Abu Aardvark

Saddam's Cash

I've been writing all week about the stories in the Arab press about new documents allegedly showing payments to Arab journalists and others. Now Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard is on the story.

Hayes makes exactly the crude argument I anticipated, explaining the Arab media's position on Iraq as such: "scores of journalists throughout the Arab world and Europe were on Saddam Hussein's payroll." As I pointed out in both earlier posts, even if it were true that Saddam lavished money on the Arab and world media - which it probably is in general but has not been proven with regard to specifics - it does not prove that people would not have taken the positions they did for principled or political reasons without the money; and it doesn't take into account the massive amount of Saudi and Kuwaiti money which permeates the Arab media and Arab politics, money which dwarfs the alleged "Iraqi payroll."

Hayes tries to beef up his story with an impressive-looking roster of quotes and "evidence." So let's take a closer look. Hayes quotes someone from the Kuwaiti Information Office (who should know something about covert financial payments to win political influence!), and Salameh Nimaat, a Jordanian journalist close to former Prime Minister Abd al Karim Kabariti, who is close to Kuwati, who has been making similar accusations about the Jordanian media for a decade. He quotes Iraqi opposition figures - no further comment needed. He quotes a decade old Wall Street Journal story. He quotes an anonymous Arab journalist. He quotes an anonymous Arab editor from a decade old Wall Street Journal story (I swear I'm not making this up!). And then he quotes a CIA report "obtained by the Weekly Standard" - doesn't anyone find it a bit odd, a bit unseemly, and possibly a bit illegal that so many government documents seem to end up in the hands of the Weekly Standard? And, finally, he quotes a "Pentagon trained Iraqi American working with coalition forces in Iraq" to the effect that Iraqi money went to American journalists too. In other words, as with other Hayes blockbusters, a lot of words really don't add up to much more than "a bunch of people who agree with me said the same thing."

I predicted that people like Hayes would use these documents - real or not - to settle political scores, or hold the threat of making such allegations over the head of political opponents. Settling scores? Hayes immediately goes after George Galloway and Jim McDermott, both of whom have been the subjects of Hayes hatchet jobs in the past. Threats? Here's his conclusion: "George Galloway most assuredly wasn't the only person lining his pockets by defending Saddam Hussein. Journalists and diplomats and businessmen have been doing it for years. Their stories will be told."

What a disgrace. Stephen Hayes makes parody obsolete.

Above all, I was really disappointed by one thing. Where's the part where Hayes "proves" that Saddam funneled the cash through al Qaeda? I really missed that part.. a very strange oversight for the Obsessed One!

UPDATE: Interesting. The Weekly Standard has a disclaimer at the end of the Hayes article explaining that it is a "corrected version." For an explanation, they say, go here. "Here" turns out to be a July 2003 item about Al Sharpton, Snoop Dogg.. and a response to the discrediting of Hayes's last Galloway hatchet job. But nothing about this story, or how or why it was changed. So I, lacking the interpretive skills of say, Stephen Hayes, remain unenlightened. But thanks for the heads-up!

Krauthammer and the sanctions

Oh, one other point about the good doctor's column. Midway through, Krauthammer says this: " People forget that when the Bush administration came into office, Iraq was a very unstable place. Thousands of Iraqis were dying as a result of sanctions." This is very true. I'm glad that Krauthammer now acknowledges this, because for many years Krauthammer was at the forefront of those who ridiculed critics of the sanctions. Iraq hawks like Krauthammer called those who critiqued the human cost of the sanctions liars, fools, and dupes of Saddam if not outright agents. I think that, since he now acknowledges that these critics were, in fact, correct, he owes anti-sanctions critics an apology. Not holding my breath.

The CIA's Fault?

Everyone has seen the overwhelming spin on the Kay report, and on the bigger point about the enormous mismatch between what the Bush administration claimed it knew about Iraqi WMD and what appears to be the truth: it's the CIA's fault, and more broadly the fault of intelligence services everywhere. This interpretation has some merit, but - as lots of other people pointed out (the Center for American Progress and Carnegie have the best roundups) - is also deeply, enormously, absurdly wrong. The Bush people intentionally and systematically hyped the Iraqi threat to get to a war they wanted for other reasons. No serious person really doubts this anymore. Laying it off on the CIA - when we all remember, or at least some of us do, apparently, that the CIA tried to resist the Bush hype throughout the buildup towards war - would be a monumental political and analytical injustice.

But everyone talks about that. What has been catching my eye lately is another version of the spin, most clearly expressed by the indefatigable Charles Krauthammer today. In his words: " The intelligence failure is quite spectacular, but its history is quite prosaic. When the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, they assumed that the huge stockpiles of unaccounted-for weapons still existed. What other assumption could they make? That Hussein had destroyed them and not reported that to the very agency that could have then vindicated him and gotten sanctions lifted?"

This spin gets history wrong in a very, very important way - but one which not nearly as many people seem to remember. The key point about the collapse of the UN inspections over the course of 1997-98 was the growing belief throughout the entire world - from Washington to Baghdad to the UN to Paris to Beijing to Moscow to the entire Arab world - that the United States would never allow the sanctions to be lifted as long as Saddam remained in power. People came to believe this in part because the Clinton administration said so - Madeleine Albright most famously, and most damagingly, in March 1997, and then Clinton's signing the Iraqi Liberation Act clinched the deal - and partly because of growing doubts about the integrity of the inspections process once Richard Butler took over from Rolf Ekeus. France and Russia argued vehemently that UNSCOM's findings pretty clearly showed substantial Iraqi disarmament, and Butler's final report rested far more on suspicions and unanswered questions rather than any hard evidence of Iraqi WMD. The UNSCOM crises of 1998 seem to have largely disappeared from the collective American memory, but they are the indispensible background to the 2002-2003 crisis. Basically, over the course of 1997-98, France and Russia pushed the United States and the UK hard on the question of how and when Iraq could be certified as either completely or partially in compliance with UN disarmament resolutions. A declaration of Iraqi compliance would trigger the lifting of the sanctions. The United States saw the sanctions as vital to the containment of Iraq, and proved willing to sacrifice the inspections to keep the sanctions. In short, the main lesson of 1998 - for Iraq, and not only for Iraq - was that there was nothing Iraq could do which would get the United States to acknowledge its compliance and lift the sanctions.

This isn't the place the debate the wisdom or the effectiveness of Clinton's approach during 1998. It is simply to remind people who might find Charles Krauthammer persuasive (Are there any people like that? Weird.).. um, to remind such people of the real reason why Iraq would not have simply declared its weapons programs to get the sanctions lifted. Whatever that history tells us, it certainly tells us nothing of the sort postulated by Dr. Krauthammer.

Iraqi payroll, again

The other day I discussed al Sharq al Awsat's big story on evidence allegedly drawn from the old Iraqi ministry files about payments to a wide range of prominent Arab media and political figures. MEMRI has predictably, but in this case usefully, translated the al Muda story with the excerpts from the list of 270 prominent people allegedly on the Iraqi payroll.

Take it for what it's worth. The generic facts about Iraqi influence-purchasing are clearly true; but the details remain murky. Many of the named people have issued denials (and some of the names, like Toujan Faisal in Jordan, seem implausible). There is no way at this point to independently verify any of the information. The newspaper that published the list is, as I understand it, a fairly typical tabloid - which in Arab countries usually means that they would happily publish sensational news without much concern for accuracy. And, as I mentioned last time, you can't really think about the actual impact of Iraqi money without also taking into account the vast amounts of Gulf (Saudi and Kuwaiti, especially) money also circulating through Arab politics and media.

Al Sharq al Awsat reports on its front page today that Fakhri Karim Malik, editor of al Muda, says that he did it because people need to know about "parties and individuals who were working on the behalf of Iraqi intelligence... including major figures in some Arab states." In his interview with al Sharq al Awsat, he can barely conceal his glee over the number of journalists and embassies which have called him up asking for a copy of his documents. To this point, he has elected to not share the documents, but he promises us that they really do exist. Reassured now!

The crazy lady

A faithful reader who hasn't yet worked out the majesty that is the comments section writes re Chalabi:

"I think you're right: Chalabi has realized that the only way he's going to get any legitimacy is to say what Sistani is saying. Though notice he's also involved in trying to convince Sistani that keeping the IGC as a provisional gov't after June 30 would be an acceptable alternative to immediate direct elections.
"BTW, did you notice that as soon as Chalabi said he was for direct elections, suddenly Laurie Mylroie and Jim Hoagland were for them, too? :)"

I hadn't noticed Crazy Aunt Mylroie's change of heart, so this is the only response I could muster:

"Great minds.... I'm surprised that Laurie Mylroie hasn't tried to explain that she used to oppose elections because Saddam was for them, but now the little aliens singing in her ear have convinced her that the voice in her head was in fact a false Saddam, not the true Saddam. It makes perfect sense, really."

The Iraqi Payroll Files

Al Sharq al Awsat is running a big story today (in Arabic, sorry) about documents in the Iraqi oil ministry which allegedly show vast payments from Saddam Hussein to Arab politicians and journalists over the past decade. Al Sharq al Awsat reproduces one document (but it shows up so small on my screen that I can't really decipher it), and claims to have seen many more detailing payoffs of billions of barrels of oil to a wide range of people across the Arab world.

One Iraqi newspaper, according to the story, has already begun publishing a list of people on the payroll - some 270 people in 50 Arab and non-Arab countries. Everyone contacted - including prominent Jordanians such as Fakhri Qawar and Hussein Majli, and the Egyptian editor in chief of Sawt al Arab - deny the allegations, of course.

This has been a persistent rumor/allegation for a long time, and there is no question at all of the general truth of the claim. Iraq basically built a suburb for Jordanian journalists in the 1980s, and there was a big to do in the late 1990s over accusations by the al Hayat journalist Salameh Nimaat about continuing Iraqi payments to Jordanians. Such accusations have been drearily common over the years as a way of discrediting opponents; indeed, the al Sharq al Awsat story quotes an anonymous Iraqi official saying that "at the proper time we will name the names" - leaving the threat of an irrefutable and unverifiable accusation hanging over the head of every Arab journalist or thinker who might consider taking positions hostile to whatever new Iraqi government emerges.

What has never been clear is how important it really is. Would the people who wrote or broadcast opinions broadly sympathetic to Iraq have expressed different opinions without the Iraqi money? I'm not so sure.

As Abd al Bari Atwan, editor in chief of al Quds al Arabi and presumably one of the prominent people likely to be accused of taking Iraqi money, put it on al Jazeera talk show (on August 30, 2003), it's easy to forget amidst these allegations of the influence of Iraqi money that by far the largest owner and financier of Arab print and broadcast media has always been Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states. In other words, even if you take a crude "money = opinion" approach to the Arab media, the influence of Iraqi money can only be weighed in relation to the influence of Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other Gulf money.

Stories like this are going to be showing up with increasing frequency. The temptation of using the Iraqi files to settle political scores will just be too great. Hopefully, somewhere in there we'll also actually learn something real about how the Arab media has operated over the years.

Cerebus RIP

The final issue of Cerebus the Aardvark, Dave Sim's monumental 300 issue, 25 plus year, graphic novel (and the origin of Abu Aardvark's fascination with aardvarks) is almost upon us. I started reading Cerebus a long, long time ago. I stlil remember the first issue I bought new (I filled in the gaps later): number 44, the "wuffa wuffa" issue for those of you who remember the old Cerebus.

I have been promising myself for a long time that I was going to write a serious essay about Cerebus when it came to the end. I'm so busy that it seems unlikely any time soon, but who knows.... this will do for starters.

For now, I'll just say, along with virtually every other fan I know, that if Cerebus had ended with issue 200 it would have been able to claim a place with the very greatest achievements in the history of comic books. The early Palnu stories, High Society, Church and State, Jaka's Story (not Melmoth - ugh), Mothers and Daughters... all brilliant on an epic scale. Cerebus was a quintessentially political book, and Sim showed a remarkable political maturity and subtlety in the first 200 issues which make his latter days that much harder to take.

Dave Sim started showing some problems even then, with a disastrous decision to interrupt an almost unbelievably compelling story with a crudely written prose essay about the awfulness of women. His leap into meta-narrative was as inventive as it was unexpected, and - quite unfortunately - gave Sim a reason to never resolve the tantalizing, intricate puzzles that he had patiently constructed over the preceding two hundred issues. But Sim almost - almost - redeemed that disaster with a sharply observed conclusion which shed bleak light on Cerebus's character.

Then, of course, it all went wrong. An interminable, supposedly funny sequence in a bar redeemed only by the luminous, unexpected, and beautifully done reunion of Cerebus and Jaka. Again, not a bad place for the series ot have ended. Because then, as Cerebus and Jaka set out on the horrific "Going Home" storyline, Sim jumped the elephant, the shark, the tracks, and darn near everything else. Long, pointless Fitzgerald and Hemingway tangents tried our patience. Major characters disappeared without a trace or an explanation, long building storylines were abandoned, and Cerebus himself became unrecognizable. And then the unforgivable and completely arbitrary conclusion, with Cerebus throwing Jaka out for no clear reason other than (see below). And then the final descent into madness, as Sim wasted the final legs of the book on a literally unreadable exposition of some bizarre new religion which might or might not have been serious (if anyone actually read this stuff, let me know).

What happened? There are lots of theories. He clearly had/has problems with women, although that didn't stop him from developing brilliant and sometimes sympathetic characters such as Jaka and Astoria. But towards the end, he distorted Jaka's character to make his own crude points about women and about feminism, doing great violence to the character and to the book. He claims (although god only knows if he is to be believed) to have given up sex, which might have contributed to his mental condition. And September 11 seems to have destroyed what was left of his mind, as he gave large portions of the book to incoherent and ill-informed rants about Islam, Canadian foreign policy, and the evils of the Left (the best part - after devoting a not inconsiderable part of the end of Mothers and Daughters to the proposition that the problem with women was that they were governed by emotion rather than reason, he lashed out at Susan Sontag's New Yorker response to 9/11 on the grounds that she insensitively applied reason to a situation that called for emotional response... without ever suggesting that he might be contradicting his long held personal philosophy with this critique).

I think that Warren Ellis, the author of the Authority and Planetary, sums it up best: "A testament to utter determination and vision. I mean, it pretty clearly drove the guy insane, but it's an astonishing achievement."

Regardless of what happened to him in his latter days, I'll always be grateful for Cerebus, Astoria, Jaka, Elrod, the Roach, Lord Julius, and so many more of the characters which Dave Sim created and once loved.

"Something fell," indeed.

Chalabi said WHAT?

I have to admit to being a bit thrown by Ahmad Chalabi's sudden switch to a position favorable to early elections. As the single currently active Iraqi politician with the most to lose from real democratic elections, you'd expect Chalabi to continue with what his game had been up to a few days ago: lobbying in Washington to get the Governing Council appointed the new sovereign rulers of Iraq.

Why did he switch? Chalabi's support for the idea is almost enough to make me rethink my own support for the idea. I still think early elections are the only good option, and remain highly skeptical of all the excuses, um, I mean arguments against them. But I worry about being the guy in the immortal Loud Family song that you've never heard, wailing after the fact that "That was my mistake - I didn't spot the setup!"

The best theory that I've got right now is nothing but a theory: that Chalabi, the consummate opportunist, has put his finger to the wind and has realized that the elections are most likely going to happen regardless of what he wants, and this is a way for him to score some points as "a genuine democrat" while also being able to brag later about how he used his "influence in Washington" to get results. But that's just a theory.

So Is Iraq Secure or Not?

So I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how the following two arguments can both be true:

(a) security conditions inside of Iraq today are far better than the media portrays; the number of deaths is less than in (fill in name of major American city here), and life is getting back to normal

(b) security conditions inside of Iraq today are so dangerous that holding elections will be impossible in the near future.

This seems to be the official administration line right now, and I'm puzzled as to how its supporters reconcile these two contradictory positions (and why they've been allowed to get away with it, but that's a different set of issues).

Just curious.

Inspections Worked

David Kay: UN inspections worked.

Setting aside all the questions important to liberals about human rights, democracy, and norms, the arguments about the Iraq war essentially turned on one key security argument: could international inspections provide for security against a regime intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration and its hawkish supporters had argued for years that UN inspections could not provide such security. Charles Duelfer, ironically enough David Kay's replacement in the now perfunctory search for Iraqi WMD, wrote an influential version of this argument in Arms Control Today two years ago called "the inevitable failure of inspections." From Ken Pollack to Dick Cheney, the core argument justifying preventive war was that inspections not only had failed, but could never be relied upon to succeed.

With Kay's resignation and interview previewing his conclusions, we can now (as if we couldn't before) fairly conclusively say that this argument is over: inspections could work, because they did work.

Iraq was the hawks' chosen test case for their doctrines. And their claims have been proven to be wildly, ridiculously wrong. All discussion about possible responses to nuclear proliferation must now proceed from this basis: multilateral disarmament is a viable policy alternative, and hawkish claims about potential threats should never be trusted.