] A violent power struggle has broken out among the
] Shi'i leadership in Iraq, centred around the holy
] city of Najaf.
]
] In the latest instance, armed radical groups have
] surrounded the house of Iraq's top Shi'i Muslim cleric
] Ayotollah Ali Sistani in the holy city of Najaf, giving
] him 48 hours to leave the country.
]
] "Armed thugs and hooligans have had the house of
] Ayatollah Sistani under siege since Saturday. They have
] told him to either leave Iraq in 48 hours or they would
] attack," a senior cleric, Kuwait-based Ayatollah
] Abulqasim Dibaji said.
 . . .
] "This is the biggest catastrophe. Total terror reigns in
] Najaf," said Dibaji. "Najaf is a main centre of learning,
] like Oxford in England. It has more than 1,000 years of
] history."
]
] Dibaji said the house was surrounded by members of
] Jimaat-e-Sadr-Thani, a splinter group led by Moqtada Sadr,
] the 22-year-old son of a late spiritual leader in Iraq.
]
] "Moqtada wants to take total control of the holy sites in
] Iraq," Dibaji said. Senior Shi'i leaders have blamed
] Jimaat-e-Sadr-Thani for orchestrating Thursday's killing
] of Khoei, who was assassinated at the Imam Ali shrine just
] days after returning from exile in London to help Iraq make
] the transition to democracy.

I have been looking hard for some sort of visual chart that shows the relationships between the various Shi'ite groups and Ayatollahs and clerics, but haven't had any luck. If anyone else spots one, please meme it?

Al Jazeera - Top Shia cleric told to leave by armed group

] There will be no new target because Iraq was a unique
] case. Although most regional regimes have varying records
] of brutality, Saddam Hussein's regime was the only
] regime that tried to wipe a member state of the United
] Nations off the map. It was also the only regime since
] World War I to use chemical weapons not only against
] adversaries in a war but also against its own people.
]
] The key reason why Saddam's regime was unique, however,
] lies elsewhere.
]
] His was a regime that could not develop any mechanism for
] change. He could play in only two registers: absolute
] defiance or full capitulation.

Interesting editorial in Arab News by Amir Taheri.

ArabNews: Who's Next? No One and Everyone

] As a gesture of reconciliation, he arrived with Haider
] al-Kadar, the man who had previously held the
] responsibility for the shrine. Mr al-Kadar is widely
] disliked in Najaf because of his connection to Saddam
] Hussein's Ministry of Religion.
]
] "Mr al-Khoei's appearance with such as reviled figure
] appears to have inflamed one of the factions loyal to a
] different mullah, Mohammed Braga al-Saddar, which appears
] to have led to his death

Majid al-Khoei Stabbed to Death

jfeil wrote:
] Elonka wrote:
] ] ] U.S. officials have pointed to Khazraji, widely respected
] ] ] among the Iraqi armed forces for his role in the
] ] ] Iran-Iraq war, as a candidate for a leadership position
] ] ] in an Iraq without Saddam.
] ]
] ] The ex-Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army (1987-1990) goes for a
] ] walk near his current home in Denmark, and disappears. Was he
] ] kidnapped (or worse) by Iraqi Intelligence? Did he flee the
] ] country from fear of a war crimes trial, or did something else
] ] happen? Stay tuned...
]
] It looks like this guy might have been spirited away by the
] CIA and killed in Iraq along with the Shiite cleric. From Arab
] News
]
] http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=25014
]

This is starting to sound like the plot of a Clancy novel! Slate MSN says something similar about the Denmark disappearance, that Khazraji may have been spirited out of Denmark by the CIA, so that they could offer him as an alternative to Chalabi, who they very much dislike:

 http://slate.msn.com/id/2081329/

More background on Chalabi and various entities' dislike of him here:
 http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid6142/

If Khazraji was indeed killed along with the Grand Shiite Ayatollah's son al-Khoei, then it makes the story kind of moot, but the reports that I've been hearing are that the two people killed today were instead al-Khoei and al-Kadar. I haven't been able to quite make sense yet about why both these guys were killed, since they seem to have been on opposite sides of the figurative fence: Khoei was anti-Saddam and had been living in exile for years, while Kadar was pro-Saddam and much hated because of his association with Saddam's "Ministry of Religion." They were also both Shiite, and seem to have been attacked by other Shiites, so if anything, this seems to underscore the bitter divisions within the Iraqi Shiite community.

Getting back to Khazraji's status though, while I was surfing the news streams on this, I did see a *lot* of reports that Khazraji has been seen in the Kuwait/Iraq region, so the assassinations do indeed bring more attention to his own story: How did he get out of Denmark? Was the CIA involved, as a couple reports suggest? And is Khazraji going to be presented as a potential leader in the new Iraqi government?

The plot thickens . . .

RE: Top Iraqi defector disappears

BBC Field reporter about the US Flag that was temporarily placed on the face of the Saddam statue yesterday:

] We've just learned from the US marines that the US flag
] that was put on the face of Saddam yesterday - it was
] replaced by an Iraqi flag when the people shouted for
] that - was the flag that was flying over the Pentagon on
] September 11.
]
] For a lot of the American marines, they think this war is
] all about defeating terrorism, they will tell you that
] over and over again. There is also a connection in the
] minds of the American public between the regime of Saddam
] and what happened on September 11, and apparently the
] flag that was draped over this face was flying over the
] pentagon when the plane crashed into it.

Note: I haven't been able to find any confirmation of this story aside from the BBC report.

Update: ABCNews is confirming this, in an interview with the soldier who put the flag up, Corporal Chin from New York:
"And the flag — it was on the Pentagon when it got hit on 9/11. That was the same flag, and me being from New York, it kind of all goes together a little bit. It was a team effort, which made it even better, you know," he said.

ABCNews article here:

 http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/Primetime/Iraq030410USFlagStatue.html

Further update: Other news agencies are confirming that it was Marine Corporal Chin up there, but are not mentioning the origin of the flag.

(unconfirmed) US Flag on Saddam statue was the one that was flying over the Pentagon on September 11th

Okay, here's my rant.

Last night, while doing my regular scanning of the news networks for info on the latest in Iraq, I tuned in to Fox News for awhile, and then found myself getting steadily more and more angry at their flippant attitude.

They were bouncing in and out of different stories, one of which was from one of their embedded reporters, a guy named Kelly, who was reporting from one of Saddam's Palaces in Baghdad. They were laughing and calling it "Kelly's Palace," making fun of the tennis courts, and one of the anchors even said something to the effect of, "I bet Saddam is watching this right now. Hey Saddam, we've got a tank on your front lawn!"

They were treating their news coverage like some kind of "morning drive-time" chatter, and it was *so* belittling of other nationalities' viewpoints, I was appalled.

I've been steaming ever since last night, trying to figure out how to communicate to those nitwits just how damaging their attitudes and comments could be, and this is what I came up with.

Try, just for the mental exercise of it, to turn things around and look at it from a different perspective. A lot of people, I think, are bewildered at the anger that the Arab people have for the American invasion of Iraq, so here's a different way of looking at it:

Imagine, in some sort of alternate twist of fate, that Al Qaeda or the Taliban had managed to take over some territory on our own shores. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that they had infiltrated and taken over Texas (yeah yeah I know, some people wouldn't mind losing Texas). But, let’s say that for some reason our own military had not been effective in removing them, and that we in the rest of the country had watched with rage as all kinds of atrocities were committed in territory that we regarded as our own. Atrocities that were being committed against Americans -- people that we might not necessarily agree with all the time, but who we strongly identified with.

Further, imagine that other countries (say, France and Mexico), who for some reason had a better military might and the willpower to deal with the problem, decided that they were going to come in and fix things for us. To "liberate Texas" for us. So they massed French and Mexican troops around Texas, and moved in. The fighting was intense, many Taliban died, and many Americans died in the crossfire. Some Americans who liked it better under the Taliban fought bitterly against the French & Mexican "invaders," and those were the ones that really tore our hearts up -- on the one hand, we wanted to see the land liberated. On the other, we hated the thought of fellow Americans being killed by foreigners. Plus there was also a sense of, "As Americans, we're good fighters. Surely we can fight off somebody like the French!" Many of the Americans in Texas though chose not to fight, and would hide in their homes, hoping that the fighting woul... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

] With the burgeoning Sars epidemic spreading fear among
] travellers worldwide, the Hong Kong tourist board must be
] ruing the day it commissioned a series of magazine ads
] telling readers a visit to the city will "take your
] breath away".

Hong Kong in hot flush over ad blunder

] The colonel in charge of the tank that fired said they
] had reacted after seeing enemy "binoculars" being used in
] the hotel.

Decius replied:
I didn't really think that was realistic until I saw the pentagon press conference yesterday, which I felt was rather "spinny." Instead of being matter of fact about it they went to alot of effort to talk about how Americans are really good guys and they avoided directly answering questions about the incident other then to say that "war zones are dangerous."

My own take on the press conference was that the Pentagon spokespeople were well aware what a messy situation this is, and that they just didn't have enough information themselves yet to know what had really happened, so they were being deliberately vague.

Personally, I sincerely doubt that the hit was any kind of "directive from the top: make it look like an accident or justified response" attack. Unfortunately though, I *do* think it's possible that a rogue commander or gunner who was pissed off at Al Jazeera over the POW situation might indeed have taken the shot deliberately. We've got thousands of troops there, and though it would be nice to say that every single one of them was clear-headed, well-informed, emotionally stable and never made a mistake of judgment, I know that's just not true. Mistakes have been made, and I'm sure that more mistakes will continue to be made. So far though, the Pentagon seems to have a pretty good track record of owning up to its mistakes. There have been plenty of "friendly fire" casualties of our own troops (and of at least one reporter) that have been acknowledged as what they were: Screw-ups. As for the reasons behind the Palestine Hotel shooting and the Al Jazeera bombing (and as screw-ups go, these are both huge -- those places should have both been labeled as sacred as mosques), I'm relatively confident that if the truth *can* be known, that it will be reported -- Error in entering coordinates, a disgruntled soldier, bad intelligence, technical glitch, battlefield misjudgment, or whatever it turns out to be.

I've got another rant brewing about the screw-ups that I've seen in the recent press reporting about other occupation issues in Baghdad, but I'll save that for another meme . . .

Straw to seek explanation for press deaths

] Many of Iraq's military tunnels are believed to have been
] built by Aeroinzenjering, a Serbian engineering firm once
] run by the military of the former Yugoslavia. Hussein
] maintained a close relationship with Communist leader
] Tito (Josip Broz), and with Slobodan Milosevic, whose
] underground tunnels and bunkers bedeviled U.S. and NATO
] commanders during the 1999 Kosovo air war.
 . . .
] A batch of technological innovations is allowing the U.S.
] government to better understand what's below the surface.
 . . .
] Among them are seismic devices akin to big hammers that
] pound the ground and bounce back a signature like radar.
] Experts also use gravimeters, which measure the variations
] in the gravitational field between two or more points to
] help pinpoint underground installations. Special high-flying
] spy cameras that measure thermal energy and chemical releases
] are used to find clues that may indicate the presence of
] underground activity.

As things settle down in Baghdad, I look forward to learning more about the tunnels. In February, "60 Minutes" reported that some of these tunnels were designed by "a Pasadena firm," and that the blueprints were now "in the hands of government officials," but I've never been able to find out *which* firm (one would hope that they kept their own copies of the blueprints, rather than handing over all copies to the government). More info on the 60 Minutes story is here:

 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/21/60minutes/main541565.shtml

Closing In on Baghdad Will Push War Underground

Multiple opinions are presented in this article. Most of them are basically: "The Americans deliberately targeted journalists in order to suppress the truth about civilian massacres."

The other two types of opinions are:

- Journalists were caught in the crossfire just as other civilians are being caught in the crossfire, but weren't being specifically targeted by the Americans.

- The Iraqi regime deliberately set things up to provoke retaliatory action towards areas where journalists were located, in order to cause journalist casualties and thereby discredit the U.S. in the international media.

My own opinion is that the truth is one of, or a combination of, the latter two explanations. The first idea, even though it seems to be widely held in the Arab media, seems to me to be patently absurd, since if anything, killing journalists is guaranteed to bring *more* attention to the killing of non-combatants, not less. Then again, I have to take into account their frame of reference, which is that many of them are coming from countries where unfavorable journalism *is* routinely dealt with via violent tactics and/or "disappearing" journalists.

ArabNews: Exclusive: Outrage at Killing of Journalists