Jim Hoagland, Give the Shiites a Say
The Washington Post Give the Shiites a Say By Jim Hoagland Friday, January 23, 2004 Iraq's Shiite majority has begun to pry political control of the country from U.S. administrator Paul Bremer and his small, overwhelmed staff in Baghdad. The Bush administration should welcome and help shape this silent transition rather than fight to retain eroding power. That power will in any event be exhausted by June 30, the date on which the United States has agreed to return sovereignty to Iraq. That deadline is the one immovable object in a tangled web of U.S.-U.N.-Iraqi negotiations over ending an occupation that has essentially run its erratic course. Other details can and will be fudged. Bremer's once unshakable insistence on control over tiny details of occupation is being sapped by a nascent internal Iraqi political process, which triggered high-level meetings on Iraq's future in New York and Washington this week. The approach of the normally assertive U.S. administrator for Iraq ranged from reactive to passive at the United Nations and in the White House sessions, other participants report. Acting in concert more often than the Bush administration seems to realize, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and leading Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council agree on one overriding objective: The Shiite majority must not be cheated out of political control of Iraq or once again be subjugated by a domineering minority. Those fears haunt the Shiites nine months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-based regime. President Bush came face to face with the force of this fear on Tuesday at the White House, where a brief encounter may have done more to inform Bush's view of Iraq than dozens of lengthy briefing books or position papers. During Bush's spirited meeting with an ethnically and religiously balanced delegation from the Governing Council, Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim suddenly and gravely asked to speak privately with the president, according to several at the meeting. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials visibly tensed and tried to bypass the request. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, intervened to get Hakim and his interpreter five valuable minutes with the president. Rice sensed that Hakim had something important to say. We need your protection. Don't abandon us. That was the thrust of Hakim's direct and personal appeal to Bush, according to a reconstruction of the conversation provided by a U.S. source. The ayatollah's remarks clearly applied to Iraq's Shiites, who are thought to make up 60 percent of Iraq's 24 million people. The Shiites still fear that the Sunnis have their number, says a mid-level U.S. official who has worked closely with both groups in Iraq in recent months. Their fears may seem irrational to us, but those fears drive what Sistani and the others are doing. They remember when the United States stood by and let them be slaughtered during their 1991 revolt. The murderous insurgency in the Sunni Triangle around Baghdad and suicide bombings by terrorists elsewhere in Iraq have deepened Shiite fears that many Sunnis will fight majority rule as they have fought U.S. occupation. Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the Iraqi branch of the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood, left the Governing Council delegation in New York rather than come to Washington and be photographed visiting the White House. Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has joined Ibrahim Jafari and other leaders of Shiite Islamic parties and Ahmed Chalabi, a practicing Shiite who heads the secular Iraqi National Congress, to create an informal caucus of Governing Council members. The Shiite caucus has held two important strategy sessions with Sistani at his base in Najaf since the ayatollah raised objections to the Nov. 15 U.S. proposal for indirect elections, according to Iraqi sources. Sistani, the most respected Shiite cleric in the country, refuses to meet directly with Bremer and is not well known by the Sunni members of the Governing Council. Sistani and the Shiite politicians agree that democratic elections, conducted while U.S.-led coalition forces still provide security, should guarantee the Shiites political dominance. A U.N. statement fixing a date for direct elections later this year or in early 2005 would provide Sistani with political cover for accepting a short delay in majority rule. Neither his objections nor the recent Shiite street demonstrations should be seen in Washington as menacing developments. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that politics in Iraq is a good thing, says one Bush aide, who reported that the president successfully reassured Hakim and the other Governing Council members that he would press for democratic elections as soon as possible. American leadership on that agenda, rather than grudging acceptance of inevitable change, is the right course.
Mylroie, What went wrong, NRO
National Review Online January 23, 2004, 8:38 a.m.Mishandling TerrorismThe law-enforcement mistake. By Laurie Mylroie In his State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush identified the point at which America's response to terrorism went so badly awry: the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Bush also explained what went wrong: That attack was treated entirely as a law-enforcement issue; "some of the guilty were indicted, tried, convicted, and sent to prison." Following the speech, one National Public Radio commentator gasped that Bush seemed to be blaming former President Bill Clinton. That is, indeed, where blame lies. After every terrorist attack that occurred on his watch, Clinton would condemn the perpetrators and vow to bring them to justice. Yet there was a Catch-22: by treating terrorism as a law-enforcement issue, Clinton practically guaranteed that it would be understood as a law-enforcement issue and the critical question of state sponsorship would receive scant attention. In many respects, the U.S. legal system was, and still is, ill-suited to dealing with major terrorist attacks. A very significant flaw crept into that system after Watergate, with serious consequences in the 1990s, when several major terrorist assaults against the United States were followed by stunningly early arrests. Post-Watergate reforms prohibited the FBI from sharing the results of a criminal investigation with the CIA or any other national-security agency. Thus, once the FBI arrested even one suspect in the 1993 Trade Center bombing, that arrest cut off the flow of information to other agencies. Six days after the bombing, Mohammed Salameh, a 26-year-old Palestinian, was detained for the remarkably foolish act of returning to a Ryder rental agency for his deposit on the van that carried the bomb. From then on, the only purpose to which the FBI's investigation could be put was the prosecution of Salameh et al. And as long as even one individual remained a fugitive Abdul Rahman Yasin, who came to New York from Baghdad before the bombing and returned there afterwards, is still at large that information could not be passed on to other government agencies. The State Department's counterterrorism office, for example, is charged with determining whether any given act of terrorism is state-sponsored. But since it didn't have the results of the 1993 bombing investigation, how could it possibly make any such determination? Individuals in the U.S. bureaucracies could have obtained copies of the voluminous documentary evidence that was put into the public record through the trials, just as any private citizen can: by going to the courthouse. But bureaucracies are dominated by routine, and that did not happen, as I learned after providing Ramzi Yousef's fingerprints (evidence in the first Trade Center bombing trial) to an individual at the CIA's counterterrorism center, when the FBI refused to share the prints with him. Moreover, even as this information was not provided to agencies of the U.S. government, by law it had to be provided to the terrorist defendants and their lawyers, including Ramzi Yousef, the attack's mastermind. In the worst case, Yousef may have managed to pass back to his handlers some of that information, allowing them to sharpen the methods by which they evaded U.S. detection in subsequent assaults. Trials are narrowly focused. A prosecutor aims to secure convictions and maximal sentences for the defendants in the courtroom; pursuing the question of possible state sponsorship is rarely relevant to that task. The U.S. Constitution guarantees the accused a speedy trial. Yet the investigation into a major terrorist attack is a difficult, time-consuming task: After 9/11, it took authorities six months to learn that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (who is supposedly Yousef's uncle) was the mastermind of those dreadful assaults. And that information came from the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah information that would been unavailable if, following his capture, Abu Zubaydah had been arrested and read his Miranda rights, as regularly happened in the Clinton years. Following the Trade Center bombing, Salameh's lawyer wanted the speediest trial possible, lest the government discover yet more evidence against his client. The legal system, in its normal operations, provides for just that it's a defendant's right. Thus the lead
