Antiwar.com Blog

Spencer Ackerman has an interesting analysis on the gyrations of Chalabi & Co. last weekend. Essentially he asks, what if the walkout by the five Shi`a puppets wasn’t Sistani’s idea at all? What if what we saw was an attempted end run around Sistani? It makes sense in that his scenario is truer to everything Sistani has said and done so far.

Ackerman:

Here’s a fellow cleric talking to Reuters: “The religious authorities have made their position clear to the politicians, but don’t want to interfere directly. They have deep reservations, but also know this interim constitution is a step in the right direction.”

For another thing, I would think that if Sistani were so deeply involved, more than five of the thirteen Shia members of the Governing Council would have refused to sign. One of those eight remaining Shia council members, Raja Kuzai, called the walkout “a disgrace”–not something I’d say if I was convinced the undisputed Shia religious authority in the country had issued the directive.

Finally, after a heated two days of negotiations–during which a furious Kurdish official called the boycotters “Iranians, not Iraqis,” a slur in Iraqi politics if there ever was one, given that this was exactly Saddam’s pretext for his massacres of the Shia–the five Council members abruptly shifted their story on their relationship with Sistani’s views on the issue. Whereas on Friday they portrayed themselves as following Sistani’s orders, now they seem to be portraying themselves as pleading their case to the cleric. After a meeting in Najaf with Sistani, Mowaffak Al Rubaie of the Governing Council told The Washington Post, “We are very happy that Ayatollah Sistani understands our point. We came to clarify the reason of delaying signing the law. … [Sistani] understands the explanation we gave him.” Al Rubaie sounds to me like a man who realizes his attempted end-run around the Basic Law simply failed, and is now scrambling to remain in a strong political position on the Council.

Ackerman quotes Juan Cole:

I can’t understand why Sistani wants 5 presidents, and I actually suspect that it is Shiite IGC members who came up with this formula and put it in Sistani’s mouth. As Borzou Daragahi reports, Sistani is a quietist and doesn’t believe that clerics should rule. The main beneficiaries of a 5-man presidency are people like Ahmad Chalabi, who probably could not get selected president, but who want to ensure for themselves some sort of high executive post.

This is just the kind of thing that snake Chalabi would do, while Sistani’s actions as portrayed by the mainstream media over the weekend seemed out of character. Why would Sistani issue a fatwa if there was some “agreement?” If there wasn’t an agreement, why did those 5 walk out last Friday? I’d like to know what Chalabi thought of Sistani’s fatwa, issued just after the Puppet Council got back on script and signed.

As mentioned earlier, the Web is abuzz with talk of the Libertarian Purity Test. Let’s forget the purity bit for a minute and talk about the ideas. My main gripe is that everyone seems to be posting scores instead of talking about specific areas of assent/dissent, which might make this quiz a useful opening for debate. Upon reading that Julian Sanchez–who has defended consensual cannibalism, for Pete’s sake!– scored a meager 79 (out of 160), Radley Balko hit a tepid 98, and so on, I began to wonder how people were answering specific questions. Of particular relevance to this blog are the following:

(1 point questions–Are you more libertarian than, say, Bill Kristol?)
25. Are you against national service?
26. Are you against the draft?
27. Does the U.S. intervene too much in other countries?
30. If it has to fight a war, should the U.S. try harder to avoid civilian targets?

(3 point questions–More libertarian than Ronald Bailey?)
49. Should the U.S. withdraw completely from Europe, Asia, and other foreign bases?
50. Is bombing civilians in an enemy country morally equivalent to murder?

Most of the 5 point questions are about one’s commitment to the broad goals of full-fledged anarchism, but even squishes should take a second look at #61:

Is it morally permissible to exercise “vigilante justice,” even against government leaders?

I would change the end to “especially against government leaders”–those who are most difficult to hold accountable for their crimes through official mechanisms– and ask this question again. If you say “no,” does that mean that the Iraqis had no right to overthrow Saddam Hussein but the U.S. government did? I guess it would go without saying, then, that, in addition to revolution, secession and all forms of conscientious objection (ie, crimes against the state) are also off the table. That’s some kind of libertarianism.

For some related thoughts of interest, see this by Jesse Walker.

A U.S. food subcontractor that runs 10% of the dining facilities in Iraq says it hasn’t been paid by a Halliburton Co. subsidiary for months and is threatening to stop serving hot meals to U.S. troops stationed there, NBC News reported Monday.

The company, Event Source, said it’s owed $87 million by Halliburton. Halliburton has a multi-billion dollar contract to feed and house the troops in Iraq.

Event Source claims not having been paid since November, NBC reported. The company prepared U.S. President George W. Bush’s Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad during his surprise visit there last year. The $87 million collectible includes payment for the president’s Thanksgiving dinner with the troops, NBC reported.

Does that include the plastic turkey?

Cross-posted from UnFairWitness

It’s all the rage.

Try it.

I’m referring, of course, to Victor Davis Hanson’s two hour appearance on C-Span’s Book TV Sunday evening. After reading his essays in National Review for some time, I was paying close attention to the corners of his mouth for rivulets of foam. All in vain, since Hanson the interviewee exudes as much cool and rationality as Hanson the essayist drips callousness and bile. Well, the interviewee’s thoughts on war ran the gamut from callous (casual references to the crimes of Uncle Joe Stalin) to bilious (“‘neoconservative’=Jew”), but they all sounded so … so … so thoughtful.

He did make one brief but valuable point about the philosophical distinction between neoconservatives and the foreign policy “realists” who came before. Among the latter are many heavies from the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I administrations–think of Scowcroft, Eagleburger, and other realpolitik wonks who sometimes criticize Boy Bush. These guys are hardly foreign policy icons in my eyes, but they have their merits. As Joseph Stromberg once put it,

Realists contend that, in a manner analogous to the laws of physics, states in the state-system must behave in certain predictable ways. Reckoning with a mob of geographical and other structural factors, they say that a rising state which seems bent on becoming a hegemonic or dominant state tends to call into being an opposing coalition of the threatened, who will seek to thwart that aspiration by diplomatic means and, finally, war, if it comes to that. This isn’t the worst way to look at things, and in a rough and ready way such insights can be useful.

Contrast this with what Hanson (rightly) called his “idealism”: disdain for “narrow” conceptions of American interests, ie, self-defense; gunboat therapy for the nondemocratic/fundamentalist world; a kinder, gentler white man’s burden whose costs can never be questioned.

As a quadrennial supporter of hopeless presidential candidates, I often hear the lesser-of-two-evils argument. I’ll go along with it this year, on one condition: the Democrats put George H.W. Bush on the ballot.

Top Iraqi scientists, led by Jafar Dhia Jafar, who is known as the father of Iraq’s nuclear programme, said that UN inspectors had “reached total conviction” that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons before the US invasion of Iraq, yet failed to convey that information “frankly” to the Security Council because of pressure from the United States.

Quotes from AP report:

“Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried out by the Special Republican Guard forces,” they wrote.

“We can confirm with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the foundations to resume such activity.”

In their paper, the scientists wrote: “The United States and Britain were not content with the United Nations’ reluctance to tell the truth … so they fabricated lies about Iraq resuming its nuclear activity.”

Jafar and al-Noaimi also accused U.N. weapons inspectors of stalling and getting hung up on “marginal issues” on the weapons of mass destruction programs.

Inspectors, they wrote, “researched in detail and realized that there was no presence of any banned armament activity in Iraq. They did not declare that frankly for reasons they know, and most probably the special (weapons) commission and the (International Atomic Energy) Agency were under strong pressure from the United States not to declare Iraq free of these weapons or activities related to it.”

Jafar is calling for a UN probe into the issue.

“It was clear that reports of the United Nations to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous,” Jafar said. “I believe the United Nations should also investigate the facts that were known before the war and why they (nuclear inspectors) did not declare them to the security council.”