Pakistan wagging the dog; Al Qaeda for Bush; tidbits

There have been a lot of strange reports from the wasteland of mirrors lately. Some of these are in registration-required type websites like the LA Times. Therefore as a handy tool for everyone I suggest BugMeNot.com, a repository of logins for news sites that should let everyone duck the hassle of giving those shady corps our email addresses. I have not looked at my server traffic logs in a while, but I suspect things have slacked off during this low-volume time of mine, and that's fine with me. I have been trying to get some exercise, get a life, get outside while the weather's good, and take two classes and work. So sue me.

I've got a lot of stuff referring to the CIA's Anonymous man. He's one solid character. Angry, yes, but clear enough to understand what a crazy detour Iraq was...

On a random note, keep reading Prof. Juan Cole every day.

Pakistan asked to wag the dog during Dem convention

Perhaps at the beginning should be this new report from the New Republic, which describes how Bush folks have been prodding the Pakistanis to go after al-Qaeda right during the Democratic convention, yet another marvelous example of Republican political expediency through rather oddly timed, symbolic decisions. But will capturing OBL or Zawahiri wag the dog hard enough, or will Pakistan's restive cross-border tribes whack back when they realize they are being manipulated for the American elections??

The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs [high-value targets] by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
[........]
But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times last year.

Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official, who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where [Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."

The point here, assuming this is even close to true, is that the Bush administration--shockingly--views the war on terror as an ATM machine, where they can buy votes by withdrawing from the Pakistan account. The country is teetering on some sort of tribal war, but the administration's persistent evasion of really dealing honestly with the problems in that country has been put off for so long that when they try to symbolically whack the hornet's nest again because of domestic politics, what kinds of things might fly out?

In any case this one will come to a head in a few weeks. More on how Iraq situation puts a "squeeze" on Musharraf. And Iraq is "A failure without borders" according to William Lind, who if I recall is a deserter of the neocon movement. This article describes the key idea of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, or the abode of Islam and the abode of war as elements in Islamic 'fundamentalist' thinking, although Lind relishes his own rhetoric a little too much:

It is all one war, one battlefield. State boundaries mean nothing. Of course, it is not going very well on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But in this war, events in those places are in effect merely tactical. The strategic centers of gravity are in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Al-Qaeda, I think, understands this. Washington does not. That fact alone suggests we have only seen the opening moves in what promises to be a very long war.

The latest from Dr. Khalidi: in an excellent piece condensed from his remarks at the UCLA International Institute, Rashid Khalidi describes something I've personally heard before from other experts, that the Bushies told all the real regional experts to go straight to hell:

Everything taking place in U.S. policy in the Middle East since 9/11 is not grounded in real knowledge about the Middle East. Without a knowledge of resistance to Western control over two centuries, America cannot know how our policy is viewed in the region. We are seeing the dismissal of real history in favor of crude stereotypes.

Those who attacked the United States are very smart people who have played on real grievances in a very expert way. The Bush administration has not used the informational resources at its disposal to respond appropriately. The U.S. attack on Iraq was accompanied by an insidious attack on domestic Middle East experts. Experts can be wrong, but the dedicated professionals have often been prescient in their warnings.

And of course if you haven't read it, check out my exclusive Mac Weekly interview with Dr. Khalidi from last fall. Talk about prescient warnings...

Cross border cash money against U.S.

Via the NYTimes wire services we find that Saddam's clan has been moving arms and money for the insurgency around. That is not very surprising, as it seems more and more that the Iraqi rebels were prepared to fight the occupation for a long time, regardless of the political arrangements imposed by the U.S. I remember feeling chilled when they showed the huge caches of weapons that kept turning up, then hearing of how we lacked enough personnel to guard the caches, so all manner of bandits and crazy folk could saddle up on as much weaponry as they could carry--a disaster for Iraq from every perspective. Despite the handover, the attacks drag on and on. "Now it's a nation of law & disorder," in so many words. TIME report on the 'new jihad,' Chris Albritton contributed to this article.

Fareed Zakaria talks some sense, simply saying "Reach Out to the insurgents;" in other words the end of the CPA has opened an opportunity to define a new relationship with the opposition groups. I always firmly believe that we can't just classify such characters as "the terrorists" and leave the situation at that, for then you get nowhere. Instead, engagement... dialectic... other hopeless hopes.

The Iraqi Baathists in exile are considering forming an Iraqi government-in-exile to offer the Iraqi people. Or it could be a framework to propel a civil war. We would just need names for the sides. A basic argument from Charley Reese on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and in particular mentioning where the U.S. recently sided with a military government against some elected Islamists in Algeria, sparking a civil war.

Once again I will cite this very fascinating up-to-the-minute perspective on the insurgents, and how well armed they are. Seems the daring journalist went out and actually talked with them for three hours. It's quite dramatic, including a rendezvous at Hotel Babel, swarming with foreign mercenaries. Take what they say with a grain of salt, but its surprisingly plain in a way:

"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets." Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we're going to win."
[......]
We knew that if the United States decided to attack Iraq, we would have no chance faced with their technological and military power. The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war. In other words: the resistance. Contrary to what has been largely said, we did not desert after American troops entered the center of Baghdad on April 5, 2003. We fought a few days for the honor of Iraq - not Saddam Hussein - then we received orders to disperse." Baghdad fell on April 9: Saddam and his army where nowhere to be seen.

"As we have foreseen, strategic zones fell quickly under control of the Americans and their allies. For our part, it was time to execute our plan. Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell." This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The objective was "to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don't want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people," say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. "We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don't lack is volunteers."
[......]
Essentially composed by Ba'athists (Sunni and Shi'ite), the resistance currently regroups "all movements of national struggle against the occupation, without confessional, ethnic or political distinction. Contrary to what you imagine in the West, there is no fratricide war in Iraq. We have a united front against the enemy. From Fallujah to Ramadi, and including Najaf, Karbala and the Shi'ite suburbs of Baghdad, combatants speak with a single voice. As to the young Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, he is, like ourselves, in favor of the unity of the Iraqi people, multiconfessional and Arab. We support him from a tactical and logistical perspective."
[....]
"The attacks are meticulously prepared. They must not last longer than 20 minutes and we operate preferably at night or very early in the morning to limit the risks of hitting Iraqi civilians." They anticipate our next question: "No, we don't have weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have more than 50 million conventional weapons." By the initiative of Saddam, a real arsenal was concealed all over Iraq way before the beginning of the war. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no helicopters, but Katyushas, mortars (which the Iraqis call haoun), anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other Russian-made rocket launchers, missiles, AK 47s and substantial reserves of all sorts of ammunition. And the list is far from being extensive.

But the most efficient weapon remains the Kamikazes. A special unit, composed of 90% Iraqis and 10% foreign fighters, with more than 5,000 solidly-trained men and women, they need no more than a verbal order to drive a vehicle loaded with explosives

A little from Asia Times Online via their mideast page: More on the five key actors: Israel, the U.S., Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi insurgents. What will sovereignty mean to each? A moment for the great Mr. Negroponte and his Battalion 316 death squad. A fairly even look at the moral shell games being played with Saddam's trial. A book review of "Exiting Iraq: Why the US Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against al-Qaeda," written by Chris Preble.

Highly worth reading is a very lengthy piece on Al Qaeda by Craig Hulet looks at the CIA agent 'Anonymous' on why Al Qaeda would benefit from Bush's reelection:

The most profound assertion the author made (Anonymous), who published an analysis of al-Qaeda last year called "Through Our Enemies' Eyes", thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. Bush is good for the Islamists the world over who want to make war on America and the West. Anonymous again:

I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president. In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war." - Evan Luard, International War
[......]
One must question not only what the administration is doing presently but what it will do should it return to office after the November elections; upcoming wars against other nation-states (which clearly have been targeted) are on the Pentagon's desk. Further evidence that the latter is officially on the agenda is below: This was dated Monday, February 17, 2003:

US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is under secretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It's important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said.
[.....]
Paul R Pillar, whose book Terrorism and US Foreign Policy was a staple for reading in counterterror circles and private security specialists like myself, pre-September 11. He notes this regarding the afore mentioned arguments:

More than anything else, it is the United States' predominant place atop the world order (with everything that implies militarily, economically, and culturally) and the perceived US opposition to change in any part of that order that underlie terrorists' resentment of the United States and their intent to attack it.
[....]
The Defense Science Board's 1997 Summer Study Task Force on "Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats" notes a relationship between an activist American foreign policy and terrorism against the United States:

As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America's position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.

More on Moore and tidbits

"The master demagogue an age of demagoguery made" by Todd Gitlin on OpenDemocracy.net. Seemed pretty valid. Australian perspective on the 'polemical film.' USA Today on Ms. Lipscomb. Movie buzz shake election? Nooo...

Apparently more Democrats are being hired as lobbyists. Should I be happy?

To hell with global Social Democracy, they say....

Ick, a National Review hack defending the torture scandal. Just here for color. Yes in fact, Cheney is a 'mixed blessing' at best. Ha.

Israel reaches for the Kurds, can I blame them?

There was a burst of rather jarring news recently about Israel's involvement with the Kurds and Israeli interrogators in secret U.S. prisons from the BBC and Sy Hersh. Hersh has an extended New Yorker piece, revealing among other things that Israeli commandoes are cruising with Kurds into Iran!!

Via BBC the thoroughly worthless Gen. Janis Karpinski now says that she saw an Israeli who claimed to help interrogate Iraqis, the first time a senior American has admitted the Israelis had security access:

The US journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal told the programme his sources confirm the presence of Israeli intelligence agents in Iraq. Seymour Hersh said that one of the Israeli aims was to gain access to detained members of the Iraqi secret intelligence unit, who reportedly specialise in Israeli affairs.

Wow, now the respected pubisher Jane's Security News reports exclusively on Shin Bet interrogators in Iraq. Argh!!

Some Kurdish guys justified a new sort of alliance with Israel against Syria and Iran in Haaretz:

"The Kurdish public is not ready to take any more humiliation. As long as we thought we could persuade the Americans to support our positions, our leaders were supported by the public," he said. "The Kurdish public is disappointed and angry, it wants results. You in Israel talk of the greater Eretz Yisrael and here we talk of greater Kurdistan. Today our political war begins."

The Kurd's struggle has two main objectives - to regain Kirkuk and its suburbs, and to gain a share of the power in the central Iraqi government. Both are uphill struggles.
[....]
Fridon Abed Alkadar, who was Kurdish interior minister, said: "The situation is now very strange. The U.S. told us they do not want to divide Iraq like Lebanon, for fear that what happened there would happen here. But if they don't accept the idea of a federated Iraq, the situation may be like the one that triggered off the civil war in Lebanon."

I have mentioned before that (because the U.S. handed security in the Kurdish areas to local militia) Kurdish armed groups are purging Arabs from places like Kirkuk and the outlying cities. Kirkuk could be the next Saravejo. Really.

Already there are reports of Kurdish militants fighting Iran, which we had to expect at some point, I suppose. Nor is it that surprising that the Israelis would reach out yet again to the non-Arabs of the middle east, in an attempt to improve their position with the Arab regimes. I don't have a moral problem with this occurring, but it certainly illustrates a central flaw in the idea that Israel is America's unwavering ally in the Mideast. Simply put, Israel has its own interests and those don't always coincide with ours. If they want to use the Kurds now that we've nearly shattered Iraq, what use is it to get offended? It's all political expediency, the Great Game anew.

In other Israel news I would like to say "Blahhhhh" to Richard Cohen for getting so damned delighted that Israel shifted its wall slightly back, via a Supreme Court ruling. Ok, fine, then show me how that whole West Bank approach actually builds a stable democracy. Or two.

You see, it turns out that in the first days of the Intifada, Israel fired more than a million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza, without any sort of strategic doctrine that framed a peaceful resolution, in part because as I said before, the head of their military intelligence, Amos Gilad, originally set a self-fulfilling prophecy by laying out a policy that Arafat and all of Palestine was not interested in negotiation. This is groupthink, systemic insanity, folks. A nice editorial illustrating why the fence is so toxic to the Arab residents of greater Jerusalem.

Speaking of insanity, more about the talk of Palestinian ethnic cleansing emanating from the settler leaders. This piece neatly refutes the view that Israel 'won' the Intifada, because, hell, Israel is still tied down in a hot, exhausting war. Duhhh?

This is very alarming. A top rabbi went off talking about 'rodef,' the supposed religious justification for a Jew to kill another Jew. Such things appeared shortly before a religious fanatic killed Rabin, in other words pretty much direct incitement that is now being threatened against Sharon if he dares pull back from land.

More about Sharon's wedged situation, attempting to retreat from Gaza among domestic political turmoil.

Wow, confusion inside and out. But in a sense the U.S. put them in the position of having to connect with the Kurds by destabilizing Iraq. And now the effort to secure their own gambit will probably cause more tumult inside Iraq, while the symbolic implications of Israeli interrogators are just terrible. Middle East is like that.

Christian Zionists, 'dispensationalism,' an Israel thesis, plus revolutionary tips!

I strongly recommend to everyone this article in the Christian Science Monitor on "Mixing Prophecy and Politics," which lays out the concrete connections between the end-of-the-world Christian fundamentalists that support Israel's colonization of the West Bank as a gateway stage to the battle of Armageddon, and their political hooks in the United States.

This whole political-religious framework is also known as 'premillennial dispensationalism,' which means that A) we live with the End Times and 'millennium' in our future and B) God dispenses goodies to good people, that is, he blesses those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel, in part. In other words, an interventionalist God, the type who would, as Jerry Falwell described it, punish the U.S. directly via Sept. 11. The problem with this kind of thinking, as the article makes clear, is that people who are thinking 'eschatologically' sometimes act to make their prophecies self-fulfilling, by financially supporting West Bank settlements, for example. In turn, this kind of garbage could easily incite World War III if clear-thinking politicians don't intercede. But of course this is Bush we are talking about, and he implies all the time that God intended Sept. 11 as some kind of avenging task generator. As an atheist, all this stuff scares the hell out of me, for reasons I hope are obvious. I think about it a great deal.

If you ever wanted to hear what a right-wing peacenik does when he collides with flashy left-wingers reading poetry, read the very amusing latest from Justin Raimondo. He also addressed the Hersh and BBC reports about the Israelis, leading round to his usual thesis that Israel was the only country that really stood to benefit from the war on Iraq.

I will say again that I always take Raimondo with more than a grain of salt, but has he been proven wrong thus far?

In an effort at damage control, the Israel lobby is making a concerted effort to smear whomever states the obvious: a great deal of the "intelligence" used to lie us into war came directly from Tel Aviv and was "stovepiped" into the White House by neocon White House advisors, and that, in retrospect, this war has been to the strategic advantage of one and only one nation on earth: Israel.

If "Israel was never near the top of the list" when it comes to motives for this war, then how is it that Tel Aviv turns out to be the chief beneficiary in so many ways? As the Mossad infiltrates Kurdistan, demands recognition from the Iraqi "government," and even sends its skilled torturers to help the American occupiers subjugate and degrade their Arab charges more effectively, the demonstrable evidence that Israel's most loyal supporters led the way to war is not so easily brushed aside.

Revolutionary politics

I found this pretty interesting: David Ignatius speaking with the latest peaceful revolutionary, Georgia's new leader Eduard Shevardnadze. I will summarize, but should I implement?

• "Burrow from within. Like many reformers, Saakashvili began as an insider with the regime he later toppled." This is a principal argument for us to keep our cool and stay in school.
  
• "Use nongovernmental organizations to help build a political base."
  
• "Create a political movement that is modern, media-savvy and well-connected in the West. [....] The movement was funded partly by contributions from billionaire George Soros's Open Society Project. It trained its members in nonviolent protest, and cleverly used the Georgian media to get free publicity."
  
• "Never show fear." Trouble with this one. Atheism makes you feel less safe (see above).
  
• "Another key tactic was not to initiate violence, no matter what the provocation. 'The temptation to use force is huge,' Saakashvili says. 'But once you cross that threshold, you can never get back.'"
  
• "Cultivate your enemies. The smartest thing Saakashvili did was to woo the Georgian army and police." In other words, persuasion over violence. Really?!