Needlenose

LAT – Iraq rage boiling over Salam Pax vs Riverbend al Qaeda link to Saudis

Sadr double-dealing and other reactions to Najaf bombThere are good ways and bad ways for Democratic opponents to respond to the meteoric, rule-breaking rise of Howard Dean — and the relevance of their candidacies will likely be determined by the options they choose.

The returns for John Kerry’s campaign so far aren’t promising. His campaign manager, Jim Jordan, was quoted as follows in the Washington Post yesterday:

“He has sold himself as the straight-shooting candidate, the truth-teller, the one who will say what’s hard and unpopular,” said Jim Jordan, campaign manager for presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). “In truth, he’s a very crafty politician, very calculating.”

This attack manages the difficult trick of being too obvious and forgettably bland at the same time. Ironically, he gets good advice from Dean himself:

“They won’t beat me by claiming I switched positions,” Dean said in an interview Wednesday. “They better come out with better ideas.”

Exactly. Particularly in a crowded race, the benefits from knocking down the front-runner — for example, if some candidate is willing to derail his or her entire strategy for the sake of attacking Dean — will be reaped by someone else who wasn’t so unlikeably negative.

In a Los Angeles Times article today by Ronald Brownstein (one of the better political analysts writing for any paper), Jordan is quoted as he whistles past the graveyard:

“No campaign has ever put a lock on things in the summer,” said Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Sen. John F. Kerry(D-Mass.). “This thing will be settled somewhere in the snow.”

The danger of adopting such a blase attitude is that it’s already backfired on Kerry, as the New York Times reveals:

The fluidity of the contest was underscored this week with a poll in New Hampshire that showed Dr. Dean pulling ahead of Mr. Kerry in a state that Mr. Kerry had all but taken for granted. The results, several Democrats said, were at least partly driven by the fact that Dr. Dean alone has been advertising heavily in New Hampshire over the past month and has been riding a positive wave of national publicity, including cover stories in Time and Newsweek.

Still, it had the effect of gutting Mr. Kerry’s pretense of inevitability while thrusting Dr. Dean in the role that Mr. Kerry held last summer: the man most Democrats view as the candidate to beat.

In that same article, though, Jordan clings to a similar pretense:

“There’s at least a 90 percent likelihood right now that either Dean or Kerry will be the nominee,” said Mr. Kerry’s campaign manager, Jim Jordan. “And the race is as even as it can be. His advantages are purely stylistic. Kerry’s are substantive and experiential.”

Keep dreaming, Mr. Jordan. Dean may yet be beatable, but it won’t be done by the wishful overconfidence and Nerf-ball stances your campaign is expressing — which are all too typical of the Congressional sausage-mill approach to candidacy that is likely to doom not only Kerry but Gephardt and Lieberman.

Update: This typically outstanding analysis by Billmon adds more detail to what I’ve said about both Kerry’s campaign above and Dean’s campaign.

From a roundup of wire service stories in the Arizona Daily Star:

The car bombing that killed one of Iraq’s most important spiritual leaders in Najaf on Friday was met by an apparent political vacuum in the nation’s capital, where the Iraqi and U.S. officials charting the country’s future seemed unsure who should respond and how.

. . . in Baghdad, the Iraqi and U.S. officials charged with shepherding this country toward democratic rule went about their business as if little had changed. There were no speeches calling for calm, few public appearances by anyone in charge. L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator, was on vacation with his family in Vermont. Nobody seemed to know when exactly he would return. The U.S. military command in Baghdad said nothing.

“I think someone is writing up a statement, somebody, I’m not sure,” said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the 25-member Iraqi governing council, one of the few who could be found Friday afternoon. “We don’t have satellite, you know, that’s one of the problems. The Americans should give us a satellite.”

An indefinite stay in Vermont, huh? That’s one way to avoid being the next car-bombing target . . .

(Update: The New York Times ruins the fun by saying that Bremer is expected to return to Baghdad in just a few days. We’ll see if that happens!)

You gotta check out wage slave journal’s George W. Bush Scorecard of Evil!!!!! I think I’ll set up a permanent link to this over the weekend!!!!!

Official sources appear to be trying to pin the blame on al-Queda or its sympathizers for the Najaf car-bombing that killed Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim.

Although this will no doubt become a welcome part of the Bush administration’s unofficial WarOnTerrorWarOnTerrorDon’tYou-KnowWe’reInAWarOnTerror PR campaign, history professor and regional expert Juan Cole has a well-reasoned argument against it. Here’s a shortened version:

I don’t believe that Muqtada al-Sadr or his followers would risk damaging the Shrine of Imam `Ali, among the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, with a huge truck bomb. They are if anything overly sensitive to the holiness of Shiite symbols. . . .

Moreover, it is not his modus operandi. Muqtada’s people have mobbed opponents, have stabbed them, have beaten them up and put them into the hospital, have surrounded their houses, and have threatened them. But they have never set off huge bombs. . . .

. . . I also do not believe that Sunni radicals would set off a bomb next to Ali’s shrine. He is the fourth caliph of the Sunnis. . . . In all of al-Qaeda’s history, they have bombed embassies and foreign ships and foreign buildings, not Muslim holy places.

In contrast, this move makes perfect sense for Saddam loyalists. They have not scrupled to damage the shrine in the past, when they put down the 1991 uprising. . . .

The Najaf bombing looks an awful lot like the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the bombing of the UN headquarters. . . . All three targeted key de facto allies of the US, and have resulted in isolating it further.

. . . My considered opinion is that Saddam and the Baath loyalists have reverted to their old 1960s cell structure and are carefully planning out a series of high-profile attacks that have great strategic yield. The Baath wasn’t much as a military power in the 1990s, but as masters of dirty politics they still have no peer. Ask Abdel Karim Qasim, the Arif brothers, and the thousands of dead among the al-Da`wa Party officers and rank and file.

I was wandering the SF Asian Art Museum the other day, chatting with my fav (somewhat) wrong-wing friend – let’s call him ‘Gun Buddy’ (I’ll probably refer to him again in the future). As we were gazing upon an ancient relic from the Near East, I mentioned in passing what a tragedy it was that Bush didn’t stop the looting of the Iraqi Art Museum and the loss of many unique items from the dawn of civilization.

I was just needling him a bit, as is our fashion, but I was surprised when he glibly said “What? You haven’t heard? Most of those items have been returned.” Indeed. I laughed and said “Ah, you’ve just been listening to the Faux News dissemination of the Office of Strategic Information disinformation again, haven’t you?”

Just for fun (and to show up Gun Buddy), I did a quick bit of research to see the current assessment of the damage. I remembered that original estimates of the loss were somewhat inflated, but guessed (rightly) that subsequent wrong-wing blow-hard journalists underestimated the losses in subsequent critical apologia reporting. Here’s what I found out:

This recent BBC article downgrades the number of missing items from original estimates of 170,000 to merely 3,000.

However, another recent article from a museum journal estimates the total of missing items at 12,000:

“Besides roaming the galleries and work spaces, the looters entered the museum’s storerooms and took thousands more artifacts. Nawala Mutawalli, director of the Iraq Museum, recently estimated the number at 12,000. The simple fact is that we will not know what was taken or the exact number of artifacts missing until a systematic inventory can be completed. It may take months, if not years. By good fortune, the museum’s records – initially assumed destroyed in the ransacking of its offices – are apparently intact.”

So what is still missing? Here’s a few of the ‘big treasures’ posting in Interpol’s stolen-art most-wanted list. The previous article puts it best in trying to explain the magnitude of the loss as something beyond just the mere quantity:

” But other equally important artifacts remain missing. The theft of any one of these is comparable, as one colleague aptly noted, to the disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. “

Then there was the burning of the unprotected Iraqi National Library an estimated 1 million tomes were burned to ashes! And of course not all of the antiquities are conveniently located in museums – tremendous amounts of historical treasures are still in the ground, at numerous, partially excavated historical sites – that are apparently still being trashed and looted even as I type – not enough troops on the ground to protect them.

Could you imagine, for a moment, the hootin’ and hollerin’ of the reactionary chicken hawks if terrorists smashed a plane into the Library of Congress and blasted a car bomb off at the Smithsonian? So if you’ve got your own Gun Buddy, or a redneck uncle that you gotta see during the upcoming holiday season – come prepared with some facts, and even some photos, to help dispel the Rumsfeldian disinformation.

As I pointed out before, one of the big sticks up Osama Bin Laden’s drawers was the massive presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia – troops that Bush is now obligingly withdrawing. Osama and the Al Qaeda leaders, still at large, must be laughing their heads off at Bush’s stupidity – they got what they wanted, with the unexpected bonus of America jumping head-first into the quicksand of Iraq, digging an economic pit through military over-reaction, and creating a new ‘proving ground’ for the mujahadeen of the 21st Century.

35 murders a day in Baghdad

NYT on al-Hakim
NYT on car bomb

This is the kind of thing that starts civil wars. A car bomb at the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, considered to be one of the holiest sites in Islam, has apparently killed Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim along with dozens of other people.

The explosion was clearly an assassination attempt — the bomb went off at the end of Friday prayers at the mosque, at the exit normally used by al-Hakim.

There’s a variety of possibilities for who did it, but the key point is that al-Hakim has tens of thousands of followers who will be out of their minds with rage and grief … and probably looking to take it out on someone within the next day or two, and beyond. The American occupation is a likely candidate to be a target for that venting.

Update: Click “More” below for a sampling of the most interesting commentary & insights I’ve found in surfing around aimlessly surveying the Internet’s opinion/information elite this afternoon.

The majority opinion seems to be that Sunni Muslims — either revenge-seeking Baathist supporters of Saddam Hussein or fanatics related to al-Qaeda — were responsible for the bombing. On the surface, the apparent obviousness of this would seem to contradict the supposed intention of sparking a civil war among rival Shiite factions.

Then again, maybe the reasoning of the Sunnis (whichever ones are to blame) is that simply creating a power vacuum will be enough to get the Shiites at each other’s throats . . .

I was doing a ‘Brownian motion’ meander through the blogosphere, and blundered upon =http://www.southknoxbubba.net/skblogSouth Knox Bubba[/url]. Is that guy really a Southerner? If so, I gotta stop cursing Grant for winning the American Civil War (and thereby dooming us to ~150 years of watching our tax dollars go to subsidizing meatheads who whine about ‘big gubbermint’ and who vote for muttonheads like Dubya) – there might in fact be intelligent life south of the Mason-Dixon line! Check out his humorous 10 commandments piece.

Also, Swopa turned me on to =http://riverbendblog.blogspot.comBaghdad Burning[/url] – I really liked Riverbend’s recent piece on the Iraqi Governing Council (Tacitus’ idea of democracy) – it’s a real ‘rogues gallery’ who’s who. I guess she has an even lower opinion of Chalabi than does Swopa!

And while we’re on the subject of blog posts, fubar of Clowntech has some striking photos of Baghdad, before and after American ‘assistance.’

Much has been written about the DeLay “K Street” strategy of ‘pay to play’ capitalism and using the ‘revolving door’ strategy to continuously cycle Repugs between lucrative industry jobs and influential government appointments in regulatory agencies in order to keep big business interests front-and-center. You can easily see the results of this strategy in the shenanigans surrounding the reconstruction of Iraq.

In the latest development, the scope of the Halliburton work in Iraq (awarded to the firm by Bush and his Oily Men without a competitive bid) has now reached an estimated $1.7 billion! And that’s not counting the easily anticipated cost over-runs that will emerge due to the continuing widespread looting and sabotage of their work – what’s more profitable than building a pipeline? Why, building it again, of course! Expect Halliburton’s take to balloon in the coming months as the guerrilla war heats up. And of course it’s also not counting the non-competitive award of reconstruction work to Bechtel, whose take is now expected to increase to $680 million.

On the domestic front, I pointed out earlier that ‘Kenny Boy’ Lay & Jeffrey Skilling wouldn’t be busted for their unbelievable rip-off of Enron shareholders – apparently, that’s becoming conventional wisdom, although the mainstream press doesn’t seem to draw the same connection between their continuing immunity to prosecution and their substantial campaign contributions to the Repugs.

I really wish Clowntech would add another ‘days at large’ counter for Kenny Boy & Jeffrey to the Osama one (hey maybe he could do a Hussein one as well!).

* Note: I made a wee error, re Bechtel above – they are already getting $680 million – USAID is proposing an additional $350 million, bringing the total Bechtel take to ~$1 billion. This article points out that USAID shares my pessimism about predicting the total costs of reconstruction due to the ongoing and mounting sabotage of infrastructure. One additional irony – if you were so inclined, you might be able to share in the bounty by purchasing Halliburton stock – but the taxpayer-funded pork going to Bechtel, a private company, will just get shared out among the Repug Bechtel family and former Bush senior cronies like George Shultz (“I know nuting! I see nuting!”)

 
He’ll be happier there!
Apparently, one province in Nigeria practices Sharia law, where the legal system really is founded upon religious doctrine – Islam, in this case. It would sure warm the cockles of (suspended) Chief Justice of Alabamy Moore’s heart to see the upcoming stoning of Amina Lawal for sex outside marriage(her beau apparently got off the hook by just denying it and won’t be stoned with her). Although christians and muslims generally consider each other heretics, their religious books both consider this a crime and share this uniquely ‘compassionate conservative’ punishment.

Admittedly, Mr. Moore might not be able to get past his intolerance of other religions and may therefore be less than enthusiastic about the prospect of setting up shop as a kadi in Nigeria. However, if Ashcroft and Dubya get their way and ramrod the Patriot II act up the a*ses of the American people, then we’d be able to have Moore’s citizenship revoked; presumably on the basis of the treasonous breaking of his oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.