Month: July 2004

Paul McGeough turns in a tour de force of an article, tying together some previously confusing information about events in Al Anbar province, like the sudden escalation of violence in Ramadi last week and the kidnapping of the governor of Al Anbar province’s sons. McGeough clearly has extensive contacts to have assembled the wealth of sourced information included in this article as well as the scoop he wrote last week on Allawi personally shooting prisoners.

Juan Cole’s comment (I’m hoping Professor Cole reads this post and comments on the McGeough article, though his expertise centers in the Shi`a and this is a Sunni affair) on the kidnapping incident “The provincial governors have largely been chosen in a complicated process over which the Americans and British had a great deal of influence, and many guerrillas consider them puppets,” implies that the governor’s sons were kidnapped as punishment for collaboration. McGeough, however, indicates that it is also a tribal clash:

At the centre of it all are the Al-Kharbits, deemed by experts in tribal affairs from Amman to Washington to be one of the most important tribal clans in all of Iraq.

The old man is one of their sheiks. And two days ago there was payback for his expulsion – the three sons of the provincial governor, Abdul Karim Burghis al-Rawi, were kidnapped in a brazen daylight attack on his Ramadi home. The house was torched and nothing has been heard on the fate of the sons – aged 15 to 30.

Before the US invasion the Al-Kharbit sheiks regularly made secret trips to Amman to brief US intelligence agents on events in Iraq, they plotted their own coup against Saddam and they ferried CIA agents into Iraq. But what seemed to be a genuine love affair was reduced to hatred two days after the fall of Baghdad, when the US bombed the home of the clan’s then sheik of sheiks, Malik Al-Kharbit, killing him and 21 of his immediate relatives.

In the doomsday language of the tribes “Blood was spilled.”

The new paramount sheik is 47-year-old Mudher Al-Kharbit, a nephew of the bespectacled old man the tribe says has been exiled. Al-Kharbit’s bitterness is multiplied by what he says has been an American refusal to apologise for the 22 deaths.

Here’s one more nugget from McGeough’s article:

An observer said: “He [Al-Kharbit] feels that he is losing his grip on the tribe. He has to go back to them with one of two things. Either the US is listening to him – or it’s not, in which case the response in Al-Anbar will be: ‘Let’s give them hell.’

“And that’ll make Falluja look like a tickle. The absurdity of all this is that the Americans were talking about the Sunni Triangle before the war.

“Al Kharbit and his tribe were the only people who didn’t fire a shot at the Americans and they allowed US Special Forces into the country three months before the war started.”

There is an old Arab saying – “he killed him and then walked at his funeral”. In the absence of a halfway house, it remains to be seen who’ll be behind the cortege at the end of the Ramadi stand-off – Washington or the tribes.

An echo, not a choice:

We will double our Special Forces, and invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and best trained in the world. This will make our military stronger so we’re able to defeat every enemy in this new world.

But we can’t do this alone. We have to restore our respect in the world to bring our allies to us and with us. It’s how we won the World Wars and the Cold War and it is how we will build a stable Iraq.

With a new president who strengthens and leads our alliances, we can get NATO to help secure Iraq. We can ensure that Iraq’s neighbors like Syria and Iran, don’t stand in the way of a democratic Iraq. We can help Iraq’s economy by getting other countries to forgive their enormous debt and participate in the reconstruction. We can do this for the Iraqi people and our soldiers. And we will get this done right.

A new president will bring the world to our side, and with it — a stable Iraq and a real chance for peace and freedom in the Middle East, including a safe and secure Israel. And John and I will bring the world together to face our most dangerous threat: the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.

With our credibility restored, we can work with other nations to secure stockpiles of the worlds most dangerous weapons and safeguard this dangerous material. We can finish the job and secure all loose nukes in Russia. And we can close the loophole in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that allows rogue nations access to the tools they need to develop these weapons.

That’s how we can address the new threats we face. That’s how we can keep you safe. That’s how we can restore America’s respect around the world.

Could David Duke have picked a better prime-time speaker for tonight’s Democratic convention than Al Sharpton? The only thing worse than Sharpton’s barking screed – which Doris Kearns Goodwin, in a rare moment of lucidity, compared to nails on a chalkboard – was the delegates’ reaction: euphoria. After watching this sorry spectacle, I’m quite happy that the Democrats renounced the antiwar movement. I only hope these imbeciles cheering Sharpton find the next four years of Bush-Cheney even more excruciating than I will. And as I watch that slick little creep (and Bush operative) Ralph Reed on Chris Matthews’ show now, I know the next four years are gonna be hell.

I’m trying to imagine who might donate to the Lynndie England Defense Fund. Rush “Blowing Off Steam” Limbaugh? FReepers? Republican neocons?

The site, still being developed, also will try to help improve England’s image which, until now, has been controlled by the Army, said lawyer Rhidian Orr.

“The part we don’t see in the press right now is Lynndie the human being,” Orr said by telephone from Denver.

“Lynndie has a life. She’s a churchgoing person. This isn’t a bad person who did these acts. … This is one person defending herself against not only the government, but what the media is trying to do to her.”

Because sometimes you just shouldn’t believe your own eyes.

Bombings, clashes kill over 120 in Iraq today – and not a word yet (3:50 CST) from Glenn Reynolds, Jeff Jarvis, Volokh, Tim Blair, Roger L. Simon, or Andrew Sullivan, all of whom have found time today to post mind-numbing trivia. Come on guys, I need some positive spin on this. Explain to me how this is really a sign that we’re just about to turn the corner. You’re supposed to be the hardnosed pragmatists – give us a little of that old callous magic you do so well!

. . . are now available.