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Next test: insurgents

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Original story found here.

The Bush administration looks like it has finally scored a ringing success in Iraq.

But, if one objective of Sunday’s elections was to help defeat Iraq’s ongoing insurgencies, then the exercise failed.

The question now is how Iraq’s next government will handle the insurgents. Before Sunday, they threatened voters. But U.S. troops led the effort to secure polling stations, while more than half of Iraq’s eligible voters defied insurgent threats and exercised their first real chance for self-empowerment in history.

No one should doubt the sincerity of that step–least of all President George W. Bush and his senior advisers. For, as much as Iraq’s elections stand as a triumph, they also mark the failure of the administration’s original plan for governing the nation. Instead of helping to install pliable Iraqis ready to follow Washington’s lead, Iraq’s next government will be dominated by Shia Arabs, more than two-thirds of whom, according to a recent poll by the reliable Zogby International, want U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as the new government is in place.

Iraq’s next leaders, however, may want us to stay a little longer, as any abrupt U.S. withdrawal could plunge the nation into a civil war. And, if the way Iraqis voted on Sunday is any indication, such a conflict is already under way. The day before Iraq’s elections, the new White House national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, claimed in a Washington Post op-ed that Iraq’s sectarian splits were being overblown. Yet the turnout was undeniably high in Shia as well as Kurdish areas, while in the Sunni Arab heartland relatively fewer Iraqis chose to vote.

Rather than unite Iraq, the U.S.-backed elections have only sharpened the struggle for political power among the nation’s different population groups. The challenge for both the next Iraqi government and the Bush administration is to find a way to reach out to Iraq’s newly disenfranchised Sunni Arab minority. Not only are areas like the Sunni Triangle the same places where few Iraqis voted, but these same areas remain the main base of Iraq’s ongoing insurgencies.

The Bush administration launched a major military offensive in cities like Fallujah before the elections. Yet, even though U.S. operations killed or drove out many insurgents, they still failed to secure these areas in a way that compelled Sunnis to vote. Some commentators have already asked whether the next government will be able to find and train Iraqi troops to take over more of the fighting from U.S. forces. But these new Iraqi troops may well be drawn from Iranian-trained Shia militias, and their deployment would only further split Iraq’s sectarian sides.

One alternative now would be to try to negotiate with Iraq’s Sunni insurgents instead of trying to eliminate them militarily. Fortunately, the United States already has a precedent for such an approach, even if Bush administration officials still fail to see it.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have each pointed to El Salvador’s war-time elections 20 years ago as a supposed model for Iraq. But they forget that El Salvador’s war dragged on for another 10 years after that nation’s first election, and its war ended not through elections at all but only after El Salvador’s U.S.-backed government finally decided to negotiate with El Salvador’s insurgents.

Negotiating with Iraqi insurgents would be even harder. While many if not most Sunni Arabs may well desire peace, foreign insurgents tied to al-Qaida would surely continue using terror to try to derail any possible settlement. Sadly, the war in Iraq may also already be dangerously close to the point at which even a new strategy would not be enough to prevent the nation’s slide into even thicker sectarian bloodshed. If so, U.S. troops would end up stuck in the middle, while fighting at least one side.

It’s hoped senior Bush administration advisers have finally learned something, at least since Sunday. Sectarian divisions do matter in a country where one small group has oppressed others for not only decades but centuries. The new Iraq promises to be more representative, indeed, than any government in that region’s long history. But, instead of being the first step toward democracy, it could yet mark the start of a full-blown civil war.

Hasty elections could divide Iraq

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Original story found here.

No matter which candidate wins in November, he will face his first challenge in Iraq.

President George W. Bush keeps promising that Iraq’s first national elections will be held in January, even if they only take place, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, in “three-quarters or four- fifths” of the nation. Sen. John Kerry, meanwhile, has yet to articulate any meaningful position on Iraq, as both candidates are reluctant to raise issues they can’t resolve.

But we cannot afford to ignore Iraq’s rising tide of violence. Yesterday, a rocket attack hit the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad. And, if the Bush administration goes ahead quickly toward elections, the president may end up doing something that he promised he would never do: breaking up Iraq into three parts largely along ethnic and religious lines.

Of course, this is not what the administration had in mind for Iraq. But it will be one sure result of any attempt to hold elections in the middle of an escalating insurgent war. It would be risky if not impossible to hold elections in the Sunni Triangle, where most of the insurgency is based. But, if these areas are excluded from the voting, Iraq will be left with two noncontiguous, self-governing entities by the Kurdish minority in the north and the Shia majority in the south.

The insurgency itself is not what many may think. Rather than enjoy either broad geographic reach or diverse popular support, most of the armed resistance is limited to one part of Iraq and is being mostly carried out by one population group. Over the past month, a private security firm documented more than 2,300 attacks against U.S.-led forces stretching across the entire nation.

But about 80 percent of the attacks were concentrated in [or around] the Sunni Triangle along both the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys and in Baghdad itself.

There was only one attack last month, for example, in the southern city of Najaf, as by then the rebellion led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the young son of a cleric killed by Saddam Hussein, was already over. The Shia resistance declined after his al-Mahdi militia suffered heavy casualties and the more respected, elder surviving cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, brokered a cease-fire. Now al-Sistani is demanding nationwide elections, while al-Sadr has gone back and forth about whether he will disarm his militia and will participate in the January elections.

Sporadic Shia resistance continues in the Sadr city slum of Baghdad, but most of the remaining insurgency is concentrated in the Sunni Triangle.

For a while, Rumsfeld and others tried to blame foreign fighters tied to al-Qaida for most of the violence in Iraq. Today, these foreign Islamists remain active out of proportion to their relatively small numbers inside Iraq, and they are responsible, indeed, for many recent beheadings of kidnapped Westerners.

But by now even Rumsfeld’s own intelligence analysts agree that the bulk of the Iraqi resistance is not only homegrown but also deeply rooted among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority population.

Even though ethnic Arabs of the mainstream Sunni Muslim religion are a majority in most Arab nations, they are a minority in Iraq of, at most, 17 percent of the population. Both the Kurds in the north, who constitute about 20 percent of Iraqis, and the Shia Arabs in the slums around Baghdad and in the south, who make up at least 60 percent of Iraqis, are more numerous. But it is Sunni Arabs, albeit through more rural tribes under Hussein than before, who have long dominated the region.

Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority has little incentive to compete in elections with other population groups, as introducing any pluralism into Iraq would only end the Sunnis’ long-standing monopoly on power. Combined with the heavy-handedness of U.S. forces, killing many civilians including women and children in cities like Fallujah and Samarra, the Sunni Arab insurgency has grown even deeper roots throughout the Sunni Triangle — which really has only two sides, along the Euphrates and Tigris. The insurgency also extends north along the Tigris as far as Mosul into areas dominated by Christian Arabs, who also rose to power under Hussein.

Even the best possible deployment of U.S. firepower and tactics cannot prevent the specter of moderate Iraqis being blown apart as they try to vote, even if it is possible to hold secure elections in most of the country.

Elections could well lead to more self-government for the “four-fifths” of Iraqis who live in either the south or the north. But these two model areas would still be split by a limited but raging insurgency alongside them and in between.

The Bush administration has backed itself into a corner. If elections are not held across Iraq, as al-Sistani is demanding, Washington risks provoking a broad Shia insurgency that would be even harder to handle than all the anti-American resistance there so far. Yet, holding elections while the Sunni insurgency is raging can only lead to the de facto breakup of Iraq.

Arguably, the administration has no choice, as it must keep its promise to Iraqis to hold elections. But, through elections in most but not all of the country, President Bush will be breaking the strategic promise he made not to divide the Iraqi nation. Rather than unite the nation under a legitimate government, wartime elections will split Iraq into three enclaves without any foreseeable plan to bring them back together.

Quienes son los Progresistas en Irak?

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This article in Spanish, “Who are the Progressives in Iraq? The Left, the Right and the Islamists,” was originally published in English by Foreign Policy in Focus on September 21, 2004. It was translated by Alexander Renderos of the editorial group, Raíces, based in San Salvador, through DesdeElSalvador (www.desdeelsalvador.com.sv).

Un evento en Baghdad pasó sin ser reportado por la tradicional prensa escrita, e incluso la “alternativa”, a pesar de que ello implica que el poder de Estados Unidos sobre el futuro político de Irak puede estar menguando. En Agosto, La Casa Blanca apoyó el establecimiento del Consejo Nacional Iraquí compuesto por 100 iraquíes provenientes de grupos religiosos, tribales y étnicos, en su esfuerzo por influenciar la composición del Cuerpo Electoral de Vigilancia Iraquí. No obstante en este mes (septiembre), dos grandes partidos políticos, ambos por mucho tiempo vistos con sospecha por Washington, salieron aventajados en la votación.

Muchos critican la legitimidad del proceso sobre el cual la Administración Bush ha depositado sus esperanzas para conducir a Irak a las elecciones generales en enero del 2005. Las indirectas elecciones acontecieron bajo condiciones de guerra, y la Associated Press reportó que morteros explotaron cerca del lugar de la convención en Bagdad donde los delegados se reunían. Los delegados iraquíes también extendieron de dos a cuatro el número de puestos para la vicepresidencia en el Consejo Nacional. De no haberlo hecho los resultados habrían sido aún más preocupantes para Washington.

En la votación de Septiembre, el delegado perteneciente a La Asamblea Suprema por la Revolución Islámica en Irak, Jawad al-Maliki, salió primero con 56 votos. Este es un grupo shiíta al que el Secretario de Defensa, Donald Rumsfeld, denunció de ser una herramienta de Irán durante la invasión de Irak liderada por Estados Unidos. Y otro iraquí, aún menos atractivo para Washington, el Secretario General del Partido Comunista Iraquí, Hamid Majid Moussa, resultó segundo con 55 votos. Mientras tanto, Rasin al-Awadi, el delegado perteneciente al Acuerdo Nacional Iraquí, cuyo grupo en un tiempo fuera respaldado por la CIA, y cuyo lider Iyad Allawi fuera también apoyado por la Administración Bush como candidato a Primer Ministro Iraquí, salió en tercer lugar con 53 votos. Nasir A’if al-Ani, el delegado perteneciente al Partido Islámico Iraquí, un grupo sunita con simpatías por la resistencia baatista operando en el oeste y norte de Bagdad, resultó cuarto con 48 votos.

Cualquiera sea el resultado, contar con un solo un aliado electo de una lista de cuatro asientos dentro de un potencialmente importante Cuerpo Electoral de Vigilancia, no augura ningún bien para la Administración Bush. Después de conformarse el ahora Consejo Nacional Iraquí y con anterioridad de emitir su voto, el vocero de La Casa Blanca, Scott McClellan, durante una estadía en el rancho de los Bush en Crawford, Texas, declaró: “La elección del Consejo es una muestra que el pueblo iraquí no permitirá que elementos terroristas se interpongan en el camino de su futuro democrático”.

Pero que tal si las próximas elecciones de enero conllevan a la elección de un gobierno no respaldado por la Administración Bush. El respetado arabista de la Universidad de Michigan, Juan Cole, estuvo entre los primeros en reportar los resultados del Consejo Nacional Iraquí. En su sitio web: www.juancole.com afirmó: “Esta lista es una evidencia más de que EE.UU invadió Iraq para poner en el poder a una coalición de comunistas, islámicos y ex nacionalistas baatistas. Si usted hubiera mencionado semejante cosa hace unos tres años, se hubieran reído de su persona”.

LOS AMIGOS DE MIS ENEMIGOS

Muchos norteamericanos de izquierda parecen conocer muy poco acerca de sus similares iraquíes, ya que para entender su rol se requiere un acercamiento variado y delicado. Lamentablemente, análisis de grupos anti-imperialistas como los de la internacional A.N.S.E.W.R, ya se han dejado insinuar en sitios de alternativas progresistas. Despachos y columnas en The Nation, asi como reportajes y comentarios en el independiente y sindicado programa de radio “Democracy Now”, no han hecho más que ignorar el papel de iraquíes progresistas, al tiempo que han destacado el papel de los varios grupos de resistencia iraquí que luchan en contra de la invasión de Estados Unidos, sin preocuparse por averiguar quienes son estos grupos y lo que representan para el pueblo de Irak.

Por ahora, muchas cosas acerca de la guerra en Irak son muy claras: la invasión de Estados Unidos ha sido el paso más imprudente y peligroso desde la guerra de Vietnam por lo cual ya paga caro, previéndose que para el futuro, el precio será aún mucho mayor debido a su imprudente acción. Más de mil soldados estadounidenses han muerto en poco más de un año en una campaña que ha debilitado profundamente la seguridad de EE.UU, y lo que el candidato demócrata por la presidencia John Kerry, se las pueda haber arreglado por articular. Según encuestas de opinión pública internacional, nunca han existido sentimientos de tanto resentimiento e incluso desprecio en contra de Los Estados Unidos alrededor del mundo como ahora. Y es éste exactamente la clase de ambiente en el que grupos terroristas como AlQeda prospera.

Activistas estadounidenses que se manifestarón en contra de la guerra en Irak, hicieron una invaluable contribución permitiendo que el resto del mundo se enterara que millones de estadounidenses se oponían a la invasión liderada por EE.UU. Pero el enemigo del enemigo de uno, no es necesariamente su amigo. Pensar lo contrario es abrazar la lógica Orwelliana que hace de los estadounidenses anti-guerra lucirse, no solo como mal informados, sino que al mismo tiempo tan cínicos como los pro-guerra. La ironía de la guerra en Irak es que la Administración Bush hizo una decisión unilateral para destronar del poder a uno de los líderes más despreciados de entre los déspotas del mundo, pero al hacerlo unilateralmente puso en su contra a incontables personas alrededor del mundo.

¿ QUIEN ODIABA A SADDAM?

Dentro de los detractores de Saddam se incluyen siempre no otro más que Bin Laden, que hace tiempo se mofó del líder iraquí calificándolo de “infiel” y “falso musulmán” durante toda ocasión que brindó entrevistas ó en declaraciones escritas. Pero de hecho, aún los musulmanes más radicales, saben muy bien que no otro gobierno árabe moderno, torturó y asesinó a tantos musulmanes como el régimen baatista de Husseim. Y por igual, ningún líder del Medio Oriente ha torturado y asesinado a tantos comunistas como el régimen de Saddam.

El Partido árabe Renacimiento Nacionalista [o] Baatista ha sido anti-comunista y anti-islámico, y desvergonzadamente ha defendido al nacionalismo étnico. Arabes étnicos de la preponderante fe sunnita por mucho tiempo han dominado el Partido baatista, a pesar que aún hoy solo constituyen un 17{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} de la población iraquí, siendo este porcentaje solo un pequeño escaño por arriba de la población blanca de Sur Africa.

Arabes étnicos de la secta Shiita Musulmán mientras tanto, son casi tan numerosos en Irak como los negros de Sur Africa. Alguien con cierto interés en hacer algo por los pobres debería saber que los shiítas han sido los más indigentes de los iraquíes, y los que más sufrieron durante el embargo de las Naciones Unidas apoyado por Los Estados Unidos. Shiítas masculinos siempre fueron poco menos que pólvora de cañón para las aventuras militaristas de Saddam. Y al igual que los shiítas, los kurdos de Irak, que son un 20{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} de la población, jamás disfrutaron más de lo que se puede denominar como una representación simbólica bajo el régimen de Saddam.

La resistencia a Saddam Husseim tomó muchas formas desde 1979 al 2003, con grupos en contra del derrocado líder organizándose desde shiítas islámicos y kurdos nacionalistas, hasta líneas del Partido Comunista. Cada uno de estos grupos perdió decenas de miles de partidarios durante las barridas contrainsurgentes del régimen baatista. Y algunos estadounidenses de izquierda pidieron disculpas por el régimen de Saddam, diciendo que no era peor que otros en el mundo. Pero el comportamiento de Saddam merece una categorización única, por sus procedimientos viciosos de represión que a menudo incluía la tortura y violación de familiares de personas sospechosos de ser disidentes. Pocos gobernantes han sido tan brutales en cualquier parte del mundo con excepción del gobierno guatemalteco apoyado por la CIA en los años 80. Ambos gobiernos, el guatemalteco y el de Saddam, fueron clandestinamente respaldados por la CIA durante la administración Reagan.

En años recientes, izquierdistas estadounidenses no fueron los únicos en ignorar a los varios grupos iraquíes que por mucho tiempo resistieron la tiranía de Saddam. La derecha estadounidense liderada por neoconservadores de la administración Bush, también ignoraron a estos grupos de resistencia cuando buscaron aliados iraquíes durante la escalada de la invasión en el 2003. En lugar de abrazar a una amplia base de grupos anti-Saddam como la oposición musulmán shiíta o la secular resistencia izquierdista, los cuales mantenían cuadros armados y clandestinos dentro de Irak aún a finales del 2003, La Administración Bush se alió con grupos de ex-monarquistas liderados por el ahora desacreditado Ahmed Chalabi. Un sólido miembro de la vieja clase dominante, el padre de Chalabi era el hombre más millonario de Bagdad en 1958, tiempo en el cual la efímera monarquía impuesta por los británicos fue derrocada. Eventualmente los baatistas comandados por Saddam sobresalieron en la consiguiente lucha por el poder, y tanto la mayoría shiíita así como los kurdos que conforman la segunda población más extensa de Irak, quedaron excluidos de la riqueza y el poder.

LA RESISTENCIA CONTRA LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS

Hay varias facciones que combaten ahora contra las fuerzas de EE.UU, y la mano dura de la ocupación estadounidense ha incitado a nacionalistas iraquíes a unírseles. Los abusos estadounidenses han incluido desde allanamientos a viviendas con las tropas a menudo maltratando a mujeres y aterrando niños, tiroteos en poblaciones vulnerables que han causado bajas civiles, y la humillación y tortura de iraquiís dentro de la prisión de Abu Ghraib.

Sin embargo, todos los grupos organizados en la resistencia iraquí son fuerzas reaccionarias de una u otra clase. La resistencia alrededor y entre las ciudades de Falluja, Tikrit y Bagdad en el llamado “triángulo sunita” es liderada por ex baatistas que aspiran en retomar al poder a la minora dictactorial. Como lo señala Juan Cole, Nasir A’if al-Ani, el delegado sunita ante el Consejo Nacional Iraqui por el Partido Islámico Iraqui, ni siquiera reconoce a la población shiíta como una mayoría en Iraq. (Ni siquiera los más recalcitrantes “afrikaners” en el aparthied en Sur Africa pretendieron que la población negra era una minoría).

Mientras tanto algunos como Naomi Klein del periódico “The Nation”, parecen haber caído ingenuamente al lado de la milicia al-Mahdi que recientemente combatió con los marinos estadounidenses en Najaf. La milicia al-Mahdi es un grupo de oposición holgadamente organizado y liderado por Muqtada Al-Sadr. Al-Sadr es un hombre que heredó su rol después de que su padre y dos de sus hermanos fueran asesinados por Saddam. Careciendo tanto de la madurez y el entrenamiento como clérigo de mayor rango, Al-Sadr ha tratado de atraer dentro de sus partidarios a clérigos shiítas de mayor peso, mediante la aplicación de los principios fundamentales del islam shiíta que incluye la explícita represión de homosexuales y mujeres.

El tercer elemento considerable de resistencia en Irak está compuesto por islámicos extranjeros miembros de AlQeda, tanto como la real familia saudita y Bin Laden, practican la versión más extremista del islám conocida como “Wahaabism”. Las últimas victimas de este grupo pueden haber incluido a las dos ya liberadas pacifistas italianas que trabajan para la ONG italiana “Un Puente a Bagdad”, y que al igual que los otros grupos anti-guerra estadounidenses trabajando en Irak está explícitamente opuesto a la ocupación estadounidense. Y en la otra mano, tanto Jeremy Scahill de “Democracy Now” y Naomi Klein de The Nation, han escrito en The Guardian de Londres, que un grupo de inteligencia apoyado por Occidente pudo haber estado detrás de los secuestros, sugiriendo que la CIA u otros, raptaron a las mujeres para desacreditar a la oposición iraquí.

Los iraquíes favorecidos por la Administración Bush pueden ser seculares pero apenas son personas admirables. El Primer Ministro, Iyad Allawi es un ex baatista que dejó el Partido Baath a mediados de 1970. Paul McGeough del Sydney Morning Herald, reportó que con un revolver, Allawi personalmente ejecutó a seis iraquíes en la estación policial de Bagdad justo antes de convertirse en Primer Ministro. Sin embargo ninguna prueba de este crimen está próxima por el momento. Y las credenciales democráticas de Allawi tampoco son impresionantes: prohibió el trabajo de la cadena de televisión al-Jazeera, y ha impuesto ciertas formas de ley marcial.

Ni los grupos de resistencia aclamados por los muchos estadounidenses de izquierda, o los partidos de gobiernos apoyados por la derecha, parecen reflejar los puntos de vistas y aspiraciones de la mayoría del pueblo iraquí, que mejor parecen sustentar sus esperanzas en el surgimientos de grupos muy independientes del pasado régimen de Saddam y del creciente gobierno ditactorial de Allawi. Estas posibilidades incluyen a grupos shiítas moderados y seculares izquierdistas, a través del los cuales el pueblo iraquí espera acceder al poder por primera vez en su historia.

Desafortunadamente, la mayoría del pueblo iraquí parece haber sido olvidada, tanto por la izquierda como por la derecha norteamericana. Los iraquíes tienen que ser valorados por lo que son, no como peones en alguna agenda política partidaria. Semejante chovinismo pueden esperarse de extremistas derechistas de “America-First”, pero también semejante postura a puras penas es defendible por cualquier conciente de ser progresista. Así que no es ninguna sorpresa que en lugar de ver la sumamente contradictoria y a la vez compleja realidad política de Irak, muchos estadounidenses de izquierda mejor han preferido aferrarse a la comodidad que proviene del simple uso del slogan.

Frank Smyth es un periodista freelance que estuvo “embedded” (incrustado) con las guerrillas izquierdistas en El Salvador, Irak y Rwanda. En 1991 cubrió los levantamientos en contra del régimen de Saddam Hussein en Irak, lugar donde fue capturado para luego permanecer cautivo por dos semanas en la prisión iraquí de Abub Ghraib. Es colaborador de Raíces.

(Traducción Alexander Renderos, miembro grupo editor de Raíces)

Who Are the Progressives in Iraq?: The Left, the Right, and the Islamists

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Original story found here.

One event in Baghdad went unreported this month, not only by the mainstream media but also by the “alternative” press, even though it implies that U.S. control over Iraq’s political future may already be waning. In August, the White House supported the establishment of an Iraqi National Council comprising 100 Iraqis from various tribal, ethnic, and religious groups in an effort to influence the composition of an electoral oversight body. Yet this month, two large political parties, each of which has long been viewed with suspicion by Washington, came out ahead in the voting.

Many criticize the legitimacy of the process by which the Bush administration is hoping to steer Iraq toward national elections next January. The indirect elections took place under war conditions, and the Associated Press reported that mortars exploded near the convention site in Baghdad where delegates gathered. Iraqi delegates also expanded the number of vice-chairs in the national council from two to four. Had they not done so, the results might have been even more troubling for the White House.

In the September balloting, the delegate from the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Jawad al-Maliki, came in first with 56 votes. This is a Shi’ite group that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lambasted as a tool of Iran during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Another Iraqi even less attractive to Washington, the Secretary General of the Iraqi Communist Party (www.iraqcp.org), Hamid Majid Moussa, came in second with 55 votes. Meanwhile, Rasim al-Awadi, the delegate from the Iraqi National Accord — the group once backed by the CIA and whose leader, Iyad Allawi, who was supported by the Bush administration to become the Iraqi prime minister — came in third with 53 votes. Nasir A`if al-Ani — the delegate from the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, sympathetic to the Ba’athist-based, anti-American resistance operating both west and north of Baghdad — came in fourth with 48 votes.

By any count, getting only one ally elected out of four seats on this potentially all-important electoral oversight body does not bode well for the Bush administration. After the Iraqi National Council was formed, but before it voted, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, while at President Bush’s family ranch in Crawford, Texas, declared: “The selection of the council is a sign that the Iraqi people will not allow terrorist elements to stand in the way of their democratic future.”

But what if elections in Iraq early next year lead to a government unlike anything ever expected by the Bush administration? The respected Arabist from the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, was among the first to report the Iraqi National Council election results on his blog, www.juancole.com. “So,” he quipped, “this list is further evidence that the U.S. invaded Iraq to install in power a coalition of Communists, Islamists and ex-Ba’athist nationalists. If you had said such a thing 3 years ago you would have been laughed at.”

My Enemy’s Friends

Many American leftists seem to know little about their Iraqi counterparts, since understanding the role of the Iraqi left requires a nuanced approach. Unfortunately the knee-jerk, anti-imperialist analysis of groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R. has wormed its way into several progressive outlets. Dispatches and columns in The Nation as well as reports and commentary on the independently syndicated radio program “Democracy Now” have all but ignored the role of Iraqi progressives while highlighting, if not championing, the various factions of the Iraqi-based resistance against the U.S.-led occupation without bothering to ask who these groups are and what they represent for Iraqis.

By now several things about the Iraq War seem clear. The U.S.-led invasion was the most dangerous and reckless step taken by the United States since the Vietnam War, and America is already paying dearly and is sure to pay an even steeper price in the future for this imprudent action. More than 1,000 American soldiers have died in little more than a year in a campaign that has undermined U.S. security more profoundly than even candidate John Kerry has managed to articulate. Never has the United States (according to international public opinion polls) been so resented, if not loathed, by so many people around the world. And this is exactly the kind of environment in which al-Qaida terrorists — who do represent a real and ongoing threat to the United States and others — thrive.

U.S. activists who demonstrated against the Iraq War made an invaluable contribution by letting the rest of the world know that millions of Americans opposed the U.S.-led invasion. But the enemy of one’s enemy is not necessarily one’s friend. To think otherwise is to embrace an Orwellian logic that makes anti-war Americans appear not only uninformed but also as cynical as the pro-war protagonists whom they oppose. The irony of the Iraq War is that the Bush administration made a unilateral decision to invade a nation in order to overthrow a leader who ranked among the most despised despots in the world but, in so doing, managed to turn countless people in many nations against the United States.

Who Hated Saddam?

Saddam Hussein’s detractors have always included none other than Osama bin Laden, who long derided the Iraqi leader as either an “infidel” or a “false Muslim” nearly every time he has ever mentioned his name in any interview or recorded statement. The most radical of Muslims, in fact, know all too well that no modern Arab government tortured and murdered as many Muslims as did Saddam’s Ba’athist regime. No Middle Eastern leader, either, has tortured and murdered as many communists as Saddam did during the decades of his regime.

The Arab Nationalist Renaissance [or] Ba’athist Party has been both anti-communist and anti-Islamic and unabashedly championed ethnic nationalism. In Iraq, the Ba’ath Party under Saddam Hussein instituted a minority-based government. Ethnic Arabs of the mainstream Sunni Muslim faith have long dominated the Ba’ath Party, even though Sunni Arabs today constitute at most 17{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the Iraqi population, just a bit above the percentage of whites in South Africa.

Ethnic Arabs of the Shi’ite Muslim sect, meanwhile, are nearly as numerous in Iraq as blacks are in South Africa. Anyone interested in empowering the poor should also know that Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslims have long been the most indigent of Iraqis and suffered the most during the U.S.-backed UN sanctions. Shi’ite males were often little more than cannon fodder for Saddam’s various military adventures. Like the Shi’ites, Iraq’s Kurds, about 20{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the population, never enjoyed more than token representation under Saddam.

Resistance to Saddam’s rule took many forms from 1979 to 2003, with anti-Saddam groups organized largely along Shi’ite Islamic, Kurdish nationalist, or Communist Party lines. Each of these groups lost tens of thousands of adherents to brutal counterinsurgency sweeps conducted by the Ba’athist government. Some American leftists apologized for Saddam’s government, saying it was no worse than many others in the world. But Saddam Hussein’s behavior deserves a category for itself, employing vicious repression and often including the torture and rape of family members of suspected dissidents. Few rulers anywhere in the world were so brutal, with one exception of the CIA-backed government in Guatemala during the l980s. (Both that government and Saddam’s, it is worth noting, were clandestinely aided by the United States during the Reagan administration.)

In more recent years, U.S. leftists were not the only ones who ignored the various Iraqi groups that had long resisted Saddam’s tyranny. The U.S. right, led most recently by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration, also ignored these resistance groups when they sought Iraqi allies during the buildup to the 2003 U.S. invasion. Instead of reaching out to broad-based, anti-Saddam groups like either the Shiite Muslim opposition or the secular leftist resistance, both of which still had either armed or clandestine cadres inside Iraq as late as 2003, the Bush administration allied itself instead with a group of ex-monarchists led by the now-discredited Ahmed Chalabi. A solid member of the old ruling class, Chalabi’s father was the wealthiest man in Baghdad in 1958, when Iraq’s short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown. The Ba’athists, eventually led by Saddam, came out on top in the ensuing power struggle, but both the Shi’ite majority and Iraq’s second-largest population group, the Kurds, remained excluded from wealth as well as power.

The Resistance Versus the Revolutionaries

There are several factions fighting U.S.-led forces inside Iraq today, and the heavy-handedness of the U.S. occupation has spurred many individual Iraqi nationalists to join them. American abuses have included breaking into homes, with male troops often manhandling women and terrifying children, firing into populated areas, causing many civilian casualties, and humiliating–as well as torturing–Iraqis inside Abu Ghraib prison.

Yet, all of the organized groups among the Iraqi resistance are reactionary forces of one kind or another. The resistance around and between the cities of Falluja, Tikrit, and Baghdad in the so-called “Sunni triangle” is led by ex-Ba’athists who aspire to return the old minority-based dictatorship to power. As Juan Cole points out, Nasir A`if al-Ani, the Sunni delegate to the Iraqi National Council from the Iraqi Islamic Party, does not even recognize the Shi’a people as a majority in Iraq (Not even the most recalcitrant Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa pretended that blacks were a minority).

Others like The Nation‘s Naomi Klein, meanwhile, seem to have naively fallen for the al-Mahdi militia that recently fought U.S. Marines in Najaf. The al-Mahdi militia is a loosely organized Shi’ite opposition group led by Muqtada al-Sadr. He is a young man who inherited his role after his father and two brothers were murdered by Saddam. Lacking either the maturity or training of a senior cleric, al-Sadr has tried to lure supporters from more-respected Shiite clerics by promoting militant enforcement of the most fundamental tenets of Shiite Islam, including the explicit repression of gays and women.

The third sizable element of resistance inside Iraq is composed of foreign Islamist members of al-Qaida, who, like both the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden, practice an even more extreme version of Islam, Wahaabism. This group’s recent victims may include two kidnapped Italian women who work for the Italian group A Bridge to Baghdad, which, like U.S. anti-war groups working in Iraq, is explicitly opposed to the U.S. occupation. The American anti-war group, Iraq Occupation Watch, seems to believe that members of the Iraqi resistance may be holding them, pointing out on its website that the abductors should recognize that the Italian women are anti-war activists. On the other hand, Democracy Now’s Jeremy Scahill and The Nation‘s Naomi Klein have written in The Guardian that a Western intelligence-backed group may be behind the abductions, suggesting that the CIA or others seized the two women to try to discredit the Iraqi opposition.

The Iraqis favored by the Bush administration may be secular, but they are hardly more admirable people. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is an ex-Ba’athist who left the Ba’ath Party in the mid-1970s. Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald, reported that Allawi personally executed (with a handgun) six Iraqis in a Baghdad police station right before he became prime minister, though no proof of this crime has yet been forthcoming. Prime Minister Allawi’s democracy credentials are also not impressive. He has already banned the Qatar-based satellite TV network, Al-Jazeera, and has imposed certain forms of martial law.

Neither the resistance groups cheered on by many on the American left nor the governing parties championed by the American right seem to reflect the views and aspirations of most Iraqi people, who seem to be hoping for the rise of groups independent of both Saddam’s reign and the increasingly dictatorial Allawi government. Possibilities include moderate Shiite groups and secular leftist ones, through whose leadership most Iraqis hope to find a way to empower themselves for the first time in their history.

Unfortunately, mainstream Iraqis seem to have been all but forgotten by both the American left and right. Iraqis must be valued for who they are, not as pawns in some partisan political agenda. Such chauvinism might be expected of “America-first” right-wingers, but such a position is hardly defensible for any conscientious progressive. It’s no wonder instead of seeing Iraq’s highly complex and, indeed, contradictory political reality, so many American leftists have chosen instead to cling to the comfort that comes from simple sloganeering.

–This article, after its first posting on www.fpif.org, has been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Norwegian. Both links and text may be found on www.franksmyth.com by clicking on Iraq. The Arabic version was translated by www.streamtime.org it may be found by clicking:
http://streamtime.org//index.php?op=Default&Date=200409&blogId=1

Behind the Badge: Meet the GOP’s Law Enforcement Front Group

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Original story found here.

Kirk Watson cannot forget the first time he saw it. Watson, a former Austin mayor, was running as the Democratic nominee for state attorney general. Only about 10 days remained before the 2002 November election. His campaign was in full gear. On that Sunday, Watson planned to visit dozens of churches. It was early in the morning in a Dallas hotel room and the candidate was shaving with the television on in the background.

He didn’t see the initial visuals of the commercial as the screen scrolled past stirring images of surgeons saving lives and the state Capitol building. A somber voice intoned “Personal injury lawyers like Kirk Watson have made millions suing doctors, hospitals, and small businesses, hurting families and driving up the cost of healthcare. Greg Abbott is different.”

By this point Watson was standing before the television, holding his razor, his face still lathered. “A respected Supreme Court Justice,” the voiceover in the ad continued, “Greg Abbott believes in common sense lawsuit reform and Greg Abbott supports the swift and aggressive prosecution of sexual predators and child pornographers. Greg Abbott has a plan for Texas. To learn more, log on now. [www.leaa.org] Law Enforcement Alliance of America.”

Watson rapidly called his campaign manager, smearing the phone with shaving cream. He had only one question: Who in the world was the LEAA?

“We have to find out,” he told his campaign manager.

Over the remaining 10 days leading up to the election, the mysterious group with the strong law-and-order moniker spent about $1.5 million for ads that ran in every major media market in Texas, gunning down Watson and lifting up the GOP’s Abbott (Ironically, it was Watson who had received an honorary commission in the Austin Police Department while Abbott sued and won millions on a lawsuit after a falling tree left him paralyzed). While the Texas media buy in the Abbott-Watson race seems to have been the largest for any single state, the LEAA also spent millions for commercials against candidates in at least four other states in 2002. In some places, like Mississippi, the LEAA dropped more money on ads than all the candidates combined.

And Watson is still waiting for an answer to his question. The former mayor notes that he, not Abbott, received the endorsement of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, which is the largest police group in the state. Two years later, he still wants to know who was behind the LEAA? Who funded the campaign against him and why?

One agency tasked with policing groups like the LEAA is the Internal Revenue Service. But the IRS doesn’t appear to be interested. It has designated the non-profit LEAA as “a social welfare organization.” Under this tax designation, the LEAA can legally “educate” voters about issues but, it cannot advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate. The IRS forbids such organizations from “direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” When big money is the key to demolishing political opponents, the biggest advantage that any “social welfare” group like the LEAA enjoys is that it is legally allowed to keep all its donors, even the largest ones, hidden.

Currently, the LEAA is under investigation by a Travis County grand jury as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the 2002 campaign. Did the LEAA cross the line between “education” and “advocacy?” Did the LEAA serve as a key component in a coordinated GOP plan to skirt campaign finance laws and funnel prohibited corporate money into Texas politics? Was the author of that plan U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), whose principle objective was to redraw congressional lines so that more Republicans would be elected?

Those who track campaign money believe that the LEAA represents a troubling trend. “LEAA is one of a new breed of shadowy front groups that is willing to serve as a corporate money conduit and attack dog to benefit GOP candidates,” says Craig McDonald of the public policy organization Texans for Public Justice. “Its ‘issue ads’ are a mere hoax. When GOP candidates need a political attack from a so-called law-and-order group, they appear to funnel money to the LEAA to carry it out.”

What’s beyond dispute is the result of Greg Abbott’s ascension to attorney general. Without the attorney general’s approval, DeLay never would have been able to push through his redistricting plan. It was Abbott who was the first to rule that the state could pursue mid-decade congressional redistricting. This November, if Republicans do as well as expected, the GOP could lock in their controlling majority in the House of Representatives for years to come.

One day in late May, I decided to pay the LEAA a visit, so I drove less than 20 minutes from my office in Washington, D.C., to the edge of the I-495 beltway around the capital. I parked my car in a lot next to a northern Virginia office building filled with medical, accounting, and employment firms and the headquarters of the LEAA, an organization that bills itself as “the nation’s largest non-profit, non-partisan coalition of law enforcement personnel, crime victims, and concerned citizens.”

I took the elevator to the LEAA’s suite 421, consisting of a handful of cramped offices.

By this point, I had already called the headquarters and sent a fax, on both occasions, with the same request. What I wanted was the LEAA’s Form 990s. These publicly available tax documents, while not naming contributors, list how much the organization spends and where the money goes. By law, one can show up in person at the IRS-registered address of any non-profit group and simply ask for its Form 990. The law requires the group to provide a copy “generally” on the “day of the request.” There are even minor fines for not doing so.

The receptionist said that LEAA Operations Director Ted Deeds was not in. I showed her a copy of IRS regulations. I pointed out that now I was here in person, and was legally entitled to walk away with the form. There was another person in the office, who identified himself as the webmaster of www.leaa.org. While I waited, he went to call Deeds. He returned and told me “Mr. Deeds would honor my request.” When I pressed for more information, he said that there was no more.

On June 4, I sent Deeds an e-mail requesting the same information, which I copied to the IRS Media Relations Specialist for northern Virginia, James C. Dupree. In keeping with IRS policy, regional spokesman Dupree declined to say what, if anything, he or the IRS did with my request. To ensure that the IRS got it, I sent a letter of complaint to the IRS enforcement office for non-profit groups, which is based in Dallas, Texas, on July 1. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen had already complained in writing about the LEAA to the same IRS office on May 14 (Public Citizen eventually obtained some of the LEAA’s older Form 990s from the IRS).

At press time, the fines that could conceivably be levied against Chief Operating Officer Ted Deeds for ignoring two separate and ongoing requests for the LEAA’s 990 are more than $3,600, if the IRS were to enforce the law. “Responsible persons of a tax exempt organization who fail to provide the documents as required may be subject to a penalty of $20 a day for as long as the failure continues,” reads the tough language on the IRS website. “There is a maximum penalty of $10,000 for each failure to provide a copy of an annual information return.”

Four grand is no more than petty cash for a multi-million dollar non-profit like the LEAA, which had a budget in 2001 of nearly $5 million, according to a Form 990 obtained by Public Citizen. But $3,600 is not necessarily an insignificant amount for Ted Deeds, who is the official responsible, and who earned $82,500 operating the LEAA in 2001, according to the same form 990.

What Deeds has yet to provide to either the Observer or Public Citizen is the LEAA Form 990 for 2002. This is just one of the reasons why, according to Taylor Lincoln, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, the LEAA is the worst of its breed. Lately, Public Citizen and Lincoln have been collecting data on 30-odd non-profit groups involved in political campaigns, asking each one for copies of their Form 990s. “[The LEAA] are the only group which has not abided by its obligation to provide the form,” said Lincoln.

“A social welfare organization” like the LEAA is not supposed to be involved in politics, at least not full-time, according to the IRS website. “[A] social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.” Moreover, “any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax.”

One way to tell whether an activity is “primary” is how much the group spends on it. The LEAA spent only $43,050 on “political expenditures” according to its Form 990 in 2000, and far less, only $2,500, on “political expenditures” in 2001. But in both years the LEAA spent $2.43 million and $3.47 million, respectively, on what the LEAA told the IRS was “enhancement and education to further the understanding of and the need for revision in the current criminal justice system and education of the public into second amendment rights.”

The certified public accountant who prepares the LEAA’s IRS filings is Nanette K. Miller, whose office is in Washington, D.C. I asked her whether these “enhancement and education” expenditures were properly filed, or whether they should have been recorded instead as “political expenditures.”

“He’d be the one you have to ask,” she said, referring to LEAA Operations Director Ted Deeds. “I can’t disclose anything without talking to him, anyway.”

Deborah Goldberg of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that groups like the LEAA are taking advantage of a loophole involving the difference between federal and state laws. Since the Supreme Court upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in 2003, it no longer matters what “magic words” groups like the LEAA use, says Goldberg. Whether or not they run “issue ads” or explicitly endorse a candidate, such groups must disclose their contributors for any ads they run during federal races. But they only need to do so for ads they run during state races if the state itself has such a law. “Both Texas and Mississippi,” said Goldberg, are among the states that do not.

Of course, the LEAA is hardly the only IRS-registered “social welfare” organization doing “public education.” One such group on the opposite side of the nation’s political fence is MoveOn.Org, which had a budget of $4.48 million in 2003, on par with the LEAA’s budget in 2001. While LEAA refuses to disclose its latest balance sheet, MoveOn.Org provided its Form 990s in compliance with the law. Moreover, while the LEAA has no “political” entity registered with the IRS, MoveOn has two other registered political groups, a Voter Fund and a Political Action Committee, both of which are required by law to disclose every contributor who donates $200 or more.

IRS officials confirm that the LEAA filed a balance sheet with the IRS for 2002. By law, anyone should be able to obtain this form from the IRS. But after more than four months, the IRS has still failed to produce the document in a “timely manner” in violation of the laws governing the agency.

A month ago, Mark W. Everson, the man President Bush tapped to be commissioner of the IRS, promised Congress that the agency was finally going to clean up dirty non-profits. “It’s fair to say this problem has crept up over time, and our response has lagged,” replied Commissioner Everson under questioning from senators, adding that the IRS would be reviewing non-profit groups as soon as this summer to start enforcing the law.

“It’s obvious from the abuses we see that there’s been no check on charities,” complained the chairman of the finance committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican. Chairman Grassley went on, “Big money, tax free, and no oversight have created a cesspool in too many cases.”

But which non-profit “cesspools” will the IRS clean up first?

IRS officials said that Commissioner Everson is most concerned about non-profit groups and their affiliates whom the IRS suspects of either engaging in criminal fraud to deceive contributors or of hiding taxable income from the IRS. The latter includes environmental trusts, said the IRS official, who added, “[Everson] was not talking about the issue you raise.”

What about a little enforcement when the “law-and-order” group breaks the law?

“It would be a violation of federal law for us to comment on a specific entity,” said Bruce Friedland, public affairs specialist at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., declining to answer questions about why the IRS has failed to sanction the LEAA. All Friedland would say was, “This is a matter that the IRS takes very seriously.”

Commissioner Everson previously served in the Justice Department and in the Immigration and Naturalization Service back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. More recently, Everson left a job in Dallas as vice-president of a multi-billion dollar, Texas-based food service company, to serve President Bush first in the Office of Management and Budget, where he reportedly earned a reputation for efficiency.

But the IRS under his leadership hardly looks efficient when it comes to the LEAA.

The Law Enforcement Alliance of America was reportedly started in 1991 by a grant from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which set up the LEAA just eleven miles away from its own headquarters in northern Virginia. Tax records from both groups show that the NRA has continued to finance the LEAA. But the LEAA’s mission appears to have expanded since its early days, as a Republican election machine controlled from Washington, D.C., has increasingly come to rely on “issue” ads as part of its national strategy. The Law Enforcement Alliance has been allying itself with other groups connected to the GOP as part of this growing effort. In the process, the LEAA’s bank account has grown and its message has changed depending on the circumstance. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Texas, where the LEAA found new friends in the Texas Association of Business (TAB), and a political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) founded by House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

In 2002, TRMPAC and TAB were busy supporting candidates and pushing “issue” ads in an effort to remake the Texas Legislature. And indeed, after a slate of 19 Republican state representatives and senators won victory, they proceeded to elect DeLay’s close friend Tom Craddick (R-Midland) speaker of the House and push through, not only mid-decade congressional redistricting, but a host of giveaways for the corporate financiers of the campaign. A central link among all these groups and a likely target of the Travis County grand jury is John Colyandro.

Colyandro was the executive director of TRMPAC. He also worked on Greg Abbott’s campaign. According to a deposition in a civil suit filed by some of the losing Democratic candidates, Colyandro admitted that he contacted the LEAA to see if they would get involved in Texas legislative races. He has denied involvement in the LEAA’s television ads against Watson. Remarkably, four ads created for the $1.9-million TAB “issue” ad campaign mysteriously ended up with LEAA logos on them.

The ads were hardly subtle. “Mike Head is on the side of convicted baby killers and murderers,” read one. “When suspected crack cocaine traffickers and marijuana dealers found themselves in jail, Paul D. Clayton came to their aid,” read another.

The movement of the ads between the groups seems to indicate coordination between them, which could violate their tax status. This could become an important point in the grand jury proceedings as it brings into question how “independent” their “independent expenditures” really were.

The LEAA may also be channeling funds into other state races for America’s largest “business league,” reported The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents more than three million firms, and includes an Institute for Legal Reform that carries out what its spokesman calls “voter education” in both national and state elections across the nation.

While the LEAA’s big issue is gun rights and criminal justice, the Chamber’s big issue is tort reform and limits on lawsuit damages. The organization has spent millions to support candidates on the lawsuit-reform bandwagon. “There are 42 supreme court races, and 11 attorney general races” in different states this year, said Sean McBride, vice president of communications for the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform.

The Chamber, like the LEAA, favors unaccountable voter education drives. “We do not give contributions directly to candidates,” said McBride. “We take a hard look at those races in cooperation with business groups or other non-profits in those states.”

Do the non-profits include the LEAA?

Chamber spokesman McBride declined to comment.

When also asked about the LEAA, the Chamber’s General Counsel, Steve Bokat similarly replied, “I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

No matter who is writing checks to the LEAA, its budget has increased nearly fivefold in just seven years. From 1995 through 1998, the NRA donated more than $500,000 a year to the LEAA, covering either nearly or slightly more than half of the LEAA’s budget, according to tax records from both groups obtained by the Observer. But the LEAA’s budget has swelled in recent years from $1.32 million in 1997 to $4.48 million by 2001. There is speculation the group spent even more money in 2002.

In addition to its presence in Texas, the LEAA has fought hard in Mississippi, which has long been the scene of pitched battles between trial lawyers and business interests. Two years ago, the LEAA sponsored smear ads in Mississippi against one 12-year sitting state Supreme Court justice. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was active in Mississippi Supreme Court races in years past as well, but, in 2002, neither the Chamber nor its ads were anywhere in sight, while LEAA ads were everywhere.

What was odd about the LEAA’s campaign against this sitting Mississippi justice, Chuck McRae, was that, unlike many previous targets of the LEAA, he was a proud gun owner and the LEAA had no beef with him about gun rights. However, many businesses and, especially, doctors opposed Judge McRae’s re-election, complaining that he was too plaintiff-friendly in his Mississippi Supreme Court decisions. The LEAA’s ads, meanwhile, attacked him that year for overturning at least one murder conviction, and for voting against the disbarment of an attorney charged with stealing money from his own clients.

“What we find with a lot of these ‘front groups’ is that they adopt innocuous-sounding names that your average person is more likely to identify with than the chamber of commerce,” said Public Citizen’s Taylor Lincoln. “Take the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Who is against law enforcement?”

It’s unclear whether the Travis County grand jury has tried to contact John W. Chapman, the chairman of LEAA’s board of directors, to ask him what he knows about the 2002 Texas campaign. It wouldn’t be hard; he’s just up the road on I-35. Chapman is a former police officer for juvenile offenses in Killeen, Texas. He joined the LEAA after the mass shooting by a lone gunmen in a Luby’s cafeteria there in 1991. On the LEAA website, www.leaa.org, Chapman can be seen in one photo shaking hands with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, and in another photo with a past NRA President. (Chapman declined to comment for this story.)

State officials in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas have accused the LEAA of illegally pumping money into their state’s electoral campaigns in violation of this group’s so-called “social welfare” status.

One judge in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, Paul F. Lutty Jr., issued a temporary restraining order against the LEAA over its ads in the Keystone State in 2001. But even those who disagreed with LEAA ads, like the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said the county judge’s ruling was a violation of free speech.

One of the largest LEAA campaigns after Texas was a 2002 attorney general race in Illinois, where the LEAA spent a reported $1.3 million. The group attacked a Democratic candidate, Lisa Magidan, telling voters that she “has never tried a single crime,” while pointing out that the Republican candidate, Joe Birkett, was an experienced prosecutor. This time the LEAA’s Executive Director James Fotis characterized the ads as “freedom of speech.”

Indeed they are. But since running such ads amounts, as the LEAA’s own IRS filings show, to the group’s primary activity, if the IRS were to determine that these expenses should be filed as “political” instead of “educational,” not only would the LEAA lose its “social welfare” status and be required to pay taxes on its political campaigns, but it would also be required finally to shed light on its contributors.

There are others who criticize the LEAA for different reasons. Jim Pasco is executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. It’s the nation’s largest law enforcement association with more than 300,000 members. The Grand Lodge Fraternal Order of Police is based in Nashville, Tennessee, and has more than 2,100 local lodges nationwide. The FOP also has a National Legislative Office that occupies three floors of a Capitol Hill townhouse.

“It’s absurd to suggest that LEAA represents the law enforcement community,” said Pasco, who is himself a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special agent.

These two groups have worked together. Both the Fraternal Order of Police and the Law Enforcement Alliance backed a federal law, now awaiting President Bush’s signature, that will allow off-duty as well as retired police officers to carry concealed weapons in any state. But on other issues, from state supreme court to attorney general races, Pasco says the LEAA does not represent America’s law enforcement personnel.

“There is no way on God’s green earth that the LEAA could spend millions of dollars on campaign ads,” said Pasco. “It’s not their money.”

How much money the LEAA spent in 2002 and who provided it is anybody’s guess. Since the LEAA and the IRS refuse and fail, respectively, to give a proper public accounting, the mystery will remain unsolved for the time being. More importantly, in the absence of a legal deterrent, who knows what plans are being laid for the LEAA to strike once again in October, 10 days before the election?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His work can be seen at www.franksmyth.com. Additional writing and reporting for this article was contributed by Jake Bernstein.

Estado Unidos no debería confiar en los hombres “yes” de Irak

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Original story found here.

¿Cómo terminamos con tantos aprietos en Irak? Porque hicimos lo que hemos hecho por largo tiempo: Buscamos no a los extranjeros con quienes todavía necesitamos trabajar, sino a los exiliados que fueran más parecidos a nosotros.

La práctica de imponer poderes impopulares no comenzó con esta administración de Bush hijo. Es una que los hacedores de la política de Estados Unidos han venido persiguiendo con diferentes resultados. Pero en un mundo tan complejo como este después del 11/9, los días de seleccionar líderes con caracteres de un nobel a lo Graham Greene, se han ido. Al contrario, nosotros debemos construir relaciones con los extranjeros que tienen apoyo entre su propia gente y dejar de acercarnos a los que meramente nos dicen lo que queremos escuchar.

Los hijos de los extranjeros favoritos a menudo disfrutan de más apoyo en esta nación estadounidense que en la suya, apoyo basado en ilusiones que han venido vendiendo de puerta en puerta y que puede tomar años antes de que sean expuestas. Tal hombre fue el presidente de El Salvador, José Napoleón Duarte, quien una vez disfrutó de un amplio consenso bipartidista en Washington.

Duarte era tan dependiente de nosotros para mantenerse en el poder, que él no solamente escribió su autobiografía cuando todavía era presidente en el contexto de la guerra civil de su país, sino que la escribió y la publicó en inglés para que nosotros la leyéramos, en lugar de su propia gente.

Les tomó cinco años a los políticos de Estados Unidos para que finalmente se dieran cuenta de que Duarte, por todas sus promesas color rosa, había fracasado.

Pero ha tomado solamente un año para la mayoría de políticos el darse cuenta que los iraquíes seleccionados por Estados Unidos, están fracasando. El Pentágono ha favorecido a Ahmad Chalabi, mientras que el Departamento de Estado ha preferido a Adnan Pachachi. Ambos son exiliados que no sentaron sus pies en Irak por más de tres décadas, y tampoco nunca se han unido a algún distrito electoral dentro de Irak.

Pero cada uno de ellos se ve bien en papeles. Fluido en inglés, Chalabi estudió matemáticas antes de convertirse en banquero, y él se describe a sí mismo no en términos religiosos sino como un secular Shia Iraki. Pachachi, quien tiene mejores enlaces en el mundo árabe, es un antiguo diplomático quien una vez representó a Irak en Nueva York, en las Naciones Unidas. Chalabi y su familia estuvieron cerca de la “Iraq’s old British-imposed monarchy”(La pasada monarquía inglesa impuesta sobre Irak), mientras que Pachachi sirvió para “Iraq’s pre-Baathist military regimes”( Los regímenes militares antes de la fundación del partido Baath ). Cuando los diferentes oficiales de la actual administración buscaron sobre el colorido pero confuso paisaje sectario de Irak, estos dos hombres sobresalieron.

Una razón por la que Chalabi se encontró favorito por tanto tiempo es que él, en particular, siempre nos dijo que “sí”. “Yes”, los iraquíes van a alzarse cuando tú invadas, a pesar de que Estados Unidos los traicionó la última vez que ellos se alzaron contra Saddam durante la primer guerra del Golfo Pérsico (el libro de Bob Woodward “Plan de ataque”, reporta que el vicepresidente Dick Cheney no supo hasta después de la invasión que “el trauma” entre Shias iraquíes por esa “traición”, todavía era muy grave). “Yes”, tú podrías explotar el petróleo iraquí por medio de un tratado de dulce corazón con Halliburton, aunque solo unos cuantos iraquíes se beneficien de ello.

“Yes,” Chalabi argumentó, tú podrías usarme para dar forma a un gobierno de tu conveniencia, incluso si los iraquíes no lo eligen. Oh, y no te preocupes acerca de todas esas tensiones religiosas y étnicas, conmigo a cargo, juntos vamos a transcenderlas.

La más grande ficción que Chalabi difundió fue la misma que Duarte, que llevar la democracia a su país era sinónimo de ponerlo a él en el poder. Esta es la gran mentira que la Casa Blanca podría haberse tragado. El mes pasado en Washington, el presidente George W. Bush dijo a los editores de periódicos que él todavía planea llevar la democracia a Irak. Pero lo que Bush todavía no puede entender es que algunas elecciones democráticas no son como para conducir a algún gobierno que él tiene en mente, o elegir a algún líder que él conoce.

Cada uno debería saber por ahora que el futuro de Irak podría bien manejarse sobre la palabra, o vida, de un clerigo de 74 años de edad de la fe Shia Musulmán, Ali Sistani, quien viste un turbante negro calificándolo como un descendiente del profeta Mohammed. Pero solo después de la invasión el año pasado, parecieron los políticos entender que posiblemente pueden necesitar el apoyo de iraquíes no tan familiares de nosotros como este gran “ayatollah”.

Pero, por el contrario, los oficiales administrativos seleccionaron a diferentes iraquíes con los que se sentían más cómodos, y ahora soldados estadounidenses junto a civiles iraquíes están muriendo por sus errores.

Para una nación con tantos enemigos como los que Estados Unidos tiene ahora, nosotros necesitamos más aliados y menos títeres alrededor del mundo.

Frank Smyth es un periodista independiente que está escribiendo un libro sobre los levantamientos de 1991 contra Saddam Hussein. Traducción al español por Catalina Barrera.

Waiting for the Anti-Saddam Revolt: Where Is It?

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Why aren’t more Iraqis rising up against President Saddam Hussein? Most likely, many remember what happened the last time they followed U.S. instructions to rise up against him. As the Gulf War was concluding, then-President George H. W. Bush urged Iraqis “to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Two weeks later, so many Iraqis, in fact, heeded those words to fight their own government that the CIA predicted it would fall.

“Saddam Hussein faces his most serious political challenge in more than 20 years in power,” writes the CIA on March 16, 1991, in a secret report in the middle of the monthlong uprisings. “Time is not on his side.”

The revolt began on February 28, 1991, in Iraq’s southernmost city of Basra when a tank commander in a column of Iraqi troops retreating from previously U.S.-occupied Kuwait pulled away to stop in Sa’ad Square, near Basra’s ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters. In a scene that Pentagon planners now dream would repeat itself, the commander got out of his tank and denounced Saddam before he got back in and blew apart a building-size mural of his image.

The fighting spread to Basra’s old city before it reached the neighborhood of Jamoriya, where an Iraqi army private, Mohammad Honan, lived. He said Ba’ath Party paramilitaries were out in the streets.

“We all heard shooting coming from downtown,” Honan told me at the time. “‘It’s a revolution!’ someone shouted. They were demonstrating — shouting, shooting,” added Honan, who joined the anti-Saddam revolt.

Thousands of regular army soldiers, mostly Shiah Arabs, joined the civilians who overran the Ba’ath Party headquarters and emptied the city’s prisons. Within days the intifada, as countless Iraqis called the uprisings at the time, spread north along the Euphrates River engulfing first Nasiriyah and then Samawah before reaching the two holy Shiah cities of Najaf and Karbala, only 50 miles south of Baghdad. (These are the very same battlegrounds of the current conflict).

So far only the Kurdish part of the 1991 uprisings has ever gotten much press, but “the Shiah uprising in the south was far more dangerous to the regime than the Kurdish insurgency in the north,” reads one contemporaneous, formerly classified State Department cable. Across Iraq, 14 of 17 cities were at least partly under anti-Saddam rebel control during the four-week-long uprisings, including every Shiah-dominated city in the south and every Kurdish-dominated city in the north.

The ’91 uprising even flared in Baghdad itself. A secret State Department report issued on March 24, 1991, said: “Discontent was not limited to the insurgencies in the north and south . . . three neighborhoods in Baghdad (one of them named ‘Saddam’) had been sealed off by the military for several days due to anti-regime activities.”

But just as the anti-Saddam intifada was getting under way, U.S. and Iraqi military officers were negotiating the cease-fire accord that formally ended the 1991 Gulf War.

After the first draft of the cease-fire accord, which restricted the flight of Iraqi “fixed-wing” aircraft, had already been printed, Saddam’s generals said they wanted to add a new point: that Iraq be allowed to fly helicopter gunships. Saddam’s generals told the American negotiators that Iraq still needed the helicopters for two reasons: to ferry themselves to the ongoing peace talks, and in order to transport Iraq’s own wounded soldiers.

By the time the uprisings were drowned in blood, the world knew the real intentions of Saddam’s regime were to use the helicopters to massacre the rebels in the north after hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians fled Iraq into neighboring Turkey or Iran in early April 1991. But until then, U.S. officials repeatedly told reporters that they did not know much about the fighting inside Iraq.

Turns out the Americans were also lying. Senior U.S. officials knew just 12 days into the monthlong uprisings that Saddam’s regime was already using his helicopters in violation of at least the spirit of the cease-fire accord. “Throughout Iraq, the military is relying on helicopters to battle the insurgents, often firing indiscriminately on civilian targets in areas of resistance activity,” reads a secret morning briefing paper prepared by the State Department for then-Secretary of State James W. Baker II on March 12, 1991. But the U.S. stood idly by and let the suffocation of the anti-Saddam revolt continue.

I experienced that betrayal at ground level. I can recall one of those days exactly 12 years ago in Kirkuk, the oil-rich northern Iraqi city that remains as coveted today as it was back then. Although Kurdish pesh merga, or “those who face death,” guerrillas managed to hold off Saddam?s elite forces for more than five hours on March 28, 1991, by midday Kirkuk was falling.

At a crossroads on the northern side of the city, thousands of people were walking fast on two roads out of town, as an occasional car, truck or bus packed with more people rushed by in the same direction. No one knew for how long they might be walking, and nearly everyone carried water. Many women wrapped in traditional Kurdish cloth were also carrying or leading children, many of whom were crying, in tow.

Fahdil was a thin, balding pesh merga who was an intelligence officer with the Kurdish wing of the Iraqi Communist Party. “Now it is time to leave Kirkuk,” he told a small group of journalists at the crossroads.

For hours that morning Saddam’s regime only deployed a handful of small helicopters, as pesh merga fired captured government anti-aircraft guns into the sky. But by noon the Soviet-made helicopter gunships suddenly appeared and spread out over the city. With multiple pods on each fixed wing, they fired exploding rockets. Soon everyone in sight began to run.

At the time, many Iraqis across the country were filled with hope. Several different pesh merga in northern Iraq in March 1991 told Western journalists about different Kurdish couples that had just given their newborns the first name “Bush.” But many Iraqi babies died of exposure just weeks later after their families went on the run. No wonder so few Iraqis are rising up alongside U.S.-led forces today.

Frank Smyth, who covered the 1991 Gulf War for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice, is writing a book on the 1991 uprisings.