March 4, 2007
In Baghdad, Sectarian Lines Too Deadly to Cross

By DAMIEN CAVE
BAGHDAD, March 3 — After centuries full of vibrant interaction, of marrying, sharing and selling across sects and classes, Baghdad has become a capital of corrosive and violent borderlines. Streets never crossed. Conversations never started. Doors never entered.

Sunnis and Shiites in many professions now interact almost exclusively with colleagues of the same sect. Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals because Shiites loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shiite laborers who used to climb into the back of pickup trucks for work across the Tigris River in Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs only near home.

The goal of the new Baghdad security plan is to fix all of this — to fashion a peace that stitches the city’s cleaved neighborhoods back together. And three weeks into the effort, there are a few signs of progress. The number of bodies found daily across the capital has decreased to 20 or fewer from previous totals of 35 to 50. In some areas closely patrolled by American troops, a few of the families that fled the violence are said to be returning to their homes.

But even in the neighborhoods that are improving or are relatively calm, borders loom. Streets once crossed without a thought in Baghdad are now bullet-riddled and abandoned danger zones, the front lines of a block-by-block war among Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents, competing criminal gangs and Iraqi and American troops.

Some Americans who have been in both Bosnia and Iraq say Baghdad has come to resemble Sarajevo as it began to unravel in the 1990s, latticed with boundaries that are never openly indicated but are passed on in fearful whispers among neighbors who have suffered horrific losses.

Like jagged wounds, the boundaries mark histories of brutal violence. And for Iraqis, they underscore a vital question at the heart of the new plan: can scarred neighborhoods ever heal?

Fadhil/Sadriya

Sybaa Street used to be wall-to-wall people: sidewalks were crammed with shoppers, and roads were snarled with cars as horns honked. In the heart of Central Baghdad, Sybaa was known as the road to get from the automotive shops on one side of the city’s market district to the hardware stores on the other.

Back then — as recently as two years ago, residents said — no one seemed to care that it was the border between the mostly Sunni neighborhood of Fadhil and the largely Shiite areas to the south, Sadriya and Sheik Omar.

But that has all changed. After six months of fighting between Sunnis and Shiites, Sybaa Street is now deserted and forsaken. On a recent afternoon, the only sign of life was a lone mechanic working inside a dark garage, his efforts lighted by a single bulb. Bullets from earlier battles punctured nearly everything — buildings, utility poles, even rusted mufflers hanging outside shuttered shops.

Um Shaima, 48, a garrulous Sunni widow who used to sell yogurt in the Sadriya market, lives just north of Sybaa Street in Fadhil. She said she used to visit the stores there to buy clothes. Her cousin Samir worked for years on the Sadriya side of Sybaa Street as a mechanic without any trouble.

Then a few months ago, Ms. Shaima said, he received a threat. “They told him, ‘You are a Sunni, and all Sunnis are infidels and their women are prostitutes, so stop coming to Sadriya or you will be killed,’ ” she said.

“He didn’t listen,” she added.

The next day, he was kidnapped. Witnesses said Shiite militants yanked him off his motorcycle and threw him in the trunk of a sedan.

“They called his wife at 9 a.m. the next day,” Ms. Shaima said, “telling her that they will kill all the Sunnis, and your husband is dead.”

A Shiite nephew of Samir’s later recovered his uncle’s mutilated body from a trash pile east of Baghdad.

Ms. Shaima said her two sons now carried guns at night to protect her and her neighbors. The Shiite-led Iraqi government will not protect them because the Shiites “want to finish us,” she said. “They will start breaking into our houses, raping us in front of our children, then killing us with our kids,” she added. “They will let Iraq reach a point where Palestinian misery will seem like a picnic.”

On the other side of the border, in Sadriya, lies a mirror image of anger and fear. The response is similar, too: young men with guns who view themselves as protectors, who justify violence as the reasonable response to violence.

Nazar Sharif Abd Hussein, 35, a carpenter and a self-described militant with the Mahdi Army militia, said he did not hate all Sunnis; one of his sisters who lives outside of Baghdad just married one.

In a recent interview, Mr. Hussein hardly looked fierce, at 5 feet 7 inches tall, wearing jeans and a gray sweater, with a short beard and sunken dark eyes. But he said he could be vicious when called upon because Sunni gangsters and insurgents in Fadhil had shown no respect for life.

Last May, he said, his 17-year-old best friend, Salar, was shot dead while they both guarded an area near the edge of Fadhil. He said that Salar was wearing a flak jacket but that a stream of .50-caliber bullets perforated his side and ripped through his chest.

“I still remember that night,” Mr. Hussein said, adding, “He was standing in the middle of the street.”

The sectarian border now seems to define him. He said he lived alone, worked near his apartment by day and was a guard for the Mahdi Army at night. Because the militia has shut down bars and other places where people socialize (he offered no opinion of the policy), he said his life remained stalled. He said he expected it to stay that way.

“I don’t want to get married because maybe I’ll be killed or tortured,” he said. “I’m afraid to bring a wife into this.”

Saydia/Dora

Baghdad’s relentless violence has also created a deeper divide that may prove equally hard to eliminate: the line between the known and the stranger.

As the unfamiliar has become the dangerous, Iraqis have developed elaborate disguises to help them pass as members of the other sect: ruses like adopting identification cards with false family names or developing elaborate fictional histories.

Even then, being a member of the same sect or a relative is no guarantee of safety in a city, Iraqis say, where Shiites have killed Shiites and Sunnis have killed Sunnis out of frightened uncertainty over whom to trust.

Ali Abu Zainab, 50, a mechanic and a journalist, said the border between his neighborhood of Saydia and Dora had left him and his three young daughters isolated, cut off from his extended family. Both neighborhoods have historically been populated by a mixture of Sunnis, Shiites and Christians. But because Dora has been a battleground for various militant groups for at least a year, he said, crossing over is impossible.

The Hilla highway, a wide road heading south that separates the two areas, and the Dora highway — the main road into the neighborhood of the same name — have become battle zones, nearly empty except for gunmen. A relative who was forced to drive down the Dora highway three months ago because of a surprise checkpoint saw bodies littering the streets, Mr. Zainab said.

So even though his favorite aunts and cousins in Dora live less than two miles away, he has been unable to visit for more than a year. In the fall, he said, he missed a cousin’s wedding at his aunt’s house. After another cousin was killed by Shiite militants, Mr. Zainab was unable to attend the funeral.

“I used to go frequently to Dora just like everyone else in Saydia,” he said.

Now, he shops near his home. When he leaves, he exits from the opposite side of the neighborhood. Still, the border’s dangers seep in. Because Saydia has remained less violent than Dora, fewer residents have fled and security is not as tight. Fighters pushed out of Dora consider Saydia a good place to hide because they can blend in with civilians.

Three weeks ago, Mr. Zainab said, after American and Iraqi troops started an operation against insurgents in Dora, a battle broke out near his home. When the gunfire stopped, 10 people were dead. He said no one in the neighborhood seemed to know who had been fighting or what had set it off.

“Sectarian extremism is the reason for all of this,” he said. “Iraqis are sentimental and their emotions lead them to follow those who pretend to be religious.”

Noting that his neighborhood still contained both Sunnis and Shiites, he said that Iraqi politicians, with the help of the American-led invasion in 2003, seemed intent on stirring up hatred. “The problems are between them,” he said. “Not between the people.”

Kadhimiya/Huriya/Shuala

Some Iraqis draw the border at their own doorsteps.

Saadi Khazaal Jawad, 60, a Shiite former government worker and restaurateur, said his neighborhood was so dangerous that he had become a virtual shut-in. He lives in Chikuk, a mixed area squeezed among the Sunni neighborhood of Huriya to the south and the Shiite Kadhimiya to the east and Shuala to the west.

As Shiites from the north and east have begun expanding their turf into Chikuk, Sunnis from Huriya have been fighting back, making every corner here a potential danger zone.

Mr. Jawad has a dusty blue Chevrolet Caprice that he almost never drives. He has two daughters and four sons whom he tries to keep home lest he lose them. He has forbidden his 16-year-old daughter from going to school.

On most days, Mr. Jawad said, he prays, eats, takes naps, reads Iraqi newspapers and watches television. Oprah Winfrey and Rachael Ray are among his favorites.

He also escapes with his birds, a gaggle of passenger pigeons in cages on his roof. The birds come from places he used to visit on vacations, like Mosul and Basra. They offer a way, he said, to flee.

“I spend about two or three hours here,” he said as he fed the birds. “I forget everything when I’m here. And besides I can’t go anywhere. It’s dangerous to go out.”

Even Mr. Jawad has not entirely lost hope; he said he was rooting for the Iraqi government’s efforts to shore up security, which he considered sincere. Some residents in Fadhil and Sadriya also said the recent Iraqi-American operation there had given a few of their friends enough confidence to leave their apartments and return to work.

But Iraqis all across Baghdad said it could take years for men like Mr. Hussein, the Mahdi militant in Sadriya, to give up their weapons, and for residents to let go of their fears. With American helicopters overhead every day and gunfire and explosions as regular as morning alarm clocks, Iraqis’ sense of being trapped has yet to recede.

“I try to kill time,” Mr. Jawad said. “We try to busy ourselves because when I have nothing to do, it makes time last longer.”

Ahmad Fadam and Muhammad al-Sattar contributed reporting.

John Bolton, turns against Bush on Iran

Saturday, March 03, 2007 - ?2005 IranMania.com
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LONDON, March 3 (IranMania) - John Bolton, who helped shape President George W Bush's diplomacy aimed at blocking the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, said those efforts are failing and the US may have to seek the ouster of the governments in Tehran and Pyongyang, Bloomberg reported.

Bolton has been quick to voice his disappointment with the president he was serving as United Nations ambassador less than three months ago. The agreement with North Korea to exchange economic aid for a nuclear disarmament pledge shows the Bush administration has "abandoned the principles it pursued for much of its first several years in office,'' he said in an interview yesterday.

Talks with either North Korea or Iran won't work, Bolton asserted. "Unless you're prepared to believe that the Iranians are voluntarily going to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons, the idea of pursuing negotiations is ultimately going to be fruitless,'' he said.

Bolton's criticism reflected a split in the administration between those who seek multinational diplomacy and those who are skeptical that approach can deter countries bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

The US has allowed Britain, France and Germany to "screw around'' in nuclear talks with Iran, according to Bolton. The diplomacy has gone on for "three and a half years, and that allowed the Iranians to make enormous progress on their nuclear- weapons program,'' he said.

Iranian officials insist their nuclear program is aimed only at building a commercial power-generation industry.

"Regime change in Iran or, as a last resort, military action is the only thing that will stop the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons,'' Bolton said.

No 'Surrender'

The 58-year-old Yale University-educated lawyer and onetime US arms-control official said he would go into more detail in a book he is writing, tentatively titled "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad.''

His criticisms drew a retort from President Bill Clinton's UN ambassador, Bill Richardson. "Mr. Bolton's insults to our European allies and this saber-rattling are irresponsible,'' Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a Democratic candidate for president, said in an e-mail. ``We need tough, direct negotiations with Iran but also with our allies, especially Russia, to provide a united front to pressure Iran.''

A spokesman for Bush's National Security Council brushed aside Bolton's critique. "He is a private citizen, welcome to his own views,'' said the NSC's Gordon Johndroe.

Blaming 'Bureaucracy'

Bolton, who left the UN in December after failing to win congressional support to extend his tenure, said he couldn't fully explain the lack of US resolve on North Korea, except to blame the "persistence of the bureaucracy'' in the State Department.

Since leaving the UN, Bolton has returned to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington to serve as a senior fellow on foreign policy. He fired a salvo against Bush's accord with North Korea a few hours after the announcement on Feb. 13 that a six-nation negotiation hosted by China had arrived at the deal.

While Bolton has been largely alone in public criticism of the agreement, he was joined Feb. 28 by Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (news, bio, voting record) of Florida, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

North Korean Pledges

"What has convinced you and the administration that the North Korean regime will abide by its commitments in the February 13 agreement?'' she asked US negotiator Christopher Hill at a hearing. Ros-Lehtinen said the agreement doesn't adequately address North Korea's transfer of missile technology to South Asia and the Middle East, and questioned a US commitment to talk with North Korea about its designation as a state sponsor of terror.

Hill said on Feb. 22, "We ultimately decided that, even though North Korea does need to make a strategic decision to get out of this nuclear weapons business, to realize that decision is going to require a step-by-step process.''

On Iran, Bolton scoffed at the pace of diplomacy, while cautioning that a military option has its own drawbacks, especially if there is a secret uranium-enrichment facility.

"The downside of the military option is that you would incur all of the costs of having undertaken military action but potentially not gotten the benefits of decisively breaking the nuclear fuel cycle at one or more points,'' he said. "What that says is we need better intelligence about what the Iranians are actually up to beyond what is already in the public domain.''

Because of all of this, the US needs to tap the "substantial Iranian diaspora'' and "exploit'' the dissatisfaction inside Iran to topple the cleric-led government, Bolton said.

North Korea's dictatorship also should be feeling the heat from the US, Bolton said. Easing financial sanctions would be a "big mistake,'' he said.

"We have let them out of the corner we put them in,'' Bolton said.

March 3, 2007
U.S. and Brazil Seek to Promote Ethanol in West

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and LARRY ROHTER
WASHINGTON, March 2 — President Bush, hoping to reduce demand for oil in the Western Hemisphere, is preparing to finish an agreement with Brazil next week to promote the production and use of ethanol throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, according to administration officials.

The agreement could lead to substantial growth in the ethanol industry in Brazil as technology and manufacturing equipment developed there is exported to other countries in the region.

Much of the ethanol produced there is made from sugar cane and is far cheaper to produce than the corn-based ethanol that has been nurtured by protective tariffs and government mandates in the United States.

But the agreement has already begun to prompt complaints from politicians from corn-producing regions of the United States. They fear that the plan would lead to an increase in imports of cheap foreign ethanol and undercut American producers.

By increasing ethanol production and consumption, particularly in countries that produce sugar, officials of the Bush administration hope to reduce the region’s overall dependence on foreign oil and to take some of the pressure off oil prices.

As a side effect, American officials contend, the program could also reduce the influence of Hugo Chavez, the president of oil-rich Venezuela.

Mr. Bush is scheduled to meet in São Paulo next week with Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Administration officials are hoping to complete a memorandum of understanding that calls for cooperation between the countries on research and common standards for biofuels, as well as on helping other countries replicate Brazil’s expertise in producing ethanol from sugar.

The agreement is largely a framework and provides few details, according to administration officials who have been briefed on the agreement but who spoke on condition of anonymity because it has not yet been completed.

Government officials in Brazil confirmed the agreement. Senior Brazilian government officials said the most important effect of a collaboration with the United States would be in promoting a broader international market for Brazilian ethanol technology.

Brazil and the United States account for a total of more than 70 percent of global ethanol production. The agreement is aimed at encouraging other countries, especially small and poor sugar cane producing countries in the Caribbean and Central America, to become producers.

“This is more than a document, it’s a point of convergence in the relationship that is denser and more intense than anything we’ve seen in the last 20 or 30 years,” Antonio Simões, the director of the energy division of the Foreign Ministry of Brazil, said in a telephone interview from New York. “Brazil will profit, the United States will profit, and so will third countries. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.”

“The good thing is that a poor country can reduce what it pays for imported oil and earn money exporting this,” Mr. Simões said. “That way they will have more money to invest in social programs, and the production of energy will be democratized in the world, with 100 countries producing energy instead of just 15 or 20.”

Eventually, the two countries hope to use their accord to spur production of renewable fuels beyond the hemisphere. Brazil is interested in encouraging sugar-cane-based ethanol production in Africa, where it has extensive trade and cultural ties, and in Asian nations like Thailand.

Brazil’s own direct exports of ethanol reached a record last year. But demand for the fuel is growing so rapidly within Brazil that the government’s immediate priority is to satisfy its domestic market.

But Brazilian business groups see commercial opportunities in supplying advanced equipment to other countries setting up their own ethanol distilleries.

“We want ethanol to become a global commodity, and for that to happen, Brazil can’t be the only producer,” said José Luiz Oliverio, vice president for operations at Dedini Industries, Brazil’s leading manufacturer of equipment for sugar cane and ethanol mills. “We’ve been growing and processing sugar for 500 years, and we are confident of our ability to maintain our leadership in this sector.”

American officials expressed a similar enthusiasm for making ethanol and ethanol-producing equipment on a huge scale. The biggest area of cooperation, they said, will be in helping countries identify and remove obstacles to building their own ethanol production capacity.

Mindful of protests from domestic ethanol producers and from the powerful American farm lobby, administration officials are not expected to even hint at a reduction in American tariffs on foreign ethanol.

Nor does the administration appear ready to offer money or loan guarantees for construction of ethanol plants in other countries.

In a letter to President Bush on Thursday, Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he failed to understand “why the United States would consider spending U.S. taxpayer dollars to encourage new ethanol production in other countries.”

The proposed partnership, Mr. Grassley warned, could become a backdoor way for Brazil to escape the tariff on imported ethanol that currently insulates American producers.

The United States imposes a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol, but Caribbean nations and countries in the Central American Free Trade Agreement are exempt from those duties if they make the ethanol from products grown in their own countries. Using Brazilian technology for refining sugar-cane-based ethanol, such countries could in time become exporters to the United States.

In addition, Caribbean nations can export a limited amount of ethanol that comes indirectly from Brazil and other countries. Under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which has been in force for years, countries can take partly processed ethanol from a country like Brazil and carry out the last step in processing before shipping it to the United States. But the region is allowed to export that kind of ethanol only up to a limit of 7 percent of United States’ ethanol consumption.

Last year, the United States imported about 600 million gallons of ethanol, and about 200 million gallons came indirectly from Brazil through the Caribbean, according to Robert Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group that represents ethanol producers. The total imports of all kinds of ethanol amounted to slightly more than 10 percent of American consumption last year.

For the moment, American ethanol producers are watching warily but not protesting.

“I don’t believe the fundamental objective of the administration is to produce ethanol in the Caribbean for export to the United States,” Mr. Dineen said. But, he added, American companies will be watching to see if the initiative becomes “the camel’s nose under the tent.”

Edmund L. Andrews reported from Washington and Larry Rohter from São Paulo. Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.

March 2, 2007
Some sense of sequencing on Iran please
ARTICLE: "Persian Shrug," by Edward N. Luttwak, Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2007, p. A16.
A simplistic argument based on a simplistic read of history. Luttwak claims detente with Sovs "propped up" the regime and Reagan puts a stop to that and kills USSR in short order. So he advocates skipping any opening up with Iran and simply pushing them hard for internal collapse.
There is no soft-kill without some connectivity, in my mind. Without it, there is no way to prepare the follow-on regime, to let it develop and emerge.
Reagan's challenging was well timed because detente had lured the Sovs well down the path of economic and social connectivity with the outside world (the whole infiltration of "hard currency," or dollars with actual monetary value that illuminated how worthless so much of the Sov economy was, plus the growing realization of how Moscow was being ripped off by energy subsidies to Eastern Europe (something Putin's still correcting to this day).
We have some vulnerability on oil revenue with Iran today that Saudi Arabia seeks to exploit, but just causing pain there won't get us regime change. Instead we're likely to get more repression with some secretive temporizing on nukes (like NK).
Luttwak's history is bad and dangerously misrepresentative. You have to set up the soft kill, otherwise one dictator's fall sets up the next.

March 3, 2007
When jobs are your exit strategy, you cannot bomb your way to victory
Tom got this email:
Dr. Barnett:
I thoroughly enjoyed your series of interviews on the Hugh Hewitt show. Thank you.

In Iraq, we are engaged in asymmetric warfare. Why are we so quick to accept the premise that we must be engaged in this type of battle? Either Max Boot or Colonel Peters recently wrote about fighting on an equal footing with insurgents in Iraq as an ill-conceived strategy. But, they never explained why we are so quick to adopt it. Is it due to our aversion to any civilian casualties? We certainly did not fight WWI or WWII in this fashion....we firebombed Tokyo, Dresden, Berlin....why the change in military doctrine? Why now?

The 2001 Bush doctrine stated that we could preemtively strike any country that supported terrorists and exported terrorism. After Sadaam fell, what changed?

Sam Grier, CFA

Tom's answer:
We fight for very different goals. That's why.
To win, we need to leave the environment more connected than we found it--our opponents, the opposite. So we can't escalate on them, just deny them their resources: disaffected, disconnected foot soldiers. The classic insurgent is not the classic terrorist (middle-class, educated) who comes to play on our connected turf. That at-risk pool we shrink by extending economic connectivity (our biggest challenge right now in Iraq is unemployment).

When jobs are your exit strategy, you cannot bomb your way to victory.

Posted by Sean Meade on March 3, 2007 7:39 AM Permalink | Comments (0)
March 2, 2007
Some sense of sequencing on Iran please
ARTICLE: "Persian Shrug," by Edward N. Luttwak, Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2007, p. A16.
A simplistic argument based on a simplistic read of history. Luttwak claims detente with Sovs "propped up" the regime and Reagan puts a stop to that and kills USSR in short order. So he advocates skipping any opening up with Iran and simply pushing them hard for internal collapse.
There is no soft-kill without some connectivity, in my mind. Without it, there is no way to prepare the follow-on regime, to let it develop and emerge.
Reagan's challenging was well timed because detente had lured the Sovs well down the path of economic and social connectivity with the outside world (the whole infiltration of "hard currency," or dollars with actual monetary value that illuminated how worthless so much of the Sov economy was, plus the growing realization of how Moscow was being ripped off by energy subsidies to Eastern Europe (something Putin's still correcting to this day).
We have some vulnerability on oil revenue with Iran today that Saudi Arabia seeks to exploit, but just causing pain there won't get us regime change. Instead we're likely to get more repression with some secretive temporizing on nukes (like NK).
Luttwak's history is bad and dangerously misrepresentative. You have to set up the soft kill, otherwise one dictator's fall sets up the next.