Month: August 2005

Jack Ross provides a compelling look at the history of the American labor movement’s foreign policy stances, up to the most recent (and surprisingly pleasant) developments. (For those of
you who read it before 10 a.m. Eastern, you may have noticed a problem with the
links — a major flub on the part of yours truly. Anyone who gave up in exasperation should give it another chance.)

There’s a significant amount of dishonesty going on today in the warblogs’ coverage of the death of Steven Vincent.  Alot of this has to do with the reluctance of warbloggers to confront the reality of what is happening to the Iraqi south since its rule shifted to the  hardline Shia fundamentalists who are the new rulers of Iraq since the election, touted by warbloggers as a triumph of democracy, swept these Shiite theocrats to power. 

Here, for example, is an excerpt from a post by the inexplicably popular "Wretchard" writing in a warblog called "Belmont Club."

This is not the place to speculate why this murder occurred, but the tragedy serves to underline the discussion in the previous post which discussed, among other things, the rising tensions between Sunni and Shi’ite in Iraq. It’s interesting to note that the BBC linked Mr. Vincent’s murder to his interest in the sectarian conflict. It would have been ironic if Vincent had been killed not because he was an American, but because he came too close to a story.

This, besides being a lie, neatly dodges the point of everything Vincent had been writing about the oppression of secular Shiites by the Islamic theocrats of al-Jafaari’s democratically-elected New Iraq.  Here’s the part of the BBC article "Wretchard" omitted so that he could write his own version of the circumstancesVincent’s murder:

In a recent New York Times article, Mr Vincent wrote that Basra’s police force had been infiltrated by Shia militants.
He quoted a senior Iraqi police lieutenant saying some officers were behind many of the killings of former Baath party members in Basra.
Mr Vincent also criticised the UK forces, who are responsible for security in Basra, for ignoring abuses of power by Shia extremists.

Did you miss the part about "sectarian conflict" to which Wretchard referred?   That’s OK, because it isn’t in there. 
Vincent wrote about the frightening rise of the Shiite theocracy in southern Iraq and how it was affecting ordinary secular Iraqis, particularly Iraqi women.  Of course, the warbloggers, having cheered and spun each blundering step made by the US occupiers that led to this debacle, cannot admit that they have rolled the red carpet out for the rule of the Iraqi ayatollahs, much less be honest about the results of their faux "liberation" in the face of the Shiite assassination squads roaming Basra in the Toyota Mark IIs of Death.
The violence in the Iraqi south is not "sectarian" .  The context of the violence in which Steven Vincent has been caught is the playing out of this scenario, predicted in the fall of 2003:

In removing the Baath regime and eliminating constraints on Iraqi Islamism, the United States has unleashed a new political force in the Gulf: not the upsurge of civic organization and democratic sentiment fantasized by American neoconservatives, but the aspirations of Iraqi Shiites to build an Islamic republic. That result was an entirely predictable consequence of the past 30 years of political conflict between the Shiites and the Baathist regime, and American policy analysts have expected a different result only by ignoring that history.

Arthur "Good News!" Chrenkoff exhibits similar dishonesty as he twists Vincent’s words into his own version of Shia vs. Sunni conflict:

It appears that Steve might have fallen foul of Shia hardliners whose violent campaign of revenge against local Sunnis ha has been documenting for some time, including in his last opinion piece for "The New York Times". As he wrote on this blog in June:

Over the last week, for example, gunmen killed up to 100 ex-Baathists (as I’ve noted elsewhere, to some there is no such thing as an "ex" Baathist.) Ask about the identity of these murderers and people claim they don’t know–a denial that’s not exactly true: Basra’s police chief recently admitted to a U.K. Guardian reporter that he believed that Iraqi cops themselves were complicit the Baathist assassinations.

Of course, what Steve wrote doesn’t say anything about local Sunnis at all.  What Vincent has written about is local Baathists.  Chrenkoff is ignorantly equating all Baathists with Sunnis, but the Baath Party in Iraq was heavily Shiite:

But Abdel Mahdi (Interim Iraqi government Finance Minister, a leading Shiite, writing in Feb 2005) advocated extending a hand to disaffected Sunnis in a Shiite-dominated parliament and expressed conciliatory views on the key issue of reincorporating members of the former regime in the army and administration.

"There are more Shiite baathists than Sunni baathists, so the de-Baathification process doesn’t only affect the Sunnis," he explained.

And, from Hannah Allum for Knight-Ridder, February, 2005:

The war between Shiite vigilantes and former Baath Party members is seldom investigated and largely overshadowed by the insurgency. The U.S. military is preoccupied with hunting down suicide bombers and foreign terrorists, and Iraq’s new Shiite leaders have little interest in prosecuting those who kill their former oppressors or their enemies in the insurgency.
[…]
Especially besieged are Shiite Baathists who live in predominantly Shiite or mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, where targets are more accessible than in homogenous Sunni strongholds. Militiamen have demanded that former Baathists fly white flags to atone for their party membership and let their neighbors know they’ve renounced their pasts. Those who refuse often end up dead.

"They’re doing it in Shiite neighborhoods because it’s easier," said Mishan Jubouri, a prominent former Baathist who was one of the few Sunni Arabs elected to the new Parliament. "I know a lot of Shiite Baath Party members who have had to escape to Ramadi or Mosul or Tikrit," mostly Sunni territories.

There’s been little or no investigation into any of the assassinations, the slain men’s relatives said. Not that they need an investigation to place blame: The families staunchly believe that Shiite militias are behind the killings.

The assassination squads are widely believed to be from the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s most influential Shiite political party and the biggest winner in the elections.

"I believe they were Badr forces. They’re assassinating all the well-known men," said Walid Rasheed, whose brother, a former Baathist named Falah Rasheed, was gunned down Monday outside his shop in Baghdad. "They just want to provoke strife among Iraqis."

Officially, the Iran-backed Badr militia is now the Badr Organization, a political party whose leaders say it’s disarmed. In reality, Badr fighters were so emboldened by their sect’s victory at the polls that they’re again roaming southern Shiite territories with weapons displayed, according to witnesses and Iraqi authorities.

Oh, and Arthur, Swopa points out that Iran is building a new airport in Najaf.  You might want to put that info in your next "Good News!" post. 

Speaking of Swopa, I ran across a post he made on Roger Simon’s warblog on the subject of Steve’s killing that succintly states the problem the war cheerleaders are having such a bad case of cognitive dissonance over:

Good question. The problem is, the people who boasted about their ability to "see clearly what we are fighting" and their determination to defeat it are now the ones making the excuses.

The war they supported, and elections they proclaimed as a purple-fingered tsunami of freedom, put the folks who just murdered Steven Vincent in charge of Basra.

That’s right — instead of defeating radical Islamists, they empowered them. But rather than admit that, they shut their eyes and pretended that southern Iraq was a thriving young democracy, making excuses for the corruption and Islamicization that Vincent wrote about.

So, now that exposing those flaws has gotten Vincent killed, will the war’s supporters open their eyes and stop making excuses? You tell me.

Antiwar.com contributor Aaron Glantz’s appearance on C-Span this morning is available here.

Juan Cole mentions the killing of Steven Vincent, an American journalist who had been blogging and reporting from Basra. Basra. Cole remarks, “I would not have expected him to be killed in Basra, which is generally safer than Baghdad.”

I would have expected the professor to have been more knowlegeable about Vincent, since he wrote about Cole’s specialty, Shiite Iraq. I began reading Vincent after following links from libertarian blogger Jim Henley, so naturally the first stop after hearing of Vincent’s death for me was Jim’s blog:

Vincent was the author of In the Red Zone and proprietor of its associated blog. He was another of the mad dreamers of the last few years who confused hopes with plans, but he stood head and shoulders above his fellows, first for his courage, secondly for his absolute refusal to start moving goalposts. He saw the liberation of Iraq as the great cause of his day. So rather than sit home and talk to anonymous bureaucrats or retype governent press releases, he went to Iraq, twice. His great passion was women’s rights, in the Arab world generally and Iraq in particular. He is dead because he refused to trim his sense of justice to fit the latest fashions in colonial PR – on the ground in Basra, he reported the facts as he found them, blowing the whistle on Allied accomodation to theocracy and the increasing oppression of Iraq’s women.

There are lessons one could draw from Vincent’s death, many of them rueful. The overused word “tragedy” applies. One must contemplate them soon. I am too sad for that right now.

An excerpt from Vincent’s July 31, 2005 NY Times piece, read in light of his murder, reveals clues as to the likely motivation of his killers:

From another view, however, security sector reform is failing the very people it is intended to serve: average Iraqis who simply want to go about their lives. As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Recruited from the same population of undereducated, underemployed men who swell these organizations’ ranks, many of Basra’s rank-and-file police officers maintain dual loyalties to mosque and state.

In May, the city’s police chief told a British newspaper that half of his 7,000-man force was affiliated with religious parties. This may have been an optimistic estimate: one young Iraqi officer told me that “75 percent of the policemen I know are with Moktada al-Sadr – he is a great man.” And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
[…]
An Iraqi police lieutenant, who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous, confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations – mostly of former Baath Party members – that take place in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of “death car”: a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.

One wonders if Steven Vincent’s last ride was in a white Toyota Mark II.

In other Colonial Iraq news, 14 Marines along with their translator have been killed in one roadside bomb explosion. Steve Vincent’s translator was a bit more fortunate – while they were both shot, she still lives. Edward Wong of the NY Times reports:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 3 – An American journalist writing about the rise of fundamentalist Islam was shot dead overnight after being abducted in the southern port city of Basra, American embassy and Iraqi officials said today. The journalist’s translator was also shot and is in serious condition at a Basra hospital.

The body of the reporter, Steven Vincent, from New York, was found this morning. He had been dumped outdoors after being shot several times, and his hands were tied with a plastic wire, and a red piece of cloth was wrapped around his neck. He and his translator, Ward al-Khal, were kidnapped on Tuesday evening in downtown Basra by masked gunman in a pick-up truck as they left a moneychanger’s shop near Mr. Vincent’s hotel, police officials said.

The gunmen may have been in a police vehicle, The Associated Press reported, citing a police official in Basra.

Antiwar.com contributor Aaron Glantz, author of How America Lost Iraq, will be on C-Span’s Washington Journal beginning at 9:15 a.m. Eastern Wednesday.

Antiwar.com columnist Aaron Glantz will appear on CSPAN’s Washington Journal on Wednesday morning at 9:15am Eastern Time (6:15am Pacific). Aaron is the author of How America Lost Iraq.

Watch CSPAN in the morning or go to the CSPAN website and click on Washington Journal to hear an archive of the show (posted later in the day.