THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
April 2004:
Week Two
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US intelligence contradicts Bush statements that Shi'ites rebelling in Iraq are a small number of extremists, saying that instead the Shi'ite uprisings are far more extensive and broad-based
- April 8: US intelligence officials contradict the position taken by the Bush administration on the Shi'ite uprisings in Iraq. While administration officials insist that the uprisings are the work of a fairly small and extremist group of Shi'ites who follow radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, intelligence officials say that the uprisings are far more extensive and broad-based. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Congress that they did not believe the United States was facing a broad-based Shiite insurgency. Administration officials have portrayed Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric who is wanted by American forces, as the catalyst of the rising violence within the Shiite community of Iraq. But intelligence officials now say that there is evidence that the insurgency goes beyond Sadr and his militia, and that a much larger number of Shi'ites have turned against the American-led occupation of Iraq, even if they are not all actively aiding the uprising. A year ago, many Shi'ites rejoiced at the American invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who had brutally repressed the Shi'ites for decades.
- But American intelligence officials now believe that hatred of the American occupation has spread rapidly among Shiites, and is now so large that Sadr and his forces represent just one element. American intelligence has not yet detected signs of coordination between the Sunni rebellion in Iraq's heartland and the Shiite insurgency. But US intelligence says that the Sunni rebellion also goes far beyond former Baathist government members. Sunni tribal leaders, particularly in Al Anbar Province, home to Ramadi, the provincial capital, and Fallujah, have turned against the United States and are helping to lead the Sunni rebellion, intelligence officials say. The result is that the United States is facing two broad-based insurgencies that are now on parallel tracks. The Bush administration has sought to portray the opposition much more narrowly. In the Sunni insurgency, the White House and the Pentagon have focused on the role of the former leaders of the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein's government, while in the Shi'ite rebellion they have focused almost exclusively on the role of Sadr. (Sadr consolidated his power among the young and disillusioned Shi'a of southern Iraq by subtly criticizing the choice of Grand Ayatollah Sistani to remain above the political fray without directly criticizing or confronting Sistani. His platform consists of a muscular reintroduction of Islamic law, nationalism, and opposition to the occupation, a platform that resonates with many young, poor, and disaffected Iraqis. The gap between the more peaceful followers of Sistani, and the more militant Sadr followers, continues to widen.)
- Rumsfeld dismisses the insurgency as nothing more than the work of "thugs, gangs and terrorists; Myers adds that "it's not a Shi'ite uprising. Sadr has a very small following." However, according to some experts on Iraq's Shi'ites, the uprising has spread to many Shi'ites who are not followers of Sadr. "There is a general mood of anti-Americanism among the people in the streets," says Ghassan al-Attiyah, executive director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy in Baghdad. "They identify with Sadr not because they believe in him but because they have their own grievances." While they share the broader anger in Iraq over the lack of jobs and security, many Shi'ites suspect that the handover of sovereignty to Iraqi politicians from the American occupying powers on June 30 will bypass their interests, says Attiyah. With his offensive, Sadr has "hijacked the political process," he says. As a result, more moderate Shi'ite clerics and politicians risk going against public opinion if they come out too strongly against the rebellious young cleric. Also hard to gauge is the relationship between Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Sadr. Ayatollah Sistani is an aging cleric venerated for his teachings, while Sadr is a youthful rabble-rouser, with little clerical standing. This week, Ayatollah Sistani issued a statement supporting Sadr's decision to act against the Americans, but emphasizing the need for a peaceful solution. In this, Sistani seemed to be marking out a position that allowed him to associate with the tide of Shi'ite popular feelings, while allowing Sadr, for whom he is said to harbor a personal contempt, to risk his militia, and his life, in a showdown with the Americans. Although anti-Americanism is hardly universal among Shiites, an anti-American mood has been building for months. At the Grand Mosque in Kufa, where Sadr took refuge as his militiamen were seizing control of the city, this deep vein of anti-Americanism feeds off every rumor. At night, as they torch gasoline-soaked tires to light checkpoints guarding the approaches to the mosque, the militiamen speak of America's planning to uproot Islam in Iraq, to steal its oil, to deny Shi'ites a voice in the country's future governance, even to bring back Saddam Hussein.
- In the Shi'ite-dominated areas of Iraq, some Pentagon officials and other government officials believe that Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shi'ite extremist group, is now playing a key role in the Shi'ite insurgency. The Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist group closely affiliated with Hezbollah, is also said by some officials to have established offices in Iraq, and that Iran is behind much of the violence. CIA officials disagree, however, and say they have not yet seen evidence that Hezbollah has joined forces with Iraqi Shi'ites. Some intelligence officials believe that the Pentagon has been eager to link Hezbollah to the violence in Iraq to link the Iranian regime more closely to anti-American terrorism. But CIA officials agree that Hezbollah has established a significant presence in postwar Iraq. The Lebanese-based organization sent in teams after the war, American intelligence officials believe. Hezbollah's presence inside Iraq is a source of concern since it is widely recognized by counterterrorist experts to have some of the most effective and dangerous terrorist operatives in the world. The United States has issued a $25 million reward for the capture of Imad Mugniyah, the longtime chief of foreign terrorist operations who is believed to have been behind a series of terrorist attacks against Americans in the 1980's, including the hostage-taking operations in Lebanon.
- More recently, Hezbollah has focused its terrorist activities on Israel, and, before the war in Iraq, is not believed to have launched a major terrorist attack against American interests since the bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996 killed 19 American military personnel. There were some clues to an Iranian presence in Kufa this week. Even as militiamen ferried food and medical supplies into the mosque this week in preparation for a siege, among the pilgrims to the sanctuary were Iranian men. Militiamen at the mosque said that at least some of the funds needed for extensive reconstruction work currently under way inside the sanctuary have come from Iran. There are close ties between the Shi'ite clerical establishments in the two countries. But whether the Iranian role extends beyond finance is hard to know. Some foreign Islamic fighters have been playing a role in Iraq, particularly in the Sunni rebellion, intelligence officials say. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian affiliated with the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group, is conducting terrorist operations in conjunction with the Sunni rebellion, intelligence officials believe. Zarqawi may have been behind some recent car bombings in Iraq, although American intelligence officials do not believe he is commanding any of the Sunni militia forces facing the United States military. The Sunni forces appear instead to be led by former Iraqi government members and local tribal leaders in Falluja and other cities in the Sunni heartland, intelligence officials say. Robert Baer, a former CIA official who worked covertly in Iraq in the mid-1990's, says that some of those Sunni tribal leaders were once opposed to Saddam Hussein, and years ago approached the CIA about working with it against Hussein. But now, many of those same tribal leaders have turned against the occupation. (New York Times/CommonDreams, Mark Etherington)
- April 8: Under assault by insurgents and unable to rely on US and coalition troops for intelligence or help under duress, private security firms in Iraq have begun to band together in the past 48 hours, organizing what may effectively be the largest private army of mercenaries in the world, with its own rescue teams and pooled, sensitive intelligence. The coordination between the mercenaries' organizations and the US military is handled by the CPA, and by all accounts is inadequate. "There is no formal arrangement for intelligence-sharing," says military spokeswoman Colonel Jill Morgenthaler. "However, ad hoc relationships are in place so that contractors can learn of dangerous areas or situations." Around 20,000 contractors, many of whom are former military veterans, are currently in Iraq, with that number expected to rise to 30,000 in the near future. The presence of so many armed security contractors in a hot combat zone is unprecedented in US history, according to government officials and industry experts. In the past, "we've been careful about where and when we arm civilians who accompany the troops because we don't want to inadvertently turn them into soldiers, even by what we have them wear," says Colonel Thomas McShane, an instructor at the Army War College. The US military does not have enough specially trained troops or Iraqi police officers to guard its civilian employees, say defense and CPA officials. As a result, the government has turned increasingly to private firms. Blackwater even provides personal security to US administrator Paul Bremer.
- The Bremer detail, said Peter Singer, a private military expert at the Brookings Institution, illustrates the extent to which the military is breaking new ground, even amending its long-held doctrine that the "US military does not turn over mission-critical functions to private contractors," according to Singer. "And you don't put contractors in positions where they need to carry weapons.... A private armed contractor now has the job of keeping Paul Bremer alive -- it can't get much more mission-critical than that." Some Defense Department officials are concerned that private commandos are not subject to adequate oversight. There is no government vetting of contract workers who carry weapons. "The CPA has let all kinds of contracts to all kinds of people," says one senior Defense Department official. "It's blindsided us." The CPA's program management office has sought bids for a project to coordinate security among the 10 largest prime contractors and their subcontractors working on US-backed reconstruction projects worth $18.4 billion. But the bids are still under review. In the meantime, the office is "trying to get at least some level of intelligence sanitized from the military that could be given to contractors," says Captain Bruce Cole, spokesman for the program management office in Baghdad. That has not happened yet. The firms, stunned by the casualties they suffered this week and by the lack of a military response, have begun banding together to share their own operations-center telephone numbers and tips on threats, as well as to organize ways to rescue one another in a crisis. "There is absolutely a growing cooperation along unofficial lines," Edmunds says. "We try to give each other warnings about things we hear are about to happen." "Each private firm amounts to an individual battalion," says one US government official familiar with the developments. "Now they are all coming together to build the largest security organization in the world." (Washington Post)
- April 8: Since the 9/11 attacks, a steady stream of counterterrorism officials have left the Bush administration in frustration with the Bush policies of anti-terrorism. Some also left because they felt Bush has sidelined his counterterrorism experts and paid almost exclusive heed to the vice president, the defense secretary and other Cabinet members in planning the "war on terror," former counterterrorism officials said. "I'm kind of hoping for regime change," says one official who quit. "Iraq has been a distraction from the whole counterterrorism effort," says the former official, adding the policy had frustrated many in the White House anti-terrorism office, about two-thirds of whom have left and been replaced since Sept. 11. Roger Cressey, who served under Clarke in the White House counterterrorism office, says, "Dick [Cheney] accurately reflects the frustration of many in the counterterrorism community in getting the new administration to take the al-Qaeda issue seriously." Cressey left the office in November 2001, when he became chief of staff of the White House's cybersecurity office until September 2002. The attrition among all levels of the Office for Combating Terrorism began shortly after the attacks and continued into this year. At least eight of twelve officials in the office have left and been replaced since 9/11. The office has been run by four different people since the attacks, and at least three have held the No. 2 slot. "There has been excessively high turnover in the Office for Combating Terrorism," says Flynt Leverett, who served on the White House National Security Council for about a year until March 2003 and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank. "If you take the [White House] counterterrorism and Middle East offices, you've got about a dozen people...who came to this administration wanting to work on these important issues and left after a year or often less because they just don't think that this administration is dealing seriously with the issues that matter," he says.
- Rand Beers, a former No. 2 in the office who quit last year over the administration's handling of the war on terrorism, says the turnover had been "unusually high" since the hijacked airliner attacks in New York and Washington. "And one of the reasons is frustration with the way counterterrorism policy has been conducted, including the focus on Iraq," said Beers, who now serves as a foreign policy adviser for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The White House denies there had been unusually high turnover, saying staff tended to be on limited assignments from other federal agencies. A senior administration official said it was "absolutely untrue" Iraq was diverting attention from overall counterterrorism efforts. Another official says it was wrong to link all the numerous departures to policy concerns over Iraq. Several current and former officials said burn out from job stress also contributed to high turnover in the office, as did frustration among some staff about the limits of their influence over policymaking in general. Many National Security Council staffers only stay 18 months to two years. One current counterterrorism official said while the Iraq campaign had been a "huge resource drain," this held true for all major events that compete for scarce resources. "There's a problem of too few counterterrorism staffers to begin with...and with the focus on any big issue like Iraq, it is a distraction from the overall counterterrorism effort," the official says. (Reuters/Axis of Logic)
- April 8: Arab experts in the Middle East worry that the escalating violence in Iraq means an increase in extremist terrorist threats, partly because the US's invasion of Iraq has created a new incubator for terrorism. There is an almost universal sense in the Arab world that Washington is paying the price for entering Iraq with no coherent plan beyond toppling Saddam Hussein, and that the anarchy they allowed to run unchecked in the first days of occupation a year ago has never really been tamed. "Iraq appears to be disintegrating, and the Iraqis are not better off today than they were before the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime," says Mohammed Kamal, a professor of political science at Cairo University. "The Americans don't have a plan on how to get out of this mess that they put themselves in." "The developments in Iraq in the last few days are alarming, and we fear that we are facing a civil war in Iraq, reminding me of what happened in Afghanistan and Lebanon," says the foreign minister of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. "We are worried about the cluster of resistance and terrorist organizations in Iraq, which has become a fertile ground for these people to implement their extremist ideology." Most Arab nations, especially those with close ties to the US, have decided to publicly say little or nothing about the Iraq situation, but privately these governments are increasingly worried and frustrated with the US actions in Iraq. Many commentators draw parallels between Israeli repression in the occupied territories and its failure to pacify the Palestinians after more than three decades, and US actions in Iraq. There have been frequent accusations that the Bush administration is mistakenly following the Israeli model. "I don't think the Americans can achieve what they want by force, and it is the same phenomenon in Israel," says Abdulwahab Badrakhan, a columnist at Al-Hayat newspaper, published in London. "The Americans made a mistake when they did not involve the Arabs in the situation."
- There is widespread concern that the violence will further inflame existing divisions in Iraq, which could easily provoke similar ethnic or religious schisms in neighboring states. "Freedom, democracy, the rule of law and other such promises have been transformed in the occupation's lexicon into violations, invasions, sieges, curfews, bombardments from Apache helicopters and the terrorization of a people," the daily Al Khaleej in the United Arab Emirates wrote in one editorial. Few expect any improvement. "Thank God that the American administration is too stupid to win the Iraqis over," says Montasser Zayat, an Islamist lawyer in Cairo. "On the contrary, they create feelings of frustration and commit more mistakes, leading more Iraqis to rise against them." There have been few demonstrations in the Arab world, which some analysts took as a sign of general satisfaction that Washington is in trouble and the resistance succeeding. Among the Arab world's majority Sunni Muslim population, there is less of an emotional connection with the Iraqi Shi'ites, who are generally seen as an extension of Iran, analysts say. Also, the fiery young cleric who is leading the Shi'ite uprising, Moqtada al-Sadr, is an unknown quantity. The exception is the Shi'ite communities in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, which evidently pay close attention to their brethren in Iraq. The top Shi'ite cleric in Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, once the Americans' nemesis there, condemned the "horrible massacres" by the United States in Iraq, saying they proved that Washington is lying when it says its goal is bringing freedom. At the same time, he called for self-restraint by Iraqis. In Tehran, an editorial in the English-language Tehran Times, often used to send messages abroad, said the United States should be working more closely with moderate clerics to defuse the situation. The wider Shi'ite populations worry that Sadr and his followers, who have little support outside Iraq, will divide the community and wreck the Shi'ite's historic opportunity to gain a dominant role. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who enjoys wide respect outside Iraq, has been biding his time, figuring that a democratic system will gain the Shi'ites effective control, given their majority status. (New York Times/Iran And World)
- April 8: Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal wishes that the 9/11 commission could ask Condoleezza Rice questions about issues other than the terror attacks, because Rice should be answerable for far more than her poor performance before and after the attacks. "her negligence and incompetence encompasses the entirety of the Bush foreign policy," Blumenthal writes. Rice is at the center of the Bush administration's "destruction" of the Middle East peace process. Blumenthal writes, "In January 2002, Rice launched a serious effort to restart the Middle East peace process. She hired Flynt Leverett, a foreign service officer on the policy planning staff of the state department, as director of the initiative. Rice told him she understood that the absence of a peace process was hurting the war on terrorism and that Leverett should propose any measures he thought necessary, regardless of political controversy. Leverett developed a plan dealing with security, Palestinian political reform and Jerusalem. Its core was essentially the same as President Clinton's ultimate proposal. Rice rejected it as politically untenable for Bush, who would have been forced to confront Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to enact it. On April 4 [2002], Bush delivered a speech calling for a 'two state' solution, but without any details, and sent his secretary of state, Colin Powell, to the region. Leverett travelled with him. Powell gained agreement for the basic outline of the original plan. But just as he was to announce his breakthrough, Rice intervened, instructing him that he could not discuss any political process and that the whole burden of accountability must be put on the Palestinians and none on the Israelis. Rice had crumbled in the face of internal political opposition from the neoconservative armada. 'The neocons in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, plus Karl Rove's political shop, prevailed,' Leverett told me.
- "Undeterred, Leverett turned to work on what became known as 'the road map.' On July 31, the Jordanian foreign minister, Marwan Muasher, met Rice to urge support for it. 'Condi says, no. All you get is a speech, no plan,' said Leverett. The next day King Abdullah came to see the president, bringing his foreign minister with him. 'Condi had told the president nothing of her conversation,' said Leverett, who was present. Bush instantly said of Abdullah's proposal: 'Good idea, let's see what we can do on that.' Leverett said, 'That was the origin of the road map.' By November, the road map was ready to be publicly released. But Sharon opposed it, claiming that proposing it would interfere with the upcoming Israeli election. Leverett argued to Rice: 'We had promised to put it out. If we pull it now we reverse a commitment and would be intervening in Israeli politics in another way. That argument was not appreciated by Condi. So they didn't put out the road map.' It was only under pressure from Tony Blair, as a precondition to his alliance on the eve of the Iraq invasion, that Bush announced the road map on March 14 2003. In June, Bush attended two summits on the road map, in Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheik, where he expressed commitment. He turned the project over to Rice, who never presented him with a plan of how to achieve it. 'He said that Condi would ride herd on this process. She never even saddled up,' said Leverett. Six months earlier, Rice had appointed neoconservative Elliott Abrams as her Middle East coordinator on the national security council, and he threw up obstacles to prevent the road map from going forward. Bush, for his part, never followed up on his own rhetoric and was utterly absent from the policy making. So Leverett decided he must quit: 'I didn't want to stick around for a charade.'"
- Rice was similarly lax on the issue of combating terrorism. Blumenthal writes, "On terrorism, Rice insists Bush wanted a strategy rather than to be 'swatting flies.' But the strategy that lay on her desk unimplemented on September 11 was virtually the same as the one presented to her by the NSC counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, on January 25, 2001. On that fateful September 11, Rice was to deliver a speech on the administration priorities that stressed missile defence and not terrorism. Now, she will not release the full text of that speech. The story of the Middle East debacle, like that of the pre-9/11 terrorism fiasco, reveals the inner workings of Bush's White House: the president -- aggressive and manipulated, ignorant of his own policies and their consequences, negligent; the secretary of state -- proud, instinctively subordinate, constantly in retreat; the vice-president -- as Richelieu, conniving, at the head of a neoconservative cabal, the power behind the throne; the national security adviser -- seemingly open, even vulnerable, posing as the honest broker, but deceitful and derelict, an underhanded lightweight." (Guardian)
- April 8: Once a favorite target for media pundits and Republican attackers, Bill Clinton's credibility in the US and abroad is soaring in comparison with his successor, George W. Bush, and his record of failure in both domestic and foreign arenas. Clinton's reputation as an aggressive president who battled terror is eclipsing Bush, who is looking more and more like a president who put his own interests ahead of his country's while pretending to be a "war president" determined to protect the US. On the African AIDS crisis, Bush's policies appear to have failed, while Clinton's charitable efforts have been effective. On the campaign trail, Clinton is threatening to overshadow Senator John Kerry, the official Democratic candidate. "I would say that Clinton is no longer the lightning rod he once was; memories have faded and feelings about him aren't as strong, so he's begun to appear all over the place," says Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. The current firestorm of controversy over the Bush administration's stonewalling of information and testimony needed by the 9/11 commission has also made Clinton look much better in hindsight. In contrast to the Bush policies of failure and personal attacks, Clinton established a commission on national security and ordered it to report to Bush's incoming administration that Americans would "become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland [and] likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers," advice that Bush ignored. The report also suggested a homeland security agency, a recommendation that the new administration also ignored until after Sept. 11.
- While Condoleezza Rice will have to defend her administration's policies in testimony to the 9/11 commission today, she will have to spend a good part of her time comparing her failures against terrorism to the policies of Clinton, who took military action against Osama bin Laden and made frequent speeches about the terrorist threat. Indeed, Clinton is emerging from the shadows to take a number of initiatives that make him look surprisingly successful compared to Bush's failures. This week, Clinton's charitable organization negotiated a deal for AIDS drugs to be provided to poor African and Caribbean countries at half their usual cost, a significant victory that was achieved while Bush's $15-billion African AIDS-fighting initiative is stalled in Congress with little of its promised money spent. "The historic Clinton Foundation drug-pricing and distribution deal is a powerful slap to Bush's arrogant attempts to limit the use of generic AIDS medicines to suit the whims of his pharmaceutical backers," says Paul Davis of the advocacy group Health GAP. Clinton's newfound credibility is becoming a factor on the campaign trail, where he has become a chief campaigner for Kerry. Yesterday, during a major speech at Washington's Georgetown University, Kerry mentioned Clinton favourably four times, an act that would have been unthinkable four years ago, when Al Gore went out of his way to avoid mentioning his former running mate. Now that the name Clinton is associated with better policies and economics instead of being synonymous with sex scandal, Kerry plans to use the former president aggressively against Bush. In fact, campaign workers say their main worry is that Clinton's celebrity will overshadow Kerry's own presence. (Toronto Globe and Mail)
