Muqtada al Sadr got a step closer to taking power in Iraq this past week.
Nouri al-Maliki gambled everything, including his own reputation, in personally leading the Iraq army’s assault to clear Basra, promising a “decisive and final battle,” only to see his numerical and firepower superiority go up in smoke as Iraqi soldiers were repeatedly mauled and ground down by Sadr’s irregulars, the Mahdi Army.
The balance of power has shifted. A number of factors have come into play. One is that Sadr’s forces have shown they can and will resist the government forces, even in the face of American air support. The Mahdi Army has shown that Sadr cannot be eliminated militarily. Baghdad is going to have to accommodate him. The fighting showed that the success of the “surge” was more Sadr’s doing than that of Bush or Petraeus. Maliki, already seen as politically weak, has now shown himself as militarily weak also.
This wasn’t just between rival Shia factions. The Sunni were watching closely, so were the Kurds. Now they’ve seen just what they can expect to be up against if they get into a shooting match with Baghdad and, if anything, they’re bound to be (to use Bush’s favourite word) “emboldened.” Maliki may have just scuppered any hopes Maliki and Bush had of meaningful compromises to forge a united Iraq.
So Maliki lost this opening game but there are several more to be played. Iraq has provincial elections coming up in October and then there’s the World Series in Washington in November. Every group in Iraq must be planning how they’ll be spending the long, hot summer that’s just around the corner.
Sadr acted brilliantly in calling off his militias when he did. They had already achieved their political objectives and engaging in a war of attritition at this point could have left the Mahdi Army too weak to exploit whatever opportunities may come along over the next six months.
What must be running through Maliki’s mind? Possibly visions of the end.
Along comes the news – surprise, surprise – that utterly disgraced RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardeli intervened to slap Ralph Goodale’s name right on a pivotal press release that may well have handed Stevie Harper a ticket to 24 Sussex Drive.
Now according to RCMP Complaints Commissioner/smokescreen Paul Kennedy, there was no evidence that Zaccardelli’s intervention was politically motivated. Mr. Kennedy, of course, is the man least able to find evidence of anything untoward in any complaint against the RCMP.
“I have found that Commissioner Zaccardelli made the final decision to issue the letter and news release, and he likely also provided the impetus and direction for the production of those documents. There is no evidence that Commissioner Zaccardelli relied on any improper considerations in coming to his decisions.”
No evidence at all, none whatsoever. I mean, just because Zaccardelli plastered Goodale’s name on the press release and then released it, by fax, not to the press but first to an opposition MP, that’s not evidence of anything improper, is it?
Of course the most telling point of the Kennedy absolution is found in this line from the Globe & Mail:
“Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Zaccardelli and several senior members of the RCMP policy centre, which was responsible for the conduct and communication of the income-trust investigation, refused to provide him with any information about the disclosure.”
Oh, now I get it. There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing because all those who would have any knowledge of it refused to talk to the guy who then blithely exonerated them.
After standing on his head to the delight of bystanders, Kennedy went on to do the splits, adding that the RCMP has no policy on notifying complainants when an investigation is initiated into a complaint. “Clearly if you have no policy you can’t break policy,” he said.
There you go, classic Kennedy. What a waste of skin.
Al Gore may be the most influential politico not to be running in the 2008 US presidential election.
Gore plans to hold the candidates’ feet to the fire over global warming. On this evening’s 60 Minutes, Gore unveiled a $300-million initiative to force climate change to the top of the candidates’ debates.
“The first television advertisements, which are to begin airing on broadcast networks as well as cable starting on Wednesday, will pair up the most unlikely partners in the movement to address global warming.
A clip aired on CBS showed the Reverend Al Sharpton sharing a sofa with the conservative preacher Pat Robertson. The two men acknowledge they agree on almost nothing – barring the need to deal with global warming.
Other spots will feature the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, alongside New Gingrich, the conservative Republican who once held the same post.
The support from such conservative figures as Gingrich and Robertson marks a victory for Gore in his efforts to make global warming a cause for all Americans: evangelical Christians and fiscal conservatives as well as those on the left.”
It’s a smart move at just the right time. Neither Clinton nor Obama can afford not to heed the campaign. It could easily resolve the contest against either of them should they choose to ignore it. However embracing the message will mean presenting some clear and specific policies against which John McCain will be measured.
If, as I suspect, Iraq is in for a dangerous and violent summer, the “surge factor” that McCain has been relying on may present him with a big liability. He too cannot afford to shun a bi-partisan environmental campaign of the sort crafted by Gore.
Zimbabwe’s opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, claims a landslide victory over Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF in yesterday’s general election.
‘We’ve won this election,’ said Tendai Biti, the MDC’s secretary-general. ‘The results coming in show that in our traditional strongholds we are massacring them. In Mugabe’s traditional strongholds they are doing very badly. There is no way Mugabe can claim victory unless it is through fraud. He has lost this election.’
Is this the beginning of the end to Zimbabwe’s nightmare, the end of Mugabe’s 28-year reign? Don’t count on it. The official results haven’t yet been announced and it’s hard to imagine Mugabe wouldn’t rig an unfavourable outcome to claim victory. That’s especially true given that Zimbabwe’s army and police leaders have announced they won’t tolerate an MDC win.
Mugabe, corrupt and incompetent as any leader can be, has been clever enough to ensure the leadership of his country’s military and security services are utterly beholden to him. Who needs to worry about the people so long as you have the absolute loyalty of all the guns?
Nouri al-Maliki may just have transformed a troublesome militia into Iraq’s own Viet Cong. It’s the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al Sadr, an outfit that’s making effective use of the most potent guerrilla tactics to grind down the numerically and technologically dominant Iraq Army.
Whereas the Viet Cong used the jungles, waterways, backroads and even networks of tunnels to wage their war against the South Vietnamese and American forces, the Mahdi Army operates in its own jungle, the congested slums of Iraq’s key cities and their intricate mazes of alleys where tanks can’t reach and fighting is one-on-one.
James Glanz wrote a brilliant article in yesterday’s New York Times in which he explains why this latest war, pitting Shiite against Shiite, is different and may just be the undoing of the Maliki government. This isn’t about resisting the occupiers. It’s about dethroning the Baghdad government and, in this fight, time is not on Maliki’s side.
Glanz writes that this battle, this war, bears an eerie resemblance to a recurring dream he developed in his four years covering Iraq:
“Here is what happens in the dream: Because I know a little Arabic, I somehow find myself a translator for the invaders, even as some of my Chicago buddies are in the alleys plotting against my employers. And each night when I walk home along my beloved Dearborn Street under the rusty elevated tracks and past the White Hen grocery store, I wonder what the guys poring over maps in their armored vehicles plan to accomplish against a few million South Siders fighting in their own alleys. That’s usually when I wake up.
That dream, a nightmare, really, flashed through my mind as I stood at the end of a filthy, pothole-riddled alley talking with a small-time deputy commander in the Mahdi Army, the militia that is the armed wing of Mr. Sadr’s political movement. Standing there with his arms folded over his potbelly as his fighters scurried about behind him, the man who called himself Riadh, 34 years old, was effectively deputy commander of an alley.
“We can’t face the armored tanks of the Americans face to face, because all we have is light guns,” he said. “So we just wait for a chance to attack something.”
Alleys: they are dangerous only when used by those who grew up in them. That is the basic reason Mr. Sadr and his fighters simply will not go away in this war.
What makes the case so difficult is that it is not just a question of a battle with American troops, here from half a world away carrying out operations that Mr. Sadr and his fighters consider an abhorrent occupation. Some 3,500 troops in the Basra fight are Iraqis from outside the province, and witnesses say it is clear that few if any of the Iraqi security forces in the assault know the neighborhoods the way the Mahdi Army does. Its fighters literally pop in and out of alleys, battling a federal force of nearly 30,000 to what is, so far, a stalemate.
No one has ever accused Mr. Sadr of being brilliant, charismatic, or even above average in the intellectual realm. But he has one thing few of those leaders have: he never left, even in the worst years of Saddam Hussein. And that does not just give him credibility on the streets. In a country where sheer social, religious, political, historical, geographic and psychological complexities are what seem to defeat all easy solutions, Mr. Sadr is one of the few who have been here continuously, absorbing the shifting lessons of the place. He has done his homework, he has put in his time.
As I sit here writing this piece, listening to the intermittent whooshes and booms of rockets and mortars fired into the Green Zone, almost certainly by Mr. Sadr’s fighters, I can no more predict where the conflict is headed than I can say what will be in my dreams tonight during the few hours of sleep that this war and my editors allow me. But when it comes to Mr. Sadr’s loyalists in the alleys of Basra and Baghdad, one thing is irrefutable.
In those alleys, waking up will not end the dream.”
Glanz has filed a piece in today’s NYT, in which he reports that the Mahdi Army has consolidated control of at least half and, by some accounts, possibly much more of Basra, taking over police stations and establishing roadblocks.
Maliki’s weakening has been dramatic. From beginning with a “surrender or die” edict, he switched to a 72-hour amnesty for surrender and then extending that by a further week and offering to pay rewards for those who turn in their guns. That doesn’t sound like a guy who figures he’s winning this battle. It sounds like someone who is very worried about his own ability to survive the conflict.
Okay, so Hillary just makes it up as she goes along. Not so for John McCain. That’s why his stumble when he linked the fundamentalist Sunni, al-Qaeda in Iraq with the fundamentalist Shia government of Iran seemed so perplexing.
So just what happened? It sounds as though the Republican presidential candidate can’t tell a Sunni from Shiite and yet I find that hard to believe. McCain is probably neck and neck with Murtha for the Politician Most Invested in Iraq prize.
What really got me thinking was when I heard an American journalist ponder whether McCain had simply had a “senior moment.” Life takes us all and it’s a bitch. That said if Iraq is John McCain’s Viagra, let’s make damned sure he still has all his marbles. No “senior moments” for the Commander in Chief of the Free World, rien?
What’s this woman doing? Whatever it is, she’s doing it in a really nasty, ill-lit and unhygenic looking spot.
You can thank the New York Times for that photo. It shows a Chinese woman processing pig intestines, the mucus membranes from which are used to make the blood thinner Heparin. Hmmm, is squalor what you think of when pharmaceuticals come to mind?
“After many near misses and warning signs, the heparin scare has eliminated any doubt that, here and abroad, regulatory agencies overseeing the safety of medicine are overwhelmed in a global economy where supply chains are long and opaque, and often involve many manufacturers.
“In the 1990s governments were all about trying to maximize the volume of international trade,” said Moisés Naím, editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and author of “Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy.” “I’m all for that, but I believe this decade is going to be about maximizing the quality of that trade, not quantity.”
Mr. Naím said the heparin scare is already having a “huge” impact, fueling worldwide anxiety over imported medicine and a growing demand for consumer protection.
The way heparin is made and distributed illustrates the challenges. The drug’s raw material comes from mucous membranes in the intestines of slaughtered pigs. Those membranes are mixed together and cooked, a process that in China often takes place in unregulated family workshops.
It is then transported to middlemen, called consolidators, who direct the product to plants in China that manufacture heparin’s active ingredient for shipment to either another trader or the finished dose manufacturer. In the United States, the tainted ingredients ended up at Baxter International, which later had to recall the blood thinner.
Since the outbreak in the United States, Japan and several countries in Europe have recalled certain heparin products made with Chinese ingredients. In some instances, European traders buy and sell the heparin to companies in other countries, extending the supply chain even more.
Anti-counterfeiting experts say that the longer the chain, the greater the opportunity for counterfeiters to adulterate the product. In fact, F.D.A. investigators have yet to figure out where in the multistage manufacturing process the chemical that mimics heparin was added.”
First it was lethal pet food, then toxic toothpaste, lead painted toys, now it’s blood thinners. C’mon people, something has to give. We either deal with this properly – now – or, I swear, we will lose control of this problem.
What makes this clip so good is there stands Hillary amidst an adoring crowd and she’s beaming at them and lying right to their faces. The only thing she didn’t say was, “I did not have sexual relations with that sniper.” It makes you wonder, is this the vaunted “experience” advantage Hillary claims entitles her to the Democratic nomination?
By the way, when that hotline phone rings at 3 a.m., I hope the person who picks it up isn’t under any delusions about being under sniper fire.
Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman has been released from prison where he was serving time for supposed bribery. A Federal Appeals Court ordered his release saying there were legitimate questions about the case.
The Siegelman case has become widely celebrated as an example of Republican abuse of justice in Alabama. When 60 Minutes recently aired an expose on Siegelman, the network’s affiliate in northern Alabama went off the air, claiming it had experienced a technical failure with the network.
Karl Rove has been linked to the effort to railroad Siegelman.
The Mound of Sound 