Bollettino

In all the American media attention given to the suicide bomber, little has been made of the fact that the guy was a Shi'ite. Hmm. The Guardian carries a thumbsucker by the usually reliable Dilip Hiro that reports on the theologico-politico complexities into which Americans, whistling like Donnie Rumsfeld soaping himself up in the shower, have wandered

"Earlier, any prospects of an uprising in the predominantly Shi'ite city of Basra disappeared on Tuesday when Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani issued a fatwa, calling on "Muslims all over the world" to help Iraqis in "a fierce battle against infidel followers who have invaded our homeland". Sistani is based in Najaf, the third holiest place of Shi'ite Muslims, and it is likely that Nomani, a Shi'ite, was following his fatwa. As the only grand ayatollah of Iraq, Sistani is the most senior cleric for Iraqi Shi'ites, who form 70% of ethnic Arabs in Iraq. Any Anglo-American attempt to devalue Sistani's opposition to the invasion - by saying he's a Saddam stooge, for example - will boomerang because of his status; there are only five grand ayatollah's in the world.

By now it is apparent that the Anglo-American decision-makers made a monumental miscalculation by imagining that Iraqis in the predominantly Shi'ite southern Iraq would welcome their soldiers as liberators. It stems from their blind faith in the unverified testimonies of the Iraqi defectors combined with their failure to realise the complexity of the task of overthrowing President Saddam Hussein's regime."

Bollettino

As liberation nears, and the irrepressible Iraqi will turns to the man whose picture is, secretly, in every Iraqi home (we mean smilin' Jay Garner, the American proconsul in waiting, who, if he could speak Arabic, would give a big shout out to all his Shi'ia buddies) we should contemplate how gracefully America is monetizing that gratitude. There's a nice piece by Frida Berrigan in In These Times (for which yours truly has written) concerning the Cheney-Halliburton connection. Dick Cheney chose to take his compensation from Halliburton (for moving down to a post as a Halliburton lobbyist - oops, I mean as Vice President of the United States), which comes out to between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per annum. And Brown and Root, everybody's favorite engineering squad, and a Halliburton subsidiary, seems on schedule for cleaning up in the great post-liberation afterwards:

"Critics argue that the U.S. Agency for International Development ignored the expertise and experience of well-regarded NGOs with decades of experience in humanitarian work in Iraq in their secretive contract process. USAID asked just five for-profit corporations to submit bids for $900 million in reconstruction contracts for the initial phase of work, scheduled to last just six months. Of course, these companies will be best situated to win billions in future contracts. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences report estimated that the reconstruction of Iraq could cost anywhere from $30 billion to $105 billion over the next decade.

KBR not only has the corner on postwar reconstruction, they were also granted a potentially huge contract to fight oil well fires throughout Iraq, even though they did not submit a bid for the job. In November, the Pentagon hired KBR to write a classified contingency plan for dealing with the fires, allowing the company to position itself for this job long before the war was a fait accompli. President Bush just asked Congress for $500 million for oil field repair, and KBR is standing by to take the money."

Sweet! Of course, it helps that Iraqi proconsul Garner is himself making a small pile on the war. As is Richard Perle. Berrigan could have included a link to Waters website, where there is a press release concerning her amendment. Here?s the link. We don't imagine this story is going to be coming to your local paper anytime soon.

Bollettino

Men have no right to what is not reasonable and to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, Licet perire poetis, when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have lept into the flame of a volcanic revolution, Ardentum figidus Aenam insulit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic licence, than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were a poet, or divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that wise, because more charitable thoughts would urge me rather to save the man, than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly. � Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

We received an email from an old friend, C. a couple of days ago. Among other remarks, C. said that he wasn�t as far to the left, of course, as LI. Moi, was our startled response. So we asked our friend S. When she said that of course, we were as left as they come, we explained that at least our anti-war impulse comes from a very Tory side of our character. The War violates American tradition; the War's shapers seek the installation of a new order from above, by state dictate, in Iraq; and the War's effects will be to initiate an enterprise founded, essentially, on a doctrine of might is right. Isn�t this the blank white face that Burke discerned behind the theorists and the idealists of the French Revolution as well as behind the krewe of British looters in Bengal? We are not Tory enough to accept Burke uncritically about the French Revolution, but we understand, in our middle age, a bit more about the damage done by the frolics of the intellectual in power. This war, in particular, has been designed, argued for, and implemented through the agency of a small, distinct cabal of such intellectuals. We know who they are because they are quite proud of who they are. We know how they spread their particular brand of fever. We know how they took advantage of an attack on this country, and we know that they did this with intent. And we know that their ideas are bad � and we will know this ever more intimately as those ideas are brought to the bloody test of reality in Iraq, where they will fail to meet even the most basic challenges of common sense. We know that their manners are appalling. We know that manners express, here, something deep about their desires. It isn�t just that the Bush administration fumbled the diplomatic niceties in the build-up to war � the message conveyed by all that Rumsfeldian bullying was that diplomatic niceties were so much sugarcoating, so much falsity, to be carelessly thrown over the new world order. Burke would have been the first to spot the rooted viciousness here. When your diplomats talk like thugs, generally you can bet they will act like thugs. Words dispose towards acts. Power lust is the enemy of all mankind, whenever it appears. It�s the booted devil in the horde, the militia, the brigade, the onslaught. It�s the killer in our midst. And it is impossible not to observe this lust at work in every facet of the appalling rush towards War � a rush that has now been quietly retired from the journalist�s lexicon in favor of the rush, as it were, towards Baghdad.

We didn�t convince S.

Bollettino

We have come to expect the worst from the Bush administration. For months, the British papers have claimed that the hawks around Rumsfeld take seriously the various scenarios of world domination and Middle Eastern conquest promulgated by the likes of Wolfowitz and Donald Feith. These are Kraus's Likudniks -- a group who feels that Israel is America's 51st state. Or 50th -- this group doesn't include liberal Massachussetts in the USA. The claims are proving all too accurate. This weekends salvos with Syria are evidence of more madness. Here's today's report in the NYT:



Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. had started the war of words on Friday, when he accused Damascus of shipping sensitive military technology to the Iraqi Army, specifically night-vision goggles. These shipments, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "pose a direct threat to coalition forces." He added, "We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government responsible."

The United States military considers its night vision technology to be a major advantage over the Iraqis. But today, a senior American commander serving in the Gulf said he had seen no evidence that the Iraqi Army has obtained night-vision goggles.

"We have not to my knowledge seen any at this point," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said during a news briefing in Qatar."

Another interesting article in the Al Ahram Weekly -- to which we were pointed by Slate --
gives a little photo op of who is dissing whom in the Iraqi opposition. As we've said before, this opposition is spending its credility with the abandon of a junkie with a stolen platinum MasterCard. The most interesting quote comes from "Kamil Al-Mahdi, a professor of Middle East Economics at Exeter Universityand a member of the liberal Iraqi opposition in exile."

"There were those within the ranks of the Iraqi opposition who portrayed this war to be a walk in the park for the allied troops. Hence, Americans were led to believe that the Republican Guard units would soon switch sides and this would be coupled with a Shi'ite uprising in the south against Saddam. But to their surprise, this did not materialise, at least until now."
Al-Mahdi said that the fact that the opposition in exile miscalculated the strength of the Iraqi resistance is strong proof of how they have lost touch with reality in Iraq. "They can no longer claim to say they represent either the interests or the will of the Iraqi people. It will be very difficult to impose them as the new rulers of Iraq after Saddam is gone," Al-Mahdi said."

Kamil Mahdi wrote a prescient article for CounterPunch a month ago. In it, he seems to predict that the US would use an Iraqi mercenary force -- which hasn't happened yet. But the idea that the war would entail high Iraqi casualties seems to be pretty much on target. . About the Iraqi opposition, he wrote this:


Now that the US has a new policy, it intends to implement it rapidly and with all its military might. Despite what Blair claims, this has nothing to do with the interests and rights of the Iraqi people. The regime in Iraq is not invincible, but the objective of the US is to have regime change without the people of Iraq. The use of Iraqi auxiliaries is designed to minimise US and British casualties, and the result may be higher Iraqi casualties and prolonged conflict with predictably disastrous humanitarian consequences. The Bush administration has enlisted a number of Iraqi exiles to provide an excuse for invasion and a political cover for the control of Iraq. People like Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya have little credibility among Iraqis and they have a career interest in a US invasion. At the same time, the main forces of Kurdish nationalism, by disengaging from Iraqi politics and engaging in internecine conflict, have become highly dependent upon US protection and are not in a position to object to a US military onslaught. The US may enlist domestic and regional partners with varying degrees of pressure.

Post

When this War began, Mr. Limited Inc and Mr. Gadfly had a little discussion about the nature of forecasts. Mr. Limited Inc took exception to Mr. Gadfly's idea that nothing could be known about what the future held. Au contraire mon frere, we said. We know that one thing will happen and then another thing will happen. This might seem like a whole lotta null set, but it is really a whole lotta structure. We reject radical skepticism about the structure of the future. However, to be honest, we are making a point that is besides the point for Mr. Gadfly, who was pointing out something about knowledge. . Nobody in the U.S. knows enough about Iraq, and nobody in Iraq knows enough about the U.S., to make any wise prediction as to the outcome, on a realtime basis, of their encounter. This is actually a very strong point. We even think it is one of the strongest points that can be made.

But we think our point is also strong. Structure is important because, while it doesn't give us a picture of the substance of future events, it gives us a rule about how they must unfold. Ignoring the "then and then and then" structure puts a plan on a collision course with reality. When a plan violates the principle that the past has already happened (or, in other words, when a plan is premised on an incompletely known past, or a past that has been distorted by the planner in some way), it will fail, even if its outcome, by happy chance, occurs. If I try to burn down a building on a stormy day with wet matches, the building is not going to torch -- but a lightening stroke might do the trick. Plans have a trajectory over time. Planners who aren't sensitive to the temporal nature of the plan's actualization are also in violation of the above rule, although in a subtler sense -- they are adding to the past as they try to control a process that is going on into the future. We have to understand, in other words, how to sum over probabilities, and how to revise ourselves when those probabilities are realized over time.

This is why, so often, business plans go awry. Businessmen are peculiarly prone to becoming prisoners of the superlative. They are addicts of the vision statement, in which �best practices", "superb performance", and the "highest levels of excellence" vie with each other to debauch meaning. They throw around locutions like �"world class," and they are big believers in a crude version of William James' Will to Believe -- they like to think that wishing on a star will make your wish come true, or at least true enough that they can get sell their options on the star before it twinkles out. Ross Perot is the echt businessman. He came dancing out of that culture, he mouthed that culture's platitudes, and he seemed to speak a slightly deranged variant of the English tongue. Bush has the same problem. Language is always such a naysayer. But all too often, the vision statement fails. The dogs won't eat the dogfood. The punchdrunk won't drink the punch. What to do? After all, one has just indulged in an orgy of orgulousness? At this point, you look around for traitors. Failure becomes a question of disloyalty.

This is pertinent: after all, we are being directed in this war by the CEO mindset armed.

This is important if, as we think is the case, we are seeing the war split into two. One is the war against Saddam the Horrific. The other is the war against the post-Saddam guerrilla. The latter has no name, yet; the incipient program is simply, repel the invader. As the invader triumphs, setting up a state run by Rumsfeld's creepy buddy, Jay Garner (who has a first class ticket to Bushs monster ball, being one of the numerous hawks who have day jobs as Perlish vultures), we will have a new war. In this one, the Iraqi state will be our ally against Iraqi "terrorists" -- that is, the people who are firing on American forces and their Iraqi collaborators. In the new war, the goal will be a lot clearer -- it will be to repel the occupiers. As the krewe of Iraqi exiles preferred by the Pentagon are installed (over the resistance of other Iraqis) get set up, the traditional lines of the conflict will become clear a client state, an imperialist sponsor, and the usual poisonous symbiosis between them, with the client depending on the sponsor to sustain it at the same time that that dependence renders it illegitimate.

Slate's Fred Kaplan wrote an interesting report, last week, on how the military gamed its own war game on Iraq. The war game pitted two teams -- the blues, representing true blue America, and the reds, representing red as in blood Saddam H. As soon as the red team started acting in such a fashion as to upset the blue team, the rules were changed, moves were disallowed, and in general the pre-ordained triumph of the blues was vindicated at the expense of the game's realism.


Kaplan restrains himself when it comes to the Strangelovian name of the Red commander Van Riper, one "p" away from Ripper, if you can believe it �Here are three grafs that tell a lot about Bush's War:

For instance -- and here is where he displayed prescience - Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, "refloated" the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)

"Robert Oakley, a retired U.S. ambassador who played the Red civilian leader, told the Army Times that Van Riper was "out-thinking" Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.

"Yet, Van Riper said in his e-mail, the game's managers remanded some of his moves as improper and simply blocked others from being carried out. According to the Army Times summary, "Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed [Red Force] not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units."

Finally, Van Riper quit the game in protest, so as not to be associated with what would be misleading results.��

The blue game is the one they are reporting 24/7 in the American news media. We wonder how long it is going to take before the Red game is reported. Iraq, as we keep reminding our loyal band of readers, is not Afghanistan - or not, at least, the Afghanistan of our dream war. In reality, Afghanistan is heating up again -- we simply aren't paying attention to it. As why should we - we aren't planning on making Afghanistan an American protectorate. That cow doesnt milk, as we say in Texas. Or is it that cow doesn't hunt dogs? We always mix up our folksy phrases.

Bollettino

After the pointless maundering in the pre-war period, the mainstream press is beginning to get what LI, with our lack of knowledge of battlefields and Iraqi culture, has been harping on for months: just because the media has decided that the war will end with the end of Saddam H. doesn't mean the War has decided the same thing. The reports of the first suicide bombing draw us ever nearer to a world in which we Our Palestinians have to be controlled, through increasing use of our soldiers, and to the detriment of our moral character, our economy, and our security.

The NYT gets it, almost. Here's a think piece that could of been ripped out of this weblog over the past two months. Well, no, it isn't as stylishly written.

Other reports corroborate the direction that the war, as well as its aftermath, promises to take: Iraqi militiamen, in civilian clothes, firing weapons and disappearing inside the anonymity of the local populace. So-called civilians riding in buses to move toward contact. Enemy combatants mixing among women and children. Children firing weapons. Families threatened with death if a soldier does not fight. A wounded American soldier commenting, "If they're dressed as civilians, you don't know who is the enemy anymore."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/weekinreview/30WEBB.html

Bollettino

In the buildup to the war, the tipping point, for most Americans, was the idea that Al qaeda and Saddam H. were joined at the hip. In the 48 hour ultimatum speech, Bush must have repeated this charge ten times � or was that in the �your 48 hour ultimatum is pre-approved!� speech? I get them all confused. In any case, whenever Bush insistently repeats a fact, you know that it is spurious. It is almost a 100% proof. Any antiwar activist can tell you that the Al Qaeda link has been laughably tenuous.

What hasn�t been asked, however, is why. Why shouldn�t Saddam have supported Al-q.?
The usual answer is that Osama bin and Saddam H. have a Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan relationship. In the one corner is the ugly infidel, in the other corner the minion of Saudi irredentism.

That doesn�t convince LI. Middle Eastern politics is a patchwork of alliances between people who would like nothing better than to stick the steak knife into each others backs. The most notorious example is Israel and Iran in 1980. There was no love lost between the countries, but since countries don�t exchange bodily fluids, merely goods, that was no problem. As we all know, Ayatollah Homeinii got his arms from Israel.

The weird thing about Iraq in 98 and 99 is that it seems to have gone out of its way to avoid Osama bin. If Atta did meet with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in April, 2001, as has been endlessly speculated, we shouldn�t assume that the momentum was all with Iraq � it might have been Atta who was making an ouverture.

We have a theory.

Our theory is that the nineties anti-terrorist strategy worked. Or at least it mostly worked. The strategy posited making state�s pay for sponsoring terrorism. How? By squeezing them. The Economist, in its May 26, 2001 issue, had a little article about the Bush administration�s tweaking of sanctions.

�Ever since the UN's weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq two and a half years ago, sanctions have lost their original purpose of ensuring that the country was declawed of its weapons of mass destruction (see article). They now merely help to devastate Iraq's economy and bolster its cruel dictatorship. A change is called for.
America and Britain think they have found the right one. They are hoping this week to persuade not just the other three permanent Security Council members, Russia, China and France, but also Iraq's neighbours, that there are more effective ways of squeezing Mr Hussein's regime. And they hope to do this before the current oil-for-food protocol, with its crude and leaky web of rules, exceptions, bribes and cudgels, comes up for its six-monthly renewal on June 4th. America and Britain hope the changes will shift the blame for Iraqi deprivation

Basically the new smart sanctions are a more flexible and, it has to be presumed, more efficient version of the oil-for-food arrangement which allows Iraq to import food and medicine and some humanitarian goods in exchange for its oil. Under the new proposals, Iraq would be able to import all the goods it wants, except for weapons and dual-use stuff.�

That was the state of play pre 9.11. There were two triumphs for the sanctionists in the nineties: Libya and South Africa. Libya is the relevant case. Libya basically caved, in order to avoid the Iran-Libya sanctions act, and the EU equivalents.

Iraq�s was the secret surrender that seemed to make sanctions do-able. Given the precarious flow of money into Iraq, Saddam H. had every reason to keep Osama bin at arm�s length.

Now, here�s where strategy meets reality. Affecting a disconnect between the state and paramilitary groups sets those groups free. They are no longer limited, in their ambitions, by the caution of tyrants. The refusal to do anything to benefit the Middle East � and this scales up to sucking money from Gulf state treasuries for unnecessary arms to refusing to protect the Palestinians � preserved the angry, and oh so recruitable context of hostility. Hence, migration to semi-states, like Afghanistan and Sudan, on the part of Osama bin. Hence, the build up of cells in South East Asia. One of those stories that is being overshadowed by the War is a thoughtful piece by AP journalist John Solomon
claiming that al-q. was recentering its operations in Southeast Asia in 2001. The graf is buried in an article about Moussaoui and the possibility that the hijacker team was planning a second wave of attacks.

�Some of that same evidence, gathered during raids and arrests in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines, also has led authorities to suspect al-Qaida's financing and operational planning has been shifting from Afghanistan and the Middle East to southeast Asia.�
LI�s theory would posit that the paramilitary network would use second line government officials and sympathizers in countries like Malaysia to design their campaign. This doesn�t mean we should attack Malaysia, by the way � we�ve already tried Southeast Asia, and though the beaches are a lot better than Iraq�s, the people can be a bitch when you are relocating them to safe villages. It does indicate that squeezing a state that has surrendered, like Iraq, sends a signal that sanctions are simply the prelude to greater degrees of violence.
The omni-menace coming out of the White House has surely speeded up the building of missiles in N. Korea, and the attempt to make atom bombs in Iran, while the invasion of Iraq has simply sanctified the disconnect between paramilitary groups and states. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, we are being led by a crew of idiots!
Excuse me. So sorry about that. Remove the man shouting from the mezzanine. Where was I? Oh yes. The problem with our theory is pretty clear. We cannot, Perle like, make any money out of it. Life really is a bummer.