Arab News Blog

I’ve been staying away from the Iraqi election standoff because I figure Juan Cole, Reidar Visser, Marc Lynch and others who follow it more closely than I do have been keeping track of it. But as things get more and more tangled, I guess I ought to offer a few thoughts. And while the various issues involved do not involve hanging chads (non-US readers can Google it), it’s still going to be a while before we see a government, I suspect. Here’s my attempt at a summation for the perplexed.

‘Iyad ‘Allawi’s Iraqiyya movement has the slight edge (91 seats to 89) over Prime Minister al-Maliki’s State of Law bloc. Though both men are Shi‘ites, ‘Allawi is a secularist allied in a front with Sunnis. Under at least one interpretation of the constitution, &lsqluo;Allawi, as leader of the party with the most seats, should have first crack at forming a coalition.

But there are two complicating factors. First, the Justice and Accountability Commission, the “De-Ba‘athification” commission led by Ahmad Chalabi (the onetime hero of the neocons, now seen as pro-Iranian) wants to disqualify six elected deputies. Three of them are from Iraqiyya, which means Maliki would have more seats than ‘Allawi. That attempt so far has not succeeded, but there’s another issue. While Iraqiyya is a multi-confessional secular movement with a lot of Sunni support, the religious Shi‘ite vote is divided between two blocks: Maliki’s State of Law and the Iraqi National Alliance, which includes the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (formerly Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement. Though the INA is more clearly Islamist and more indisputably pro-Iranian than Maliki’s, they have more in common with each other than either does with Iraqiyya.

Now the plot thickens again. The Federal Supreme Court has ruled that is constitutional for parties to form blocs in order to qualify as the largest bloc. This is being challenged by Iraqiyya, but could mean that an alliance between INA and Maliki could block ‘Allawi. But we’re likely to see more constitutional arguments.

There will be attempts by both sides to portray this as a fight between the US candidate, meaning ‘Allawi, and Maliki, who will be painted as too pro-Iranian. But Maliki was our guy too, and we should be careful to assume all Iraqi Shi‘ite religious-based parties are Iranian stalking horses (though it’s hard not to see Sadr that way).

So far, and I emphasize that qualification, this is playing out democratically: through the courts, the official commissions, protests to electoral bodies, etc. I think it would be a mistake to go all chicken-little and start proclaiming that Iraq is on the verge of sectarian war. (The US had the whole hanging chad thing in 2000, but when the Supreme Court ruled, it was accepted. Let’s give the Iraqis the benefit of the doubt.) It also occurs to me as ironic that what is, in fact, Iraq’s second general election, is as stalemated as the US’ second Presidential election in 1800, when John Adams ran against Thomas Jefferson but a (later fixed) Constitutional quirk allowed Aaron Burr to challenge Jefferson and throw the whole thing into the House of Representatives. I may be reaching a bit there, but hey, it’s my blog.

I would expect the rhetoric to escalate. ‘Allawi will be denounced as an American stooge and a creature of the CIA (and there’s at least circumstantial evidence that might be used against him), and he’ll doubtless try to paint his opponents as Iranian agents. Things are rarely that black and white. Let’s keep Western analysts’ rhetoric within limits and hope the Iraqis do the same. If ‘Allawi ends up as PM, we’ve worked with him before. If Maliki wins, ditto. I don’t intend to provide daily coverage of this, since the aforementioned other bloggers (especially Visser, but Cole’s a pretty detailed poster on this stuff) are looking at the nuts and bolts.

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Cole/ here

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London, Mar. 3 (ANI): Egypt coach Hassan Shehata reckons that England players John Terry and Ashley Cole should be thrown out of the world Cup squad in the wake of their alleged infidelities.
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Lang on Philip Giraldi via SST/ here

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AP reports that guerrillas drove a car bomb into an Interior Ministry crime lab in the Karrada district of Baghdad on Tuesday, only a day after a coordinated bombing attack on the city’s hotel district, killing 22.

Al-Zaman says that a number of high-ranking officers are among the dead, and that some 80 are wounded. Many Iraqi politicians live in Karrada, an upscale Shiite neighborhood. Haydar al-Jurani, a member of parliament in the Islamic Mission Party (Hizb al-Da’wa) to which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki belongs, was walking near the building and was taken to hospital with a mild head wound.

If the attacks were meant to demoralize, they seem to be succeeding. Al-Zaman reports that many in Baghdad blame the security forces for either being incompetent, or for being actively complicit (e.g. taking bribes to allow cars through checkpoints) in the bombings.

The crime lab, which had been recently renovated with American aid funds, was almost completely destroyed. Obviously, a terrorist group would want to disrupt the forensics capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.

The Australian Broadcasting Co. has a video report:

AP’s Brian Murphy also quotes Gen. Ray Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, to the effect that the explosives used in the past two days appear to have been less powerful than in the August and December attacks, but that guerrillas have developed new tactics– having an armed band shoot it out with building security forces, e.g., clearing the way for a car bomb to be driven into the building. The US military suspects that there are bomb-making factories in the semi-rural areas just outside Baghdad, from which the payloads are driven into the capital. The guerrillas’ strategy has also shifted, Odierno, said, from a attempt to mount a popular insurgency to overwhelm the capital [in 2004-2005] to a rearguard set of small terrorist actions aimed at destabilizing the Shiite-dominated government. [Cole would add that the reason for this shift is that the Sunni Arabs have been largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so that it is no longer plausible for them to take over the capital using their old demographic base in e.g. al-Mansur. Thus the spoiler actions of bombing downtown buildings, which cannot change the government but can keep it weak.]

Muhammad A. Salih reports for IPS that the Accountability and Justice Commission, which excluded some 500 candidates from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections, may be softening. It recently reinstated 59 candidates. The ostensible reason given for the exclusions was that the candidates were too closely linked to the banned Baath Party. But among those excluded was Salih al-Mutlak, who had sat in parliament as leader of the 11-seat National Dialogue Bloc and who had left the Baath Party in 1977. I am quoted saying that this move by the committee comes as too little, too late, and that the goal of the exclusions seems to be to make sure that the Shiite religious parties retain control of parliament, whichthey have had since January 2005.

Carnegie has a good overview of the politics of the exclusions. The authors maintain that Shiite ex-Baaithists were also banned, and that most of the 500 were minor political figures, but that the more prominent of them were Sunni Arabs, creating an impression of sectarian bias. The head of the Commission is a fundamentalist Shiite also running for parliament, a situation many have decried as inherently unfair.

The next big security challenge comes this weekend, with the advent of the 40th day commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at his shrine in the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad. Some 20,000 army troops, police and other security men have been positioned through the city to forestall bombings of the pilgrims or the shrine, which would have the potential to throw Iraq back into intense ethno-sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Pilgrims are being forbidden to wear burial shrouds, which some do to symbolize their willingness to be martyred along with Imam Husayn for the truth. I suppose authorities feel that the loose shrouds could too easily hide a belt bomb.

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An audio message allegedly from Usamah Bin Laden was released Sunday, claiming that the attempted Christmas day airline attack over Detroit was his work.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert two things about the audio. First, I do not think it is genuine. Second, I think it demonstrates that Bin Laden, whether he is dead or alive, is now irrelevant.

Nothing about this ‘message’ smells right.

The audio’s claim that Bin Laden was behind the Christmas day bombing is dubious. The modus operandi of Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab bore no resemblance to that of Bin Ladin’s al-Qaeda. Bin Laden plans operations for years beforehand; attempts to arrange for simultaneous large attacks or attacks on symbolic targets; and uses teams. One guy hastily recruited in an amateurish attempt that only blows up his own crotch? That isn’t al-Qaeda.

All the police work so far in the public record points to Yemen as the place Abdulmutallab was radicalized, trained and equipped for this mission. Bin Laden has no command and control capabilities in Yemen, and that his father hailed from there before moving to Saudi Arabia in the early 20th century is irrelevant. “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” is 300 guys holed up in isolated Maarib in Yemen. Bin Laden has no means to communicate with them (he no longer uses cell or satellite phones because the US can trace them). AQAP already announced that it was behind the Christmas bomb plot, and it wouldn’t be like the real Bin Laden to upstage them.

Then there is the mystery that the USG Open Source Center, which monitors radical Muslim web sites, reported that there was no sign of the Bin Laden audio being posted to them on Sunday:

‘FYI — Bin Ladin Audio Statement Not Observed on Jihadist Websites on 24 January
Jihadist Websites — OSC Summary
Sunday, January 24, 2010 . . .

As of 1200 GMT on 24 January, jihadist websites monitored by OSC have not been observed to post the Bin Ladin audio statement released on an Arab media website and filed as GMP20100124635002.’

I think even the jihadis know that this thing is likely a fraud, and that in any case it adds nothing to the significance of Mutallab’s operation (already claimed by others) or to the debate over the plight of the Palestinians. If it is Bin Laden, it is a pitiful Bin Laden trying to stay relevant by grandstanding and stealing others’ thunder.

Aljazeera Arabic also demoted it. The channel aired part of it in conjunction with an interview with former US ambassador Edward P. Djerejian, now head of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. I can’t remember another instance where Aljazeera gave a prominent US voice a real-time opportunity to rebut a Bin Laden tape. Djerejian sensibly pointed out that the Obama administration is trying hard for a two-state solution that would in fact ameliorate the conditions of the Gazans, so that Bin Laden’s ire seemed misdirected. Aljazeera’s editorial board clearly considered the audio not very newsworthy and moreover they like the Obama administration enough to give a US former diplomat the opportunity to refute it.

By the way, Obama’s argument that his election and his approach to Middle East issues would in itself put al-Qaeda in a difficult position is borne out by Aljazeera’s approach to this Bin Laden audio. Aljazeera is aware that Obama is pressuring the Israelis to halt settlements in the West Bank and that he is trying to close Guantanamo (where one innocent Aljazeera correspondent was imprisoned on false charges for some years).

Another clue: the alleged Usamah listed only one grievance, that of Palestine, and he framed it in terms of the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Wouldn’t he have some concerns about the US drone strikes on the positions of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwest of Pakistan and in Afghanistan? About Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war? If this is a recent audio, as shown by the reference to the December 25 attack, why not gloat about the attack on the CIA forward operating base by an al-Qaeda double agent only a few days afterward?

It is not like him to attempt to steal the thunder of Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas has already told al-Qaeda to butt out. Moreover, if all he has to offer is a lament about Gaza, then there is nothing distinctive about that. It makes him seem as though he is hitching his wagon to someone else’s star. Bin Laden comes from a business background, and one of his principles was always to seek leverage. When a Muslim radical group already has a lively insurgency going, he feels, there is little point in his putting money and resources into it. That is one reason he never focused on Palestine. He is about encouraging operations that would not otherwise be undertaken, as against US embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole at Aden, and New York and Washington.

The diction about the suffering people in Gaza, moreover, is not Bin Laden’s style. Contrary to what is often alleged, his concerns with Palestine go back to at least the 1980s, and are real and central to his ideology. The al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in the 1980s used to get together and give each other sermons on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem on a frequent basis. Bin Laden’s partner until 1989, Abdullah Azzam, was a Palestinian activist who thought that fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was more realistic than the PLO struggle against Israel at that point in time, and more likely to redound to the cause of political Islam; but Palestine was always on the agenda for the future.

But Bin Laden has never been interested in Palestinian nationalism, or, indeed, in nationalism of any sort. His devotion is to pan-Islam. His objection is the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. He has always been focused on Muslim control of Islamic sacred space. Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam, associated in Muslim lore with the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey and miraculous ascension into heaven, and a city that Muslims ruled longer than any other Power in its history (from the 7th to the early 20th century). Bin Laden’s objection to US troops being in Saudi Arabia was that they then represented an ‘occupation’ of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He invoked the same sort of trope with regard to Jerusalem.

Last winter during the Gaza War, an audio tape attributed to Bin Laden did not neglect to mention the need to recover al-Aqsa Mosque (the Muslim holy site in Jerusalem) for Islam. Before 9/11, in early 2001, Bin Laden was penning odes to the liberation of Jerusalem and reading them at his son’s wedding.

The new audio makes no reference to Jerusalem or al-Aqsa at all, just to Gaza. It would just be uncharacteristic for Bin Laden to neglect to mention them.

I am not arguing that the Israeli colonization of the West Bank and siege of poor little Gaza does not generate anti-Western sentiment or make for a set of recruiting tools for al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias are right about that. I am arguing that in this audio, “Bin Laden” is not speaking as he usually would about the issue. For Arab nationalists, a Palestinian state that could accede to the Arab League is what they are fighting for. For pan-Islamists like Bin Laden, it is the holy city of Jerusalem to be returned to Muslim rule.

Here is a translation of the new Bin Laden audio file:

‘ “In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful
“Peace be upon those who follow the right path
“On behalf of Osama to Obama: if our message could be sent to you by the word, we should not have sent in by planes.

“The message we wanted to provide you with the aircraft of the hero Umar Farouk, May God lighten his sufferings confirms the previous messages transmitted by the heroes of September 11, which were repeated before and after that date.

“The message is that the United States can not aspire to security before it becomes a reality in Palestine. It is unfair that you have a quiet life while our brethren in Gaza live in bad conditions.”

“By the will of God, our attacks against you will continue as long as your support the Israelis.

“Peace be upon those who follow the right path.” ‘

I don’t know if the old monster is dead, and some clever young engineers just have a program to emulate his voice, or whether he is alive and horribly disfigured (we have not seen him in an authentic video since October 2004). But I do have the severest doubts that he issued this audio message. And the interesting thing is that even if he did, almost no one in the Muslim world seems to care.

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Varisco interviewed about Yemen on MSNBC, January 16

For the past week or so, just before the terrible human tragedy in Haiti, Yemen was once again a front page news story in the Western media. This time it was not about qât, nor about the rhino horn used in Yemeni dagger hilts, but the issue was exotic nevertheless. Yemen is newsworthy because of the recent attempted suicide mission of a Nigerian who met with members of the relatively recently reframed Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At first, the political talking heads were eager to brand Yemen as a lawless tribal haven for the next stop of our continuing war on terror. Joe Lieberman added Yemen to his own version of the axis of evil, which I have previously commented upon. But then late last week Yemeni officials announced that six al-Qaeda figures had been killed in an airstrike, and on Saturday three more had been arrested near the Saudi border.

On Saturday, on my return from delivering two lectures in Toronto, I went straight from the airport to MSNBC, where I was interviewed (if that term works for about two minutes of air time) about the recent strikes on al-Qaeda in Yemen. Earlier in the week, I sat down for an extended interview on the current situation in Yemen with Karla Schuster of Hofstra University, an interview which can be seen on Youtube.

The coverage on the situation in Yemen has been mixed, not surprising given the level of ignorance about the country and the lack of expertise among both journalists and government officials. There has been some excellent commentary by Greg Johnsen and former Yemen Ambassador Edmund Hull, as well as the superb photojournalism of Karim Ben Khelifa, but there is also a fair amount of misinformation.

The latest Time Magazine contains an article by Andrew Lee Butters entitled “The Most Fragile Ally.” In general the article is fair, although it is mainly about the U.S. dealings with President Salih rather than providing effective background on the multiple crises facing Yemen. Unfortunately, the article does not seem to have had a very good fact checker, if such an old-fashioned position still exits. Otherwise flags might have been raised at the misleading statement in the first paragraph: “North Yemen had become an independent state after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.” The term “North Yemen” came to be used for the Yemen Arab Republic, which was created by a military coup in 1962, transforming the previous Zaydi Imamate of Yemen. Although the Zaydi imam recognized the distant authority of the Ottoman sultan, sealed in an agreement made in 1911, the departure of the Ottoman soldiers in 1918 did not immediately make Yemen an independent state. Imam Yahya took two years to gain control of the Tihama region, in open conflict with the Idrisi state on the Saudi coast. Also, the union of the Yemen Arab Republic and the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen was arranged through diplomacy, militaristic as it may have been, rather than all-out war in 1990, despite the claim of a northern “victory” in the Time article. There was a brief “war” in 1994 that led to the hegemony of the north in the south. Perhaps the author thought the rather sparse Wikipedia article in Yemen was sufficient background for his article.

I question Mr. Butters’ worth (pun intended) when he repeats the misleading mantra that Yemen “has a long history of being both a source of militants and a staging ground for jihadist attacks.” How long a history is needed to be so branded? As a source of militants, it is worth remembering that Osama Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, even if the ancestral home of his family is in the Hadramawt region of Yemen. There were Yemenis who volunteered to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, but at the time they were called “freedom fighters” by our government. For a refresher on that, click here. There were Muslims from a number of countries who served in that acceptible “jihad.” But in terms of terrorist attacks on Americans in Yemen, there has been little beyond the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbor. The Yemenis cooperated with American authorities after that and by the end of 2003 the al-Qaeda cell in Yemen had been virtually eliminated. This is not to deny the terrorist credentials of senior members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but apart from the unsuccessful attempt of the “Undiebomber” to blow up a flight to Detroit last Christmas, not much else has been staged against Western interests. If there are only about 200 members of the current cell out of a population over 23 million, this is hardly the definition of a staging ground. Nor is it accurate to automatically assume that the militant tactics of the cell have the sympathy of the Yemeni population.

For clarification, Yemen is not Afghanistan, nor is it Iraq. In both these cases the governments collapsed due to American military intervention and the subsequent terrorism was largely a response to the American military presence and occupation. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq when Saddam was in power; nor were there random attacks on Westerners under his dictatorial rule. Brutal as the Taliban rule was to its own people, they posed no threat to the United States until we took them out. As weak and untrustworthy as President Salih may seem, his government has largely cooperated with the United States. This has actually cost him politically, especially when Paul Wolfowitz bragged about direct American involvement in taking out Abu Ali al-Harithi in a 2003 drone strike.

Yemen is Yemen, so perhaps it would be better for news media to focus on the multiple economic, environmental, and now global issues pressing on this poor country.

Daniel Martin Varisco

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Today was the Martin Luther King holiday in the US and I’ve been busy with family things, but I thought I’d offer a few quick links you might wish to check out:

• Amira al-Tahawy, one of the bloggers arrested in Nag Hammadi and held in Qena, managed to conceal her cellphone and get a few pictures from captivity: the blog’s in Arabic but everybody can figure out the pictures.

• Anwar Sadat’s first wife, Iqbal, has died at age 93. She was the mother of his three eldest daughters, but he divorced her and married his second wife Jihan, who became familiar to the world as Egypt’s outspoken First Lady and as Sadat’s activist widow.

• The disqualification of 500 Iraqi politicians for alleged ties with the Ba‘ath has further clouded the prospects for the upcoming elections. I’ll post more eventually but in the meantime you can follow coverage of the issue by Norwegian blogger Reidar Vissar, who has published a detailed series of analyses; or see shorter posts such as those by Marc Lynch, and also Juan Cole.

More from me later or tomorrow.

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WINEP/ here

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