. Rarely has so improbable a leader shaken the world. Yet in 1979 the lean figure of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini towered malignly over the globe. As the leader of Iran's revolution he gave the 20th century world a frightening lesson in the shattering power of irrationality, of the ease with which terrorism can be adopted as government policy. As the new year neared, 50 of the American hostages seized on Nov. 4 by a mob of students were still inside the captured U.S. embassy in Tehran, facing the prospect of being tried as spies by Khomeini's revolutionary courts. The Ayatullah, who gave his blessing to the capture, has made impossible and even insulting demands for the hostages' release: that the U.S. return deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to Iran for trial and no doubt execution, even though the Shah is now in Panama; that America submit to a trial of its "crimes" against Iran before an international "grand jury" picked by Khomeini's aides. He claimed that Iran had every legal and moral right to try America's hostage diplomats, an action that would defy a decision of the World Court, a vote of the U.N. Security Council and one of the most basic rules of accommodation between civilized nations. The Ayatullah even insisted, in an extraordinary interview with TIME, that if Americans wish to have good relations with Iran they must vote Jimmy Carter out of office and elect instead a President that Khomeini would find "suitable." Unifying a nation behind such extremist positions is a remarkable achievement for an austere theologian who little more than a year ago was totally unknown in the West he now menaces. But Khomeini's carefully cultivated air of mystic detachment cloaks an iron will, an inflexible devotion to simple ideas that he has preached for decades, and a finely tuned instinct of articulating the passions and rages of his people. Khomeini is no politician in the Western sense, yet he possesses the most awesome—an ominous—of political gifts: the ability to rouse millions to both adulation and fury. Khomeini's importance far transcends the nightmare of the embassy seizure, transcends indeed the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The revolution that he led to triumph threatens to upset the world balance of power more than any political event since Hitler's conquest of Europe. It was unique in several respects: a successful, mostly nonviolent revolt against a seemingly entrenched dictator, it owed nothing to outside help or even to any Western ideology. The danger exists that the Iranian revolution could become a model for future uprisings throughout the Third World—and not only its Islamic portion. Non-Muslim nations too are likely to be attracted by the spectacle of a rebellion aimed at expelling all foreign influence in the name of xenophobic nationalism. Already the flames of anti-Western fanaticism that Khomeini fanned in Iran threaten to spread through the volatile Soviet Union, from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa. Most particularly, the revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic republic whose supreme law is the Koran is undermining the stability of the Middle East, a region that supplies more than half of the Western world's imported oil, a region that stands at the strategic crossroads of super-power competition. As an immediate result, the U.S., Western Europe and Japan face continuing inflation and rising unemployment, brought on, in part, by a disruption of the oil trade. Beyond that looms the danger of U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Washington policymakers, uncertain about the leftist impulses of Iran's ubiquitous "students"—and perhaps some members of Iran's ruling Revolutionary Council—fear that the country may become a new target of opportunity for Soviet adventurism. The Kremlin leaders in turn must contend with the danger that the U.S.S.R.'s 50 million Muslims could be aroused by Khomeini's incendiary Islamic nationalism. Yet if the Soviets chose to take advantage of the turmoil in Iran as they have intervened in neighboring Afghanistan, the U.S. would have to find some way of countering such aggression. Khomeini thus poses to the U.S. a supreme test of both will and strategy. So far his hostage blackmail has produced a result he certainly did not intend: a surge of patriotism that has made the American people more united than they have been on any issue in two decades. The shock of seeing the U.S. flag burned on the streets of Tehran, or misused by embassy attackers to carry trash, has jolted the nation out of its self-doubting "Viet Nam syndrome." Worries about America's ability to influence events abroad are giving way to anger about impotence; the country now seems willing to exert its power. But how can that power be brought to bear against an opponent immune to the usual forms of diplomatic, economic and even military pressure, and how can it be refined to deal with others in the Third World who might rise to follow Khomeini's example? That may be the central problem for U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1980s. The outcome of the present turmoil on Iran is almost totally unpredictable. It is unclear how much authority Khomeini, or Iran's ever changing government, exerts over day- to-day events. Much as Khomeini has capitalized on it, the seizure of the U.S. embassy tilted the balance in Iran's murky revolutionary politics from relative moderates to extremists who sometimes seem to listen to no one; the militants at the embassy openly sneer at government ministers, who regularly contradict one another. The death of Khomeini, who has no obvious successor, could plunge the country into anarchy. But one thing is certain: the world will not again look quite the way it did before Feb. 1, 1979, the day on which Khomeini flew back to a tumultuous welcome in Tehran after 15 years in exile. He thus joins a handful of other world figures whose deeds are debatable—or worse—but who nonetheless branded a year as their own. In 1979 the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini met TIME's definition of Man of the Year: he was the one who "has done the most to change the news, for better or for worse." Apart from Iran and its fallout, 1979 was a year of turmoil highlighted by an occasional upbeat note: hopeful stirrings that offset to a degree the continuing victories of the forces of disruption. On a spectacular visit to his homeland of Poland and the U.S., Ireland and Mexico, Pope John Paul II demonstrated that he was a man whose warmth, dignity and radiant humanity deeply affected even those who did not share his Roman Catholic faith. Despite his rigidly orthodox approach to doctrinal issues, the Pope's message of peace, love, justice and concern for the poor stirred unprecedented feelings of brotherhood. The election of Conservative Party Leader Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Britain was perhaps the most notable sign that many voters in Europe were disillusioned with statist solutions and wanted a return to more conservative policies. At year's end her government could claim one notable diplomatic success. Under the skillful guidance of Thatcher's Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, leaders of both the interim Salisbury government and the Patriotic Front guerrillas signed an agreement that promised—precariously—to end a seven- year-old civil war and provide a peaceful transition to genuine majority rule in Zimbabwe Rhodesia. There were other indications of growing rationality in Africa, as three noxious dictators who had transformed their nations into slaughterhouses fell from power: Idi Amin was ousted from Uganda, Jean Bedal Bokassa from the Central African Empire (now Republic), and Francisco Macias Nguema from Equatorial Guinea. Southeast Asia, though, as it has for so long, endured a year of war, cruelty and famine. Peking and Moscow jockeyed for influence in the area. China briefly invaded Viet Nam and then withdrew, achieving nothing but proving once again that Communists have their own explosive quarrels. Hanoi's Soviet- backed rulers expelled hundreds of thousands of its ethnic Chinese citizens, many of whom drowned at sea; survivors landed on the shores of nations that could not handle such onslaughts of refugees. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese-backed regime of Heng Samrin was proving little better than the maniacal Chinese- supported dictatorship of Pol Pot that it had deposed. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians still faced death by starvation or disease as the year ended, despite huge relief efforts organized by the outside world. In the U.S., 1979 was a year of indecision and frustration. Inflation galloped to an annual rate of 13% and stayed there, all but impervious to attacks by the Carter Administration. The burden of containing inflation eventually fell on the shoulders of new Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. His tough fiscal measures, including higher interest rates and a clampdown on the money supply, do promise to restrain price boosts—but only after a distressing time lag, and at the cost of making more severe a recession that the U.S. seemed headed for anyway in 1980. President Carter's energy program at last began staggering through Congress, but a near disaster at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania raised legitimate questions—as well as much unnecessary hysteria—about how safe and useful nuclear power will be as a partial substitute for the imported oil that the eruption in Iran will help make ever more costly. The conclusion of a SALT II agreement wit the Soviet Union—more modest in scope than many Americans had urged, but basically useful to the U.S.—led to congressional wrangling that raised doubts about whether the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty will even be ratified in 1980. The SALT debate put a substantial strain on U.S.-Soviet relations, which were deteriorating for lots of other reasons as well. For much of the year, Carter appeared so ineffective a leader that his seeming weakness touched off an unprecedentedly early and crowded scramble to succeed him. Ten Republicans announced as candidates for the party's 1980 presidential nomination; at year's end, however, the clear favorite was the man who had done or said hardly anything, Ronald Reagan. On the Democratic side, Senator Edward Kennedy overcame his reservations and declared his candidacy, but early grass-roots enthusiasm about his "leadership qualities" dissipated in the face of his lackluster campaigning, his astonishing incoherence, and his failure to stake out convincingly different positions on the issues. At year's end Carter was looking much stronger, primarily because his firm yet restrained response to Iran's seizure of hostages led to a classic popular reaction: Let's rally round the President in a crisis. None of these trends could match in power and drama, or in menacing implications for the future, the eruption in Iran. A year ago, in its cover story on 1978's Man of the Year, Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, TIME noted that "the Shah of Iran's 37-year reign was shaken by week upon week of riots." Shortly thereafter, the Shah fell in one of the greatest political upheavals of the post-World War II era, one that raised troubling questions about the ability of the U.S. to guide or even understand the seething passions of the Third World. Almost to the very end, the conventional wisdom of Western diplomats and journalists was that the Shah would survive; after all, he had come through earlier troubles seemingly strengthened. In 1953 the Shah had actually fled the country. But he was restored to power by a CIA-inspired coup that ousted Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist Prime Minister who had been TIME's Man of the Year for 1951 because he had "oiled the wheels of chaos." In 1963 Iran had been swept by riots stirred up by the powerful Islamic clergy against the Shah's White Revolution. Among other things, this well-meant reform abolished the feudal landlord-peasant system. Two consequences: the reform broke up properties administered by the Shi'ite clergy and reduced their income, some of which consisted of donations from large landholders. The White Revolution also gave the vote to women. The Shah suppressed those disturbances without outside help, in part by jailing one of the instigators—an ascetic theologian named Ruhollah Khomeini, who had recently attained the title of Ayatullah and drawn crowds to fiery sermons in which he denounced the land reform as a fraud and the Shah as a traitor to Islam. (An appellation that means "sign of God." There is no formal procedure for bestowing it; a religious leader is called ayatullah by a large number of reverent followers and is accepted as such by the rest of the Iranian clergy. At present, Iran has perhaps 50 to 60 mullahs generally regarded as ayatullahs.) In 1964 Khomeini was arrested and exiled, first to Turkey, then to Iraq, where he continued to preach against the idolatrous Shah and to promulgate his vision of Iran as an "Islamic republic." The preachments seemed to have little effect, as the Shah set about building the most thoroughly Westernized nation in all of the Muslim world. The progress achieved in a deeply backward country was stunning. Petroleum revenues built steel mills, nuclear power plants, telecommunication systems and a formidable military machine, complete with U.S. supersonic fighters and missiles. Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed, in part by the use of torture in the dungeons of SAVAK, the secret police. It is still not clear how widespread the tortures and political executions were; but the Shah did not heed U.S. advice to liberalize his regime, and repression inflamed rather than quieted dissent. By 1978 the Shah had alienated almost all elements of Iranian society. Westernized intellectuals were infuriated by rampant corruption and repression; workers and peasants by the selective prosperity that raised glittering apartments for the rich while the poor remained in mud hovels; bazaar merchants by the Shah-supported businessmen who monopolized bank credits, supply contracts and imports; the clergy and their pious Muslim followers by the gambling casinos, bars and discotheques that seemed the most visible result of Westernization. (One of the Shah's last prime ministers also stopped annual government subsidies to the mullahs.) Almost everybody hated the police terror and sneered in private at the Shah's Ozymandian megalomania, symbolized by a $100 million fete he staged at Persepolis in 1971 to celebrate the 2,500 years of the Persian Empire. In fact, the Shah's father was a colonel in the army when he overthrew the Qajar dynasty in 1925, and as Khomeini pointed out angrily from exile at the time of the Persepolis festival, famine was raging in that part of the country. But the U.S. saw the Shah as a stable and valuable ally. Washington was annoyed by the Shah's insistence on raising oil prices at every OPEC meeting, yet that irritation was outweighed by the fact that the Shah was staunchly anti-Communist and a valuable balance wheel in Middle East politics. Eager to build up Iran as a "regional influential" that could act as America's surrogate policeman of the Persian Gulf, the U.S. lent the Shah its all-out support. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger allowed him to buy all the modern weapons he wanted. Washington also gave its blessing to a flood of American business investment in Iran and dispatched an army of technocrats there. The depth of its commitment to the Shah apparently blinded Washington to the growing discontent. U.S. policymakers wanted to believe that their investment was buying stability and friendship; they trusted what they heard from the monarch, who dismissed all opposition as "the blah-blahs of armchair critics." Even after the revolution began, U.S. officials were convinced that "there is no alternative to the Shah." Carter took time out from the Camp David summit in September 1978 to phone the Iranian monarch and assure him of Washington's continued support. By then it was too late. Demonstrations and protest marches that started as a genuine popular outbreak grew by a kind of spontaneous combustion. The first parades drew fire from the Shah's troops, who killed scores and started a deadly cycle: marches to mourn the victims of the first riot, more shooting, more martyrs, crowds swelling into the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions in Tehran. Khomeini at this point was primarily a symbol of the revolution, which at the outset had no visible leaders. But even in exile the Ayatullah was well known inside Iran for his uncompromising insistence that the Shah must go. When demonstrators began waving the Ayatullah's picture, the frightened Shah pressured Iraq to boot Khomeini out. It was a fatal blunder; in October 1978 the Ayatullah settled in Neauphle-le-Chateau, outside Paris, where he gathered a circle of exiles and for the first time publicized his views through the Western press. Khomeini now became the active head of the revolution. Cassettes of his anti-Shah sermons sold like pop records in the bazaars and were played in crowded mosques throughout the country. When he called for strikes, his followers shut down the banks, the postal service, the factories, the food stores and, most important, the oil wells, bringing the country close to paralysis. The Shah imposed martial law, but to no avail. On Jan. 16, after weeks of daily protest parades, the Shah and his Empress flew off to exile, leaving a "regency council" that included Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, a moderate who had spent time in the Shah's prisons. But Khomeini announced that no one ruling in the Shah's name would be acceptable, and Iran was torn by the largest riots of the entire revolution. The Ayatullah returned from Paris to a tumultuous welcome and Bakhtiar fled. "The holy one has come!" the crowds greeting Khomeini shouted triumphantly. "He is the light of our lives!" The crush stalled the Ayatullah's motorcade, so that he had to be lifted out of the crowds, over the heads of his adulators, by helicopter. He was flown to a cemetery, where he prayed at the graves of those who had died during the revolution. Khomeini withdrew to the holy city of Qum, appointed a government headed by Mehdi Bazargan, an engineer by training and veteran of Mossadegh's Cabinet, and announced that he would confine his own role during "the one or two years left to me" to making sure that Iran followed "in the image of Muhammad." It quickly became apparent that real power resided in the revolutionary komitehs that sprang up all over the country, and the komitehs took orders only from the 15-man Revolutionary Council headed by Khomeini (the names of its other members were long kept secret). Bazargan and his Cabinet had to trek to Qum for weekly lunches with Khomeini to find out what the Ayatullah would or would not allow. Some observers distinguish two stages in the entire upheaval: the first a popular revolt that overthrew the Shah, then a "Khomeini coup" that concentrated all power in the clergy. The Ayatullah's main instrument was a stream of elamiehs (directives) from Qum, many issued without consulting Bazargan's nominal government. Banks and heavy industry were nationalized and turned over to government managers. Many of the elamiehs were concerned with imposing a strict Islamic way of life on all Iranians. Alcohol was forbidden. Women were segregated from men in schools below the university level, at swimming pools, beaches and other public facilities. Khomeini even banned most music from radio and TV. Marches were acceptable, he told Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, but other Western music "dulls the mind, because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs." Fallaci: "Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?" Khomeini: "I do not know those names." In power, Khomeini and his followers displayed a retaliatory streak. Islamic revolutionary courts condemned more than 650 Iranians to death, after trials at which defense lawyers were rarely, if ever, present, and spectators stepped forward to add their own accusations to those of the prosecutors; death sentences were generally carried out immediately by firing squad. An unknown but apparently large number of other Iranians were sentenced to life imprisonment. Khomeini preaches the mercy of God but showed little of his own to those executed, who were, he said, torturers and killers of the Shah's who got what they deserved. Some were, including the generals and highest-ranking politicians, but the victims also included at least seven prostitutes, 15 men accused of homosexual rape, and a Jewish businessman alleged to be spying for Israel. Defenders of Khomeini's regime argue with some justification that far fewer people were condemned by the revolutionary courts than were tortured to death by the Shah's SAVAK, and that the swift trials were necessary to defuse public anger against the minions of the deposed monarch. As usually happens in revolutions, the forces of dissolution, once let loose, are not so easily tamed. Iran's economy suffered deeply, and unrest in at least three ethnic areas—those of the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis and the Baluchis—presented continuing threats to Tehran's, or Qum's, control. Many Western experts believe Khomeini shrewdly seized upon the students' attack on the U.S. embassy, which he applauded but claims he did not order, as a way of directing popular attention away from the country's increasing problems. It gave him once again a means of presenting all difficulties as having been caused by the U.S., to brand all his opponents—believers in parliamentary government, ethnic separatists, Muslims who questioned his interpretations of Islamic law—tools of the CIA. When the United Nations and the World Court condemned the seizure, he labeled these bodies stooges of the enemy. It was Iran against the world—indeed, all Islam against the "infidels." When Bazargan resigned to protest the capture of the hostages, the Ayatullah made the Revolutionary Council the government in name as well as fact. Then, during the holy month known as Muharram, with popular emotion at a frenzied height as a result of the confrontation with the U.S., Khomeini expertly managed a vote on a new constitution that turned Iran into a theocracy. Approved overwhelmingly in a Dec. 2-3 referendum, the constitution provided for an elected President and parliament, but placed above them a "guardian council" of devout Muslims to make sure that nothing the elected bodies do violates Islamic law. Atop the structure is a faqih (literally, jurisprudent), the leading theologian of Iran, who must approve of the President, holds veto power over virtually every act of government, and even commands the armed forces. Though the constitution does not name him, when it goes fully into effect after elections this month and in February, Khomeini obviously will become the faqih. How did the Ayatullah capture a revolution that started out as a leaderless explosion of resentment and hate? Primarily by playing adroitly to, and in part embodying, some of the psychological elements that made the revolt possible. There was, for example, a widespread egalitarian yearning to end the extremes of wealth and poverty that existed under the Shah—and the rich could easily be tarred as clients of the "U.S. imperialists." Partly because of the long history of Soviet, British and then American meddling in their affairs, Iranians were and are basically xenophobic, and thus susceptible to the Ayatullah's charges that the U.S. (and, of course, the CIA) was responsible for the country's ills. Iranians could also easily accept that kind of falsehood since they had grown used to living off gossip and rumor mills during the reign of the Shah, when the heavily censored press played down even nonpolitical bad news about Iran. When Khomeini declared that the Americans and Israelis were responsible for the November attack by Muslim fanatics in Mecca's Sacred Mosque, this deliberate lie was given instant credence by multitudes of Iranians. By far the most powerful influence that cemented Khomeini's hold on his country is the spirit of Shi'ism—the branch of Islam to which 93% of Iran's 35.2 million people belong. In contrast to the dominant Sunni wing of Islam, Shi'ism emphasizes martyrdom; thus many Iranians are receptive to Khomeini's speeches about what a "joy" and "honor" it would be to die in a war with the U.S. Beyond that, Shi'ism allows for the presence of an intermediary between God and man. Originally, the mediators were twelve imams, who Shi'ites believe were the rightful successors of the Prophet Muhammad; the twelfth disappeared in A.D. 940. He supposedly is in hiding, but will return some day to purify the religion and institute God's reign of justice on earth. This belief gives Shi'ism a strong messianic cast, to which Khomeini appeals when he promises to expel Western influence and to turn Iran into a pure Islamic society. The Ayatullah has never claimed the title of Imam for himself, but he has done nothing to discourage its use by his followers, a fact that annoys some of his peers among the Iranian clergy. Ayatullah Seyed Kazem Sharietmadari, Khomeini's most potent rival for popular reverence, has acidly observed that the Hidden Imam will indeed return, "but not in a Boeing 747"—a reference to the plane that carried Khomeini from France to Iran. Iran and Iraq are the main Muslim states where the majority of the population is Shi'ite; but there are substantial Shi'ite minorities in the Gulf states, Lebanon, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Khomeini's followers have been sending these Shi'ites messages urging them to join in an uprising against Western influence. The power of Khomeini's appeal for a "struggle between Islam and the infidels" must not be underestimated. In these and many other Islamic countries, Western technology and education have strained the social structure and brought with them trends that seem like paganism to devout Muslims. In addition, Muslims have bitter memories of a century or more of Western colonialism that kept most Islamic countries in servitude until a generation ago, and they tend to see U.S. support of Israel as a continuation of this "imperialist" tradition. With Khomeini's encouragement, Muslims—not all of them Shi'ites—have staged anti-American riots in Libya, India and Bangladesh. In Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, a mob burned the U.S embassy and killed two U.S. servicemen; the Ayatullah's reaction was "great joy." In Saudi Arabia, possessor of the world's largest oil reserves, the vulnerability of the royal family was made starkly apparent when a band of 200 to 300 well- armed raiders in November seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of all Islamic shrines, which is under the protection of King Khalid. The raiders appeared to have mixed religious and political motives: they seemingly were armed and trained in Marxist South Yemen, but were fundamentalists opposed to all modernism, led by a zealot who had proclaimed the revolution in Iran to be a "new dawn" for Islam. It took the Saudi army more than a week to root them out from the catacomb-like basements of the mosque, and 156 died in the fighting—82 raiders and 74 Saudi troopers. In addition, demonstrators waving Khomeini's picture last month paraded in the oil towns of Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. Saudi troops apparently opened fire on the protestors and at least 15 people are said to have died. Such rumblings have deeply shaken the nerves, if not yet undermined the stability, of governments throughout the Middle East. Leaders of the House of Saud regard Khomeini as an outright menace. Egypt's President Anwar Sadat denounced Khomeini as a man who is trying to play God and whose actions are a "crime against Islam [and] and insult to humanity." Nonetheless, the Ayatullah's appeal to Muslims, Sunni as well as Shi'ite, is so strong the even pro-Western Islamic leaders have been reluctant to give the U.S. more than minimal support in the hostage crisis. They have explicitly warned Washington that any U.S. military strike on Iran, even one undertaken in retaliation for the killing of the hostages, would so enrage their people as to threaten the security of every government in the area. The appeal of Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalism to non- Muslim nations in the Third World is limited. Not so the wave of nationalism he unleashed in Iran. Warns William Quandt, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution: "People in the Third World were promised great gains upon independence [from colonialism], and yet they still find their lives and societies in a mess." Historically, such unfulfilled expectations prepare the ground for revolution, and the outbreak in Iran offers an example of an uprising that embodies a kind of nose-thumbing national pride. Selig Harrison, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the overthrow of Iran's Shah "is appealing to the Third World as a nationalist revolution that has stood up to superpower influence. At the rational level, Third World people know that you cannot behave like Khomeini and they do not condone violation of diplomatic immunity. But at the emotional level, mass public opinion in many Third World countries is not unfriendly to what Khomeini has done. There is an undercurrent of satisfaction in seeing a country stand up to superpower influence." The Iranian revolution has also had a dramatic impact in Western economies. 1979 was the year in which the world economy moved from an era of recurrent oil surpluses into an age of chronic shortages. Indeed, it was a year in which the frequent warnings of pessimists that the industrial nations had made themselves dangerously dependent on crude oil imported from highly unstable countries came true with a vengeance. For more than three centuries the industrial West had prospered thanks partly to resources from colonies or quasi-colonies. Now a great historical reversal was at hand. "If there had been no revolution in Iran," says John Lichtblau, executive director of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, "1979 would have been a normal year." The strikes that accompanied the revolution shut off Iranian production completely early in the year. Through output resumed in March, it ran most of the time at no more than 3.5 million bbl. a day—little more than half the level under the Shah. Khomeini made it clear that no more could be expected. In fact, Iranian output has dropped again in recent months, to around 3.1 million bbl. a day. Oil Minister Ali Akbar Moinfar says it will go down further because "at the new price levels, Iran will be able to produce and export less and still cover its revenue needs." The cutback in Iran reduced supplies to the non-Communist world by about 4%. That was enough to produce a precarious balance between world supply and demand. Spot shortages cropped up, and the industrial West went through a kind of buyers' panic; governments and companies scrambled to purchase every drop available, to keep houses warm and the wheels of industry turning, and to build stockpiles to guard against the all-too- real prospect of another shutdown in Iran or a supply disruption somewhere else. The lid came off prices with a bang. OPEC raised prices during 1979 by an average of 94.7%, to $25 a bbl.—vs. $12.84 a year ago and a mere $2 in 1970. Moreover, oil-exporting nations shifted a growing proportion of their output to the spot market, where oil not tied up under contract is sold for whatever price buyers will pay. Before the Iranian revolution, the spot market accounted for only 5% of the oil moving in world trade, and prices differed little from OPEC's official ones. During 1979, anywhere from 10% to 33% of internationally traded crude bought by the industrial countries went through the spot market, and prices shot as high as $45 a bbl. The runaway price rises will fan inflation in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. Affected are not only the price of gasoline and heating oil but also the cost of thousands of products made from petrochemicals—goods ranging from fertilizers and laundry detergents to panty hose and phonograph records. Oil price hikes will bear on apartment rents and the price of food brought to stores by gasoline-burning trucks. The price boosts act as a kind of gigantic tax, siphoning from the pockets of consumers money that would otherwise be used to buy non-oil goods and services, thus depressing production and employment. In the U.S., which imports about half its oil, a 1980 recession that would increase unemployment might happen anyway; the oil price increases have made it all but inevitable. At year's end OPEC had almost come apart; at their December meeting in Caracas its members could not agree on any unified pricing structure at all. So long as supply barely equals demand, there will be leapfrogging price boosts; four countries announced 10% to 15% price hikes last Friday. In the longer run, the disunity could lead to price-cutting competition, but only if the industrial countries, and especially the U.S., take more drastic steps to conserve energy and reduce imports than any they have instituted yet—and even then OPEC might come back together. It is presumably not in the cartel's economic or political self-interest to bankrupt its major customers, especially since many of OPEC's member states have invested their excess profits in the West. Yet even moderate nations like Saudi Arabia, which have fought to keep price boosts to a minimum, argue that inflation price hikes will be necessary as long as oil prices are tied to a declining dollar. A still greater danger is that the producers may not pump enough oil to permit much or any economic growth in either the industrial or underdeveloped worlds. The producers have learned that prices rise most rapidly when supply is kept barely equal to, or a bit below, demand; they have good reason to think that oil kept in the ground will appreciate more than any other asset, and the Iranian explosion has demonstrated that all-out production, and the forced-draft industrialization and Westernization that it finances, can lead not to stability but to social strains so intense that they end in revolution. The result of a production hold-down could be a decade or so of serious economic stagnation. Oil Consultant Walter Levy sees these potential gloomy consequences for the West: "A lower standard of living, a reduction in gross national product, large balance of payments drains, loss of value in currencies, high unemployment." Warns Mobil Chairman Rawleigh Warner: "The West can no longer assume that oil-exporting countries, and specifically those in the Middle East, will be willing to tailor production to demand. The safer assumptions is that the consuming countries will increasingly have to tailor their demand to production. And the factors that determine the ceiling in production are more likely to be political than economic or technical." The West will be lucky if oil shortages are the worst result of Khomeini's revolution. An even more menacing prospect is a shift in the world balance of power toward the Soviet Union. The Ayatullah is no friend of the Soviets. Far from it: while in his mind "America is the great Satan," he knows, and has often said, that Communism is incompatible with Islam. Tehran mobs have occasionally chanted "Communism will die!" as well as "Death to Carter!" Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism could become a domestic worry to the Kremlin. Its estimated 50 million Muslims make the Soviet Union the world's fifth largest Muslim state. (After Indonesia (123.2 million), India (80 million), Pakistan (72.3 million) and Bangladesh (70.8 million).) For the Kremlin, Muslims represent a demographic time bomb. By the year 2000, there will be an estimated 100 million Soviet Muslims, vs. about 150 million ethnic Russians. Most of the Muslims live in areas of Central Asia, bordering on Iran, that were subjugated by czarist armies only a little more than a century ago—Samarakand, for example, fell in 1868. The Soviets have soft- pedaled antireligious propaganda and allowed the Muslims to maintain mosques and theological schools. Consequently, the Azerbaijanis, Turkmen and other Muslim minorities in the U.S.S.R. could eventually become targets for Khomeini's advocacy of an Islamic rebellion against all foreign domination of Muslims. Yet Moscow can hardly ignore the opportunity presented by Khomeini's rise. An Iran sliding into anarchy, and a Middle East shaken by the furies of Khomeini's followers, would offer the Soviets a chance to substitute their own influence for the Western presence that the Ayatullah's admirers vow to expel. And the Middle East is an unparalleled geopolitical prize. Whoever controls the Middle East's oil, or the area's Strait of Hormuz (40 miles wide at its narrowest) between Iran and the Sultanate of Oman through which most of it passes, acquires a stranglehold on the world's economy. The U.S.S.R. today is self-sufficient in oil, but it could well become a major net importer in the 1980s—and thus be in direct competition with the West for the crude pumped out of the desert sands. The warm-water ports so ardently desired by the Czars since the 18th century retain almost as much importance today. Soviet missile-firing submarines, for example, now have to leave the ice-locked areas around Murmansk and Archangel through narrow channels where they can easily be tracked by U.S. antisubmarine forces. They would be much harder to detect if they could slip out of ports on the Arabian Sea. The conflagration in Iran, and the threat of renewed instability throughout the region, could open an entirely new chapter in the story of Soviet efforts to infiltrate the Middle East. So far, the Soviet leaders have played a double game in the hostage crisis. Representatives of the U.S.S.R. voted in the United Nations and World Court to free the hostages. At the same time, to Washington's intense annoyance, the Soviets have proclaimed sympathy for Iran's anger against the U.S. The Kremlin apparently wants to keep lines open to Khomeini's followers, if not to the Ayatullah himself, while it awaits its chance. Meanwhile, Moscow has been acting more brazenly throughout the entire region of crisis. Around Christmas, the U.S.S.R. began airlifting combat troops into Afghanistan, reinforcing an already strong Soviet presence. Last week the Soviet soldiers participated in a coup ousting a pro-Moscow regime that had proved hopelessly ineffective in trying to put down an insurrection by anti-Communist Muslim tribesmen. At week's end, Washington charged that Soviet troops had crossed the border in Afghanistan in what appeared to be an outright invasion. Who or what follows Khomeini is already a popular guessing game in Tehran, Washington and doubtless Moscow. Few of the potential scenarios seem especially favorable to U.S. interests. One possibility is a military coup, led by officers once loyal to the Shah and now anxious to restore order. That might seem unlikely in view of the disorganized state of the army and the popular hatred of the old regime, but the danger apparently seems significant to Khomeini; he is enthusiastically expanding the Pasdaran militia as a counterweight to the official armed forces. A military coup might conceivably win the backing of the urban intelligentsia, which resents the theocracy and Washington analysts think that even some mullahs might accommodate themselves to it if they see no other way of blocking a leftist takeover. Whether such an uneasy coalition could fashion a stable regime is questionable. Another potential outcome is a takeover, swift or gradual, by younger clergymen in alliance with such Western-educated leaders as Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. A government composed of those forces would be less fanatical than the Ayatullah but still very hard-line anti-U.S. Another possibility, considered by some analysts to be the most likely, would be an eventual confrontation between Khomeini's religious establishment and members of the urban upper and middle classes, who applaud the nationalistic goals of the revolution but chafe under rigid enforcement of Islamic law—and have the brains to mount an effective opposition. A leftist takeover is the most worrisome prospect to Washington policymakers. The Mujahedin (Islamic socialist) and Fedayan (Marxist) movements maintain guerilla forces armed with weapons seized from the Shah's garrisons during the revolution. Both groups disclaim any ties with the U.S.S.R., and some Iranian exiles believe a dialogue between them and moderate forces would be possible. However, they are very anti-Western. A third contender is the Tudeh (Communist) Party, which has a reputation of loyally following Moscow's line. It is currently voicing all-out support of Khomeini because, its leaders disingenuously explain, any foe of America's imperialism is a friend of theirs. In gratitude, the Ayatullah has permitted them to operate openly. Any of these potential scenarios might draw support from Iran's ethnic minorities, whose demands for cultural and political autonomy—local languages in schools, local governing councils—have been rebuffed so brusquely by Khomeini's government as to trigger armed rebellion. Iran, a country three times the size of France, was officially designated an empire by the Shah, and in one sense it is; its 35.2 millon people are divided into many ethnic strains and speak as many as 20 languages, not counting the dialects of remote tribes. The 4 million Kurds, superb guerilla fighters who live in the western mountains, have at times dreamed of an independent Kurdistan, and today have set up what amounts to an autonomous region. The Baluchis, a nomadic tribe of Sunni Muslims, boycotted the referendum on the Iranian constitution, which they viewed as an attempt to impose Shi'ism on them. The 13 million Azerbaijanis, a Turkic people, also boycotted the constitutional referendum and in recent weeks have come close to an open revolt that could tear Iran apart. Some Washington policy planners have toyed with the idea of encouraging separatism, seeking the breakup of Iran as a kind of ultimate sanction against Khomeini. But the hazards of doing this far outweigh the advantages; true civil war in Iran would be the quickest way of destroying whatever stability remains in the Middle East. The lands of the Azerbaijanis stretch into Turkey and the Soviet Union, those of the Kurds into Turkey and Iraq, those of the Baluchis into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Successful secessionist movements could tear away parts of some of those countries as well as of Iran, leaving a number of weak new countries—the kind that usually tumble into social and economic chaos—and dismembered older ones. All might be subject to Soviet penetration. Anarchy in Iran could also trigger a conflict with its uneasy neighbor, Iraq, which shelled border areas of Iran three weeks ago. The geopolitical stakes there would be so great that the superpowers would be sorely tempted to intervene. The options for U.S. policy toward Iran are limited. So long as the hostages are in captivity, Washington must use every possible form of diplomatic and economic pressure to get them released. The Carter Administration has all but said that military action may well be necessary if the hostages are killed. But if they are released unharmed, many foreign policy experts think that the U.S. would be well advised not to retaliate for the seizure but simply to cut all ties with Iran and ignore the country for awhile—unless, of course, the Soviets move in. Primarily because of the intimate U.S. involvement with the Shah, Iran has turned so anti-American that just about any Washington attempt to influence events there is likely to backfire; certainly none of Iran's contending factions can afford to be thought of as pro-U.S. Iran needs a demonstration that the U.S. has not the slightest wish to dominate the country. The U.S. must try to contain the spread of Khomeini-inspired anti-Americanism in the Middle East. The best way to do that would be to mediate successfully the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations, to ensure that they will lead to genuine autonomy for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. The degree to which the Palestinians problem has inflamed passions even among Arabs who consider themselves pro-U.S. is not at all understood by Americans. Says Faisal Alhegelan, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S.: "All you have to do is grant the right of Palestinian self-determination, and you will find how quickly the entire Arab world will stack up behind Washington." There are also some lessons the U.S. can learn that might help keep future Third World revolutions from taking an anti- American turn. First, suggests Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard professor of government, the U.S. should stop focusing exclusively on the struggle between the U.S. and Communism and pay more attention to the aspiration of nations that have no desire for alliance with either side. Says Hoffmann: "To me, the biggest meaning of Iran is that it is the first major international crisis that is not an East-West crisis, and for that very reason we find ourselves much less able to react. There is very little attention given to the problems of revolutionary instability and internal discontent. Americans don't study any of this, and when such events happen, we are caught by surprise." A corollary thought is that the U.S. must avoid getting tied too closely to anti-Communist "strongmen" who are detested by their own people. Says Selig Harrison: "We should not be so committed that we become hostage to political fortune. We should have contact will all the forces in these countries, and we should not regard any of them as beyond the pale, even many Communist movements that would like to offset their dependence on Moscow and Peking." Such a policy, of course, is easier proclaimed than executed. In some volatile Third World countries, the only choice may be between a tyrant in power and several would-be tyrants in opposition. But when the U.S. does find itself allied with a dictator, it can at least press him to liberalize his regime and at the same time stay in touch with other elements in the society. Finally, Khomeini has blown apart the comfortable myth that as the Third World industrializes, it will adopt Western values, and the success of his revolution ought to force the U.S. to look for ways to foster material prosperity in Third World countries without alienating their cultures. Says Richard Bulliet, a Columbia University historian who specializes in the Middle East: "We have to realize that there are other ways of looking at the future than regarding us as being the future. It is possible that the world is not going to be homogenized along American-European lines." It is, unfortunately, almost surely too late for any such U.S. strategies to influence Ayatullah Khomeini, whose hostility to anything American is bitter, stubborn, zealous—and total. But he may have taught the U.S. a useful—even vital—lesson for the 1980s. He has shown that the challenges to the West are certain to get more and more complex, and that the U.S. will ignore this fact at its peril. He has made it plain that every effort must be made to avoid the rise of other Khomeinis. Even if he should hold power only briefly, the Ayatullah is a figure of historic importance. Not only was 1979 his year; the forces of disintegration that he let loose in one country could threaten many others in the years ahead.

Marine Letter about Najaf and Iraq

Letter to a Marine Reserve Officer
This is a piece of private correspondence with a thoughtful reserve officer who kindly took the time to remonstrate with me about comments he took to be "anti-military" on my web log.
Dear . . .I can't thank you enough for your detailed and (under the circumstances) gentlemanly letter, which I read with great attention.Let me try to clear away what I think is a misconception. I am not anti-US military. My father spent 20 years in Signal Corps and then Sat Com in the army, and I grew up on bases. I have also . . . had interactions with officers here (where they are sometimes detailed to do an MA with us) and elsewhere. I have the greatest respect for the intelligence, culture and initiative of the US officer corps, and I am grateful to the Marines and the other services for defending our country. I thank you for your own service.There are nevertheless things I don't like about the way the Iraq war is being prosecuted. I don't doubt that much of this is at the behest of "General Rove" and is by no means the fault of the military itself. They after all have to shoot where they are told to. Nevertheless, I do feel a need to speak out when I see things going wrong. That is my function as an analyst of the scene, and not to do it would be a dereliction of duty. And, sometimes the only way to make a strong point is to make it rudely.One reason for my vehemence is that I think the US is walking a tight rope in Iraq. The Americans seem not to realize it, but it is entirely possible that the Iraqis will mount a nationwide urban revolutionary movement aimed at expelling the US. At that point the US military will be faced with a choice of committing massacres (as the Shah's troops did at Black September in 1978) or leaving. Neither eventuality will lead to anything good.I wasn't on the scene at Haifa street and found the footage confusing, so I just don't know what happened there. But whatever it was doesn't smell right from the eyewitness accounts we have in the European and Arab press. I'd love to have your reaction to the suggestion made to me by one correspondent that the Bradley might have had some sort of intel equipment aboard and that was why it was important that it be completely destroyed before the guerrillas could loot it.In general, as you can tell, I deeply disagree with the tactic of using helicopter gunships and warplane bombardment of civilian neighborhoods as key tactics in fighting urban guerrillas. If the LAPD bombed Watts to get at the Cripps and the Bloods, there would be outrage. (In fact, that sort of thing was done in Philly with regard to MOVE and did cause outrage). You can't attack urban areas that way without killing a lot of innocent people. It isn't right, and I suspect it is a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. It is also politically inadvisable, since the people you are bombing in Kut and elsewhere started out only having a few guerrillas amongst them, but are pushed into vehement anti-Americanism by seeing their relatives killed this way.My angry comments on Najaf derived from several sources. Mostly I was upset by the fighting in the holy city. If really, really angered all my Shiite friends and had geopolitical repercussions as far abroad as my old stomping grounds in Lucknow, India. After 9/11, surely it should by now be apparent that the US cannot act with impunity in the Muslim world, and right now we don't need Shiite enemies alongside our Sunni and Wahhabi ones.If it were true, as John Burns alleged, that the most recent round of fighting was set off by local Marine decisions, then that was most unwise. It may be, as you imply, that Burns was wrong, and that the policy was set higher up, and the Marines were only following orders. But it is actually unclear that Washington would have wanted a major fight in a sacred space just before the Republican National Convention, and I am inclined to credit Burns on this.It seems obvious to me that the US military was perfectly willing to storm the Shrine, and indeed many were itching to do so. The Washington Post quoted one Marine as saying that the shrine "might not be there much longer."That was the ignoramus, along with his like-minded colleagues, to whom I was mainly refering.I know very well that the US officer corps knows about the significance of Najaf and Karbala . . . The problem is that they don't know about that significance in their *guts*. It is still intellectual for them, as it obviously is for you. The Shrine of Imam Ali is, by the way, not a mosque, though a mosque is attached to it. It is a mausoleum.That Muqtada's guys were in the shrine did not necessitate the Marines storming the Shrine of Ali, which was clearly at some points envisaged. First of all, the Mahdi Army did not even control Najaf in March of 2003-- it was mainly in the hands of Badr Corps. It was the stupid American decision to "kill or capture" Muqtada in early April that led to his movement ensconcing itself in Najaf. So having caused the problem in the first place, the American solution to it was to piss all over the most sacred mausoleum in Shiite Islam. That is wilfull ignorance, I am afraid.I am sure the local Marine commanders were manipulated by Adnan Zurfi and the Najaf elite, and probably Allawi as well. (A . . . State Department official intimated to me that Allawi was mainly behind it and Negroponte's hands were tied). But, again, if the initiative came as Burns claims from local commanders, then what they did was most unwise (the polite way of putting it).There are some things that the US should not do, period. Besieging Najaf and bombing the sacred cemetery is one of them. The whole city and its environs are holy, not just the shrine. It is very nice for Zurfi and Allawi if they can get us to do it, but we should resist being used that way.Not only were all the Shiites in southern Iraq outside Najaf itself angered by the fighting in Najaf, but so were the Lebanese, Bahrainis, Iranians, Pakistanis, and Indians. An operation would have to be really important and urgent to make it worthwhile alienating 120 million people. I didn't see the urgency. Most of the cities in Iraq are not under US control and are patrolled by militias. If you were going to pick a fight, Ramadi or Kut would have been preferable, because they lack the "gut" factor.And, it is precisely by injuring these religious feelings that the US hastens the day when the Iraqi public comes out into the streets in the hundreds of thousands and begins the revolution for Iraqi independence.
posted by Juan @ 9/20/2004 06:05:52 AM

Iraq, a battleground state

Iraq, A Battleground State
By Michael Schwartz, tomdispatch.com. Posted August 12, 2004.
The Bush administration's decision to launch an all-out offensive in Najaf is not motivated by military strategy, but by electoral math.
The Bush administration has embarked on a desperate military adventure in hopes of creating the appearance of a pacified Iraq. The assault on the holy city of Najaf, with its attendant slaughter of combatants and civilians, its destruction of whole neighborhoods and its threat to Shia holy cites, is fraught with the possibility of another major military defeat.
But the military commanders are hoping it will instead produce a rare military victory, since they are fighting lightly armed and relatively inexperienced members of Muqtada al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army. Nevertheless, even such a victory would be short-lived at best, since the fighting itself only serves to consolidate the opposition of the Shia population. The administration is apparently hoping that a sufficiently brutal suppression of the Sadrists will postpone the now almost inevitable national uprising until after our November election.
To understand this desperate and brutal strategic maneuver, we must review the origins of the new Battle of Najaf:
A truce in May ended the first round of armed confrontation between U.S. Marines and Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, the al-Mahdi Army, but was never fully honored by either side. American troops were supposed to stay out of Najaf, and al-Sadr's militiamen were supposed to disband as an army. In the intervening months of relative peace, neither side made particularly provocative moves, but the U.S. still mounted patrols and the al-Mahdi army continued to stockpile arms, notably in the city's vast, holy cemetery. Lots of threats were proffered on both sides.
The new confrontation began after the Americans replaced Army troops with Marines in the area outside Najaf and then sent two armed patrols, including local police, to al-Sadr's home. The arrival of the second patrol led to a firefight with casualties on both sides. In the meantime, the Marines and the Iraqi police detained at least a dozen Mahdi's Army members.
The al-Mahdi soldiers retaliated by attacking a local police station. Previously, there had been a modest pattern of peaceful coexistence between the police and al-Sadr's followers, except when the Sadrists were directly attacked. They also took policemen as hostages, a new tactic that they justified by pointing to the detained Sadrists and calling for an exchange of prisoners.
On Aug. 5, the U.S. counterattacked in force – with the official blessing of Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi – using a remarkably similar military strategy to the one that had created an international crisis in Falluja back in April. After first surrounding the city, they assaulted al-Mahdi positions with long range weapons, notably helicopter gunships armed with rockets, and even jets. They then sent Marines (and Iraqi security forces) into the holy cemetery at the heart of Najaf to root out dug-in al-Mahdi soldiers and capture their weapons caches. This fierce attack produced two days of heavy fighting, heavily reported in the press, and evidently destroyed significant portions of the downtown area. A tank, for instance, was described in one report as firing directly into hotels where al-Mahdi fighters were said to be holed up.
In the three days that followed, the Marines penetrated ever further into the city (at a cost so far of 5 dead, 19 wounded, and one helicopter downed) and for a period, even took the cemetery itself, though in a description which had a Vietnam-era ring to it, "A Marine spokesman said insurgents had fled the cemetery after an assault on Friday. But when U.S. forces withdrew from the area, the insurgents moved back in." By day six, Americans tanks had moved into the cemetery and helicopters were strafing the area. The Sadrists warned that further attacks would be met by extending the fight to other cities (as had happened in the previous round of fighting in April and May) and al-Sadr himself swore he would never leave the city but would defend it to "the last drop of my blood," calling for a more general uprising. At least some Shia clerics supported this call for general insurrection.
As the fighting continued, it became ever clearer that this was anything but a small incident that had spun out of control; it was, on the American side, a concerted effort to annihilate the Sadrist forces. The development of the battle points strongly to this conclusion:
The original patrols to Muqtada al-Sadr's house and the arrest of his followers were unprovoked, distinctly provocative acts. They occurred just after the Marines replaced Army troops on the scene and are among numerous indicators of a planned new campaign against Sadrist forces.
Once the city was surrounded, the helicopter and jet attacks on "suspected positions" of al-Mahdi soldiers would hardly have been needed to rebuff the modestly mounted Sadrist attack on one police station, but fit perfectly with a larger strategy of "softening up" the resistance after preventing it from escaping. So do a number of other American acts, including the commandeering of Najaf's major trauma center (ostensibly for a military staging area), clearly a punitive measure of a kind previously used in Falluja, meant to maximize suffering and expected to hasten surrender.
Instead of denying or apologizing for the initial attack on the holy cemetery, the Marine commander on the scene justified it in a public statement. ("The actions of the Moktada militia make the cemetery a legitimate military objective.") The same statement also implied that the Marines would destroy the Holy Shrine if the al-Mahdi occupied it.
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shia cleric in Iraq, left Najaf just as hostilities erupted. Though he gave what may have been valid medical reasons for his departure for Lebanon and then England, his timing as well as other factors made it appear that he had been informed by the Americans of what was to come and had made a decision to avoid being caught, in every sense, in a major battle for Najaf. (It's possible as well that the Americans, through intermediaries, informed him that they could not guarantee his safety.)
Public statements by Iraqi officials of Iyad Allawi's Baghdad government and of American military commanders, as reported in the New York Times, made it clear that their goal was to take control of the entire city away from the Sadrists. The national police commander, for instance, told the press that "the interim government ordered a combined operation … with the task of regaining control of the city." The governor of the province in which Najaf is situated, Adnan al-Zorfi, told a press briefing: "This operation will never stop before all the militia leave the city." And the Marine commander left no doubt that this conquest would involve the physical occupation of those areas currently controlled by the al-Mahdi army, including the cemetery that had previously been "off limits to the American military for religious reasons." He told Times reporters Sabrina Tavenese and John Burns, "We are fighting them on close terrain but we are on schedule. You have to move very slowly because the cemetery has a lot of mausoleums and little caves [where guerrillas could hide]." (The words "on schedule," by the way, have a particularly ominous ring; they suggest a battle plan for conquering all parts of the city on a street by street basis, a strategy that annihilated whole neighborhoods in Falluja.)
This well-planned attack thus constituted the beginning of a major U.S. offensive almost certainly aimed at making Najaf into the showcase military victory that Falluja was once supposed to be. A rapid and thorough defeat of the insurgents, followed by an uncontested occupation of the entire city, was undoubtedly expected, especially since the lightly armed al-Mahdi soldiers had previously proved a relatively uncoordinated fighting force. Huge and well publicized casualties, as well as heavy physical destruction, were, as in Falluja, undoubtedly part of the formula, since they provide an object example to other cities of the costs of resistance.
The immediate goals of the ongoing battle were summarized by Alex Berenson and John F. Burns in the New York Times, in response to an offer of a cease fire by the Sadrists: "There was little sign a cease-fire would be accepted by the Iraqi government and American commanders. Instead, the indications at nightfall were that the American and Iraqi units intended to press the battle, in the hope of breaking the back of Mr. Sadr's force in Najaf."
Reporters Tavernese and Burns characterized the more general goals of the offensive in this way: "In effect, the battle appeared to have become a watershed for the new power alignment in Baghdad, with the new government, established when Iraq regained formal sovereignty on June 28, asserting political control, and American troops providing the firepower to sustain it."
In their attempt to achieve a noteworthy victory, the Bush administration and its Iraqi allies have created a potential watershed for both the war and the American presidential election. To understand why this might be so, consider the following:
This major offensive was probably motivated by the increasing possibility that the U.S. and its allies were losing all control over most of the major cities in Iraq. In the Sunni parts of the country, city after city has in fact adopted the "Falluja model" – refusing to allow an American presence in its streets and establishing its own local government. As a recent Tomdispatch succinctly summarized the situation: "Think of Sunni Iraq – and possibly parts of Shia Iraq as well – as a 'nation' of city-state fiefdoms, each threatening to blink off [the U.S.] map of 'sovereignty,' despite our 140,000 troops and our huge bases in the country." The attack in Najaf is certainly an attempt to stem this tide before it engulfs the Shia areas of Iraq as well, and it validates historian Juan Cole's ironic description of Prime Minister Allawi as "really… just the mayor of downtown Baghdad."
The U.S. and its Iraqi clients probably chose Najaf because it represented their best chance of immediate success. Unlike the mujaheddin in Falluja (and other Sunni cities), the al-Mahdi soldiers were generally not members of Saddam's army and are therefore more lightly armed and considerably less undisciplined as fighters; nor do they enjoy the unconditional support of the local population. (For an indelible portrait of civilian attitudes in Najaf, see Scott Baldauf's first-hand account of the fighting in Najaf in the Christian Science Monitor.) An ambivalent city is easier to conquer, even if victory results in a sullen hatred of the conquerors. A quick victory would therefore be a noteworthy achievement and might have some chance of convincing rebels in other Shia cities not to follow the Falluja model – at least not immediately.
However, a loss in Najaf (which could occur even with a military "victory") would be catastrophic for the U.S. and for its interim administration in Baghdad, which is now indelibly identified with the Najaf offensive (and has ostensibly "ordered" it). Even a victory would, at least in the long run, undermine the already strained tolerance of the country's deeply suspicious Shia population. The Americans inside the Green Zone in Baghdad (and assumedly in Washington) are, however, banking on the possibility that an immediate victory might be worth the negative publicity. It might establish the interim administration (and its American muscle) as a formidable, if brutal, adversary, worthy of fear if not respect. A defeat, on the other hand, would make it nothing more than an impotent adjunct of the American occupation.
For the Bush administration, the battle of Najaf shapes up as a new Falluja: If it doesn't win quickly, it will likely be a major disaster. A quick victory might indeed make it look, for a time, as if the occupation, now in new clothes, had turned some corner, particularly if it resulted in temporary quiescence throughout the Shia south. But a long and brutal fight, or even an inconclusive victory (which led to further fighting elsewhere in Shia Iraq or renewed low-level fighting in Najaf) would almost certainly trigger yet more problems not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. And this would lead in turn to another round of worldwide outrage, and so to yet another electoral problem at home.
A loss after a long bloody battle would yield all of the above, while reducing the American military to the use of air power against cities, without any real hope of pacifying them.
Our presidential election could be decided by this battle. President Bush's approval ratings dropped 10 percent during the April and May battles, creating the opening for a Kerry victory. Since then they have neither recovered, nor deteriorated further. If the battle for Najaf dominates the headlines for as long as a week, it will likely be the next big event in the Presidential campaign. A resounding victory for American forces could be exactly what Karl Rove has been dreaming of – proof that the tide has turned in Iraq. At the very least, it might remove the subject from the front pages of American papers and drop it down the nightly network prime-time news for a suitable period of time. But a defeat as ignominious as Falluja – or even a bloody and destructive victory bought at the expense of worldwide outrage – would almost certainly drive away many remaining swing voters (and might weaken the resolve of small numbers of Republican voters as well). This would leave Bush where his father was going into the electoral stretch drive – in too deep a deficit for any campaign rhetoric to overcome.
One has to wonder why the Bush Administration has selected such a risky strategy, fraught with possibly disastrous consequences. The only explanation that makes sense is that they are desperate. In Iraq, their control is slipping away one city at a time, a process that actually accelerated after the "transfer of sovereignty." A dramatic military offensive may be the only way they can imagine – especially since their thinking is so militarily oriented – to reverse this decline.
In the United States, their electoral position is not promising: their hope for a dramatic economic turnaround has been dashed; a post-sovereignty month of quiescence in our media about Iraq did not reduce opposition to the war; and recently there has been a further erosion of confidence in Bush's anti-terrorist policies. No incumbent president (the Truman miracle of 1948 excepted) has won re-election with a less-than-50% positive job rating. (The President's now stands somewhere around 47%.) A dramatic military victory, embellished with all sorts of positive spin, might reverse what has begun to look like irretrievable erosion in his re-election chances. The Bush administration appears to have decided that it must take a huge risk to generate a military victory that can turn the tide in both Iraq and in the United States.
The agony of the current American offensive begins with the death and destruction it is wreaking on an ancient and holy city. Beyond that, the primary damage, may lie in the less visible horror that animates this new military strategy. The U.S. is no longer capable either of winning the "battle for the hearts and minds" of the Iraqis or governing most of the country. But by crushing the city of Najaf, the Marines might be able quiet the rebellion for long enough to spin the November election back to Bush.
Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His work on Iraq has appeared at ZNET and TomDispatch, and in Z magazine.

The Mentality of the Colonized:

By Rene L. Gonzalez Berrios M.A.

04 April, 2004Information Clearing House
Consider the following quotes from the most authoritative author on the mentality of the colonized, revolutionary psychatrist Frantz Fanon, writing in his landmark book, "The Wretched of the Earth",
"Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain "species" of men by another "species" of men." - p. 35
"The last shall be first and the first last. Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence." - p. 37
"For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists." - p.
"The violence which has ruled over ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters" - p. 40
The lynchings of American civilians in Fallujah are not at all difficult to understand, should one be courageous enough to admit a few certain, contextual facts. First of all, let there be no illusion about the American occupation; it is colonial in nature. It is made possible by violence at the hands of occupation soldiers from the "Coalition of the Bribed", and ultimately guaranteed by their very presence in Iraq. Thus, in the overall context of powerlessness on the part of Iraqis to manifest their utter contempt for the humiliating, colonial rule of the American-led occupiers, their violent hatred will manifest itself in the type of lynchings that were witnessed in Fallujah. Quite simply, the Iraqis are intent on "replacing a certain "species" (Americans)" with another (themselves). It can be simplified to that savage reality. They want their country back, and they are willing to lynch every interloper in their way. It does not matter if those interlopers are attempting to rationalize their invasion of Iraqi territory through claims of "aiding the Iraqis"; what matters is that they are in Iraq at a time of national humiliation, and thus, they make themselves targets for the scorn of humiliated Iraqis. And, I do mean Iraqis, not "insurgents, terrorists, or fighters". It is clear that the people who lynched the Americans were not the "insurgents" who left the Americans at the mercy of the mob. It was regular Iraqis, representing the Iraqi national mood of hatred and humiliation.
No one should doubt the equally violent mentality of the colonizers. Consider the comments by American Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt and other Americans,
''We will pacify that city. ... It will be at the time and place of our choosing,'' - The Batt.Com article
"Let's just go in and level the town," said one angry American civilian. "Let's tell them to get their women and children out and then go in and level it." - The Telegraph article
The comments of regular Iraqis were equally disdainful of the worth of American or foreign lives,
"The Americans may think it is unusual but this is what they should expect. They show up in places and shoot civilians so why can't they be killed?" Falluja shop worker Amir said on Thursday. - News.FT.Com article
"Of course these things will happen. What do you expect with the Americans occupying Iraq and killing our people?" said a taxi driver who declined to give his name. - News.FT.Com article
The events in Fallujah do not require much academic or analytical description to understand. It is simple. The colonized will respond to the violence of the colonizers and imposition made possible by threat of violence in the manner of their choosing, usually in "kind" (violence), as Frantz Fanon highlighted in his book on the mentality of colonized. Those 4 Americans had to pay with their lives for the colonial imposition of the American occupiers. That the Iraqis are responding in such ways is evidence that the American invasion is colonial, and has always been in the eyes of the Iraqi people (which should be the only viewpoint that matters). It is only a surprising development to people who have not yet admitted to themselves that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, that it is colonial, that attempting to impose foreign rule breeds hatred on the part of the locals, and that the respone will most likely will violence. Only in the feeblest and most cowardly minds is the elephant in the room not a factor of their thinking. To paraphrase on a common argument for the importance of economic issues in U.S politics in the characterization of the Iraqi situatoin, "it's colonialism, stupid". It will take more "Fallujahs" to hit the message home to recalcitrant American and other foreigner minds who still harbor naive hopes for the re-ordering of Iraqi society along lines acceptable to Americans. It simply won't happen, and people must understand and digest this.s
Fallujah is a message to all who continue to naively believe that the American occupiers can impose a government of their choosing on Iraq. The invasion will be resisted with the most brutal and savage kind of violence; the same kind of brutal and savage violence that was evidenced by thousands of rockets, missiles, bullets, tank shells, depleted uraniun, and other measures that have characterized the American invasion until now. Violence will breed more violence.
In the eyes of this author, it is hard to argue with the logic of the arguments presented by the Iraqi people that, in many ways, the "Americans deserved this". It is also a testament to the impossibility of imposing American visions in Iraq. It is a recognized international human right for the colonized to respond to colonial imposition through any measures of their choosing, including "armed struggle". Thus, the Fallujah lynchings are justified by the countless murders and abuses of the colonial occupiers. It does not have to make rational sense to us, in the West, who are horrified by the "savagery" of the Fallujah residents. It only matters that the Fallujah people are so angry about the American presence in Iraq that they will lynch Americans wherever they see them. That is really the issue at hand, for if it is true that the Iraqi people are so angry at Americans, than the war for "minds and hearts" is over, and the occupation an utter failure.
At this moment, only one rational course remains: for the Americans to withdraw their forces from Iraq. If they stay, only more resistance violence and American "overwhelming" counter-violence will characterize the future of Iraq, a development which will continue to legitimize the Iraqi rebellion and further sink the United States' reputation in the quagmire of colonial clashes. It is only a matter of time: do we give up now, or give up later, with further degradation of our reputation. The only way to "win" would be to "level towns" and commit genocide on the Iraqis, a course of action that is not open to us, as a "civilized" nation. That being our choice of action, it's a no-brainer. Given the amount of Iraqis, it is a virtual impossibility to "win" this insurgency. The Americans should concede defeat and exit Iraq. There is no way to win, and the faster they realize this fact, the faster we can begin a process of national reflection over the profoundly irresponsible, illegal, murderous, and incompetent decision of invading another sovereign country under false pretenses.
Gonzalez is a Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Politics at the University of Massachusetts

Is the Najaf Crisis Over?

Death in Najaf
Iraqis are unsure about the outcome of the battle of Najaf, reports Nermeen Al-Mufti from the devastated holy city
Is the Najaf crisis over? Have the Americans and the Iraqi government won or was Moqtada Al-Sadr the real victor? All of these questions are common on Iraqi streets, and the answers are lacking. Since the fall of Baghdad, Iraqis have yearned for peace and found none.
The Iraqi people can only guess at who's fighting for them and who's fighting for personal glory. Many questions linger as the country revolves in a whirlwind of destruction, fear and death. Iraqis are perplexed and tired of it all.
Najaf was quiet following the initiative of Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani and the acceptance by Al-Sadr of a peace deal. But on the first day of peace, Najaf was a ghost town. Families that have left the city to the outskirts of Abbasiya, or the nearby provinces, haven't come back; perhaps they wanted to see peace survive another day. Their caution is justified. According to official records, 110 were killed and 501 injured the day Al-Sistani returned. The markets in the old city, particularly those close to Imam Ali shrine, still bear the devastating marks of violence.
Some buildings have disappeared entirely, burnt into rubble and ashes. Hotels -- most of which had been renovated over the past few years -- stand like scorched shells, as if they hadn't been full of visitors until recently. Pain blends with the wish that the town would be disarmed, turned into a symbol of peace, neighbourliness and dialogue.
As Najaf calmed down, things went berserk in Al-Sadr City, Baghdad. Bombardment left many killed and wounded, some civilian, some from Al-Mahdi Army. Eventually, a truce was called and negotiations started between the dignitaries of the Baghdad suburb and the American army. And yet Al-Mahdi Army fighters in Basra said they were not committed to the peace deal and would continue to resist the occupation forces.
On the second day of calm, last Saturday, top Shia clerics met at the home of Al-Sistani and issued a statement in which they "renewed their opposition to armed resistance against the occupation forces led by the US" and declared their support for peace and dialogue. As clashes raged in Al-Sadr City, a high- ranking government delegation, including five ministers, arrived in Najaf to thank Al-Sistani and enquire about the needs of the town.
Nesreen Birwari, minister of municipalities and public works, was among the delegation. She told Al- Ahram Weekly that "the visit to Najaf was in support to the efforts of Al-Sayed Al-Sistani, to thank him, confirm the ceasefire and launch the reconstruction."
Al-Sistani, according to Birwari. "was in good shape and high spirits." She added, "We'll take care of security first and then construction."
Concerning the statement by top Shia clerics that they oppose armed resistance, the Weekly contacted Al- Sistani's office in Damascus (approaches to his Najaf office were not successful). The office said that it has not received information to that effect yet and could not confirm the statement.
Speaking to the Weekly, Adnan Al- Ebeidi, from the press office of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), said, "We haven't seen the statement so far. But it is the position of top Shia clerics and the major Islamic currents in Iraq, such as Al-Dawa and SCIRI, to support dialogue and negotiations."
Concerning foreign forces in Iraq, Al- Ebeidi said that these forces are not occupation forces but multinational forces deployed in Iraq in response to the demand of the Iraqi government.
Al-Ebeidi denied that Moqtada Al- Sadr was uner Al-Sistani's protection. "He is protected by the pledges given by the Iraqi government," Al-Ebeidi said. And what about the clashes in Al-Sadr City? "This is a different matter. There are, undoubtedly, ramifications, pockets and strongholds affecting all of Iraq. There are some people affiliated with Al-Sadr who are violating the pledges made so far, but life will go back to normal," Al-Ebeidi stated.
As for the Al-Sadr movement? "The leaders of that group said that they are willing to turn into a political movement," Al-Ebeidi said.
In a telephone interview Hamid Al- Khaffaf, official spokesman for Al- Sistani's Damascus office, he denied that the top Shia clerics were calling for an end to armed resistance, added that certain people want to smear the achievement in Najaf.
Where is Moqtada Al-Sadr now? The answer comes from Moqtada's followers. He is still in Najaf and has never left it.
One question remains: Who was the winner in the crisis? Political analyst Ali Al-Zubeidi says, "The first winner is Ayatollah Al-Sistani. His victory is one that benefits Iraq more than the top Shia clerics. As for the losers, we have many, including the government of Iyad Allawi, for it has failed to bring about a solution and remained until the last moment intent on a military solution. As for the US forces, they knew from the very beginning that the murder or capture of Al-Sadr would lead the entire country into a bloodbath, and yet they were willing to go for a military solution."
Karim Mokhtar, a specialist in Iraqi affairs, insists, "There is no victor in this crisis. The big loser is not the government but the Iraqis. The US forces used the media infatuation with Najaf to bombard Fallujah and carry out operations in Samarra and Baghdad. Hundreds were killed or wounded in Najaf and Baghdad, and dozens of families lost their homes and shops."
The Najaf crisis has added to the sense of perplexity in Iraq. According to one observer, the transformation of Najaf into a disarmed city, no longer a hotbed of resistance but merely a religious relic, is just another step towards the division of Iraq.
The future is uncertain, but the people of Najaf, those who have suffered most and for no good reason, hope to see Al- Sadr's movement turn political. They are tired of the stench of death.

The Sistani Puzzle: Did The Grand Ayatollah Collude With The US Assault On Najaf?

The Sistani Puzzle: Did The Grand Ayatollah Collude With The US Assault On Najaf?
E-mail thisPrint thisMilan Rai, Justice Not Vengeance, 3 September 2004Blunder or conspiracy?There are at least three possible accounts of the origins of the recent Najaf conflict. Uncovering the truth requires a close scrutiny of the behaviour of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, now feted as the peace-bringer of Najaf.The standard Western media rendering is that (for some unknown reason) militant Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr decided to launch an uprising against the US occupation on 5 AugustThis flies in the face of the fact that, as the Financial Times reported, it was US forces that 'went on the offensive' against al-Sadr's group, 'breaking a two-month ceasefire with followers of Shia radical Moqtada al-Sadr' by surrounding al-Sadr's home in Kufa, next to Najaf, sparking an exchange fire with members of al-Sadr's militia.' (FT, 3 August, p. 9)
Sistani's police escort - photo by CPTAnd this took place on 2 August, three days before the Mehdi Army assault on Najaf police station which is usually reported as the beginning of hostilities.US officials claimed that the 2 August incident in Kufa was not a raid on al-Sadr's house: 'Until we learn the side streets, we won't know where Sadr lives. And until we do, we'll run into things,' said Lt. Mike Wyrsch of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which had taken 'command' of the area only two days before the incident.On the other hand, according to Ahmed Sheybani, al-Sadr's spokesman in Najaf, 'They passed the barriers, surrounded the house and tried to enter.' (Knight Ridder, 3 August)The 'blunder' explanation does not explain why, on the same day as the Marines 'ran into' al-Sadr's house, US forces also 'went on the offensive' against a Sunni Islamist political group, 'arresting an influential Sunni cleric in Baghdad'. (FT, 3 August, p. 9)It also does not explain why a few days earlier, US forces (with some token Iraqi security forces, raided the home of al-Sadr's representative in the holy city of Karbala, arresting both Sheikh Mithal al-Hasnawi and his brother. (The Australian, 31 July)Following 2 August, there were 'days of mounting tension' as 'several of the cleric's senior aides' in the Najaf area were arrested, and the Mehdi Army in Najaf 'seized 18 Iraqi police officers in response'. (Guardian, 6 August, p. 2)Before and after 2 August, there was a pattern of harassment against al-Sadr (and at least one other Islamist opposition group). The 2 August incident in Kufa was almost certainly a deliberate attempt to seize al-Sadr.A local initiative?Where was the decision taken to escalate the violence in Najaf? Let us turn to the second major turning point in the conflict, the decision on 5 August to send US forces into areas of Najaf they were excluded from under the terms of the June ceasefire.An account in the New York Times has it that Marine officers in Najaf 'said they turned a firefight with al-Sadr's forces on August 5 into a eight-day pitched battle - without the approval of the Pentagon or senior Iraqi officials.'Because of Mahdi Army resistance slowing them down in Najaf's cemetery, 'the politics of war' eventually took over 'and the U.S. force had lost the opportunity to storm al-Sadr's troops around the mosque.' What the Marines had hoped would be 'a quick, decisive action' 'bogged down into a stalemate'.A sequence of events that is 'strikingly reminiscent of the battle of Fallujah in April': 'In both cases, newly arrived Marine units immediately confronted guerrillas in firefights that quickly escalated. And in both cases, the U.S. military failed to achieve its strategic goals, pulling back after the political costs of the confrontation rose.'The Marines told the New York Times 'that they engaged al-Sadr's forces at the request of the local Iraqi police': 'They did not seek approval from more senior military commanders or from Iraqi political leaders, with the exception of the governor of Najaf.' (18 Aug,reprinted in the Indianapolis Star)Sistani's curious timing - departureOne of the difficulties for this account is the apparent complicity of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who left at this crucial juncture for medical treatment for his heart in London.'US tanks and armour, led for the first time by Iraqi security forces, rolled into Najaf [on 5 August], hours after Ayatollah Sistani left the city… By the time Ayatollah Sistani had reached Heathrow, having changed planes in Beirut, a full-scale battle that raged for seven days and seven nights was unstoppably under way.' [Sunday Telegraph, 15 August, p. 18]Professor Juan Cole, one of the most perceptive commentators on Iraq, suggested on 7 August that US forces had 'spirited' al-Sistani out of Najaf to pave the way for an assault on al-Sadr. Cole notes that 'Al-Hayat reports that Sistani's reason for leaving at this juncture was to remove himself from the scene of the fighting and to lift the mantle of his authority from the Sadrist movement', permitting the assault. (juancole.com)The FT noted there had been 'a whispering campaign among the Sadrists that he colluded in a plan to finish off Mr Sadr.' (28/29 August, p. 10)'One US commander, Major David Holahan [executive officer, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines Regiment], said of al-Sistani's departure: "A lot of people think it is the green light for us to do what we have to do." ' (Sunday Times, 15 August, p. 19.)A US officer, perhaps Major Holahan again, said as Sistani returned to Najaf three weeks later to end the fighting, 'There was a lot of thought that he had left the country originally to give us a chance to take control of the situation. Now he is coming back to help us find a solution, possibly a peaceful result. But the end result is, he wants us to help disband the Mahdi Army.' (D. Filkins, 'Week in Review', NYT, 29 August)On 12 August, Juan Cole noted, 'Al-Sharq al-Awsat says today that Sistani will not need a heart operation, and that his clogged arteries will be treated by coronary angioplasty (inflating a balloon in them).' The Times of London remarked on the strange decision 'to go to London for minor surgery that could have been performed in Baghdad.' (27 August, p. 27)Residents of the Amir neighbourhood of Najaf had already condemned the ayatollah: Shakir Qassim, 25, said, 'Sistani escaped from Najaf. There are more hospitals in Baghdad to treat the same disease but he escaped to save himself.' Safa Abdel Zahra, 20, agreed: 'Sistani escaped from Iraq because he was afraid. There are hospitals [in Iraq] that can treat him. At the end he is a coward.'The Financial Times noted that, 'Popular anger has been deepened by the fact that Mr Sistani went to London rather than Iran, where he was born, or Lebanon, home to one of the Arab world's largest Shia minorities.' (26 August, p. 9)Sistani's curious timing - return'He has shown an uncanny sense of timing. In the days leading up to [the peace deal], some Iraqis were tearing up photos of al-Sistani in the streets of Najaf, out of anger that he hadn't saved the city. But on the day that al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia left the shrine, [some] Iraqis called al-Sistani's timing perfect, saying he had intervened while al-Sadr was surrounded by U.S. and Iraqi forces and would have to respond to his peace plan…' (Knight Ridder, 27 August)'He picked his moment carefully, waiting until the Americans had tightened the tourniquet to the point where the militias were effectively outflanked and cornered. His silence in the three weeks since the fighting began [and his absence in London] had begun to strain the loyalty of his aides. It was deliberate - Ayatollah al-Sistani wants Hojatoleslam al-Sadr down as well as out: out of Najaf, in conditions that diminish him. That means wresting back control of the shrine by the Marjaiyah - the traditional combined leadership of Iraq's four ayatollahs - while being seen also to have distanced US forces from the city and brought an end to the fighting.' (Times, 27 August, p. 27)Sistani was out of the way. Where were the other three ayatollahs during the fighting?'A German diplomat probed his British counterpart on the significance of the absence of all four grand ayatollahs from Najaf at the same time. There was no senior religious figure who could stop the conflict with a single call to negotiate. "It's entirely a coincidence," said one Western envoy.' (Sunday Telegraph, 15 August, p. 18)Some coincidence. 'In all likelihood, the American operation to expel the Mahdi Army from the shrine could never have gone forward without the sanction of some very powerful Iraqi leaders - including Ayatollah Sistani himself.' When he did return, offering a truce, the Ayatollah apparently agreed that force could be used in the shrine itself against al-Sadr's militia: 'If Mr. Sadr did not back down, American officials said, Ayatollah Sistani assured them that he would support a storming of the shrine by Iraqi troops.' (D. Filkins, 'Week in Review', NYT, 29 August)Sistani, Allawi, al-Sadr - and the US assaultThe Sistani peace deal for Najaf is generally regarded as increasing the ayatollah's influence while diminishing that of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi. True, but not quite so simple.'The reassertion of Mr Sistani's authority over Najaf is crucial for the Allawi government and for the US. With much of the Sunni heartland out of American or Iraqi government control, the Bush administration has relied on the ageing cleric - and changed its plans for political transition in accordance with his wishes - to keep Iraq's Shias from rising up against the occupation.' (FT, 26 August, p. 9)The US assault on Najaf seems to have been a gamble decided on in Washington, perhaps coordinated with the Allawi government, certainly agreed with Iraq's four ayatollahs. Not a 'blunder', but a colossal miscalculation, by everyone, including the Grand Ayatollah, who wants an end to both the occupation and the al-Sadr phenomenon.— Milan Raiwww.j-n-v.org