Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

The New York Times just implicated Iraq’s Mr. Fix-it in the Saddam execution video debacle. Get ready for aftershocks.

In its report on Iraq’s alleged investigation into the Saddam execution, there is this startling passage:

As his aides announced that the events at the hanging would be the subject of an inquiry, one of the officials who attended the hanging, a prosecutor at the trial that condemned Mr. Hussein to death, said that one of two men he had seen holding a cellphone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein’s last moments — up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor — was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser. Attempts to reach Mr. Rubaie were unsuccessful. The prosecutor, Munkith al-Faroun, said the other man holding a cellphone above his head was also an official, but he could not recall his name.

In one casual passage, the New York Times drops a bombshell.

Mr. al-Rubaie is not just anyone in Iraq. He is the link between the Americans and the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani. He is also the go-between to Moqtada al-Sadr. He has been involved with the Dawa Party since its days as a major terrorist organization. In the 1980s, he was the Dawa Party’s international spokesman.

In 2004, when George W Bush visited Iraq he reached out to Ayatollah al-Sistani through Mr. al-Rubaie:

American officials in Iraq are well aware of al-Rubaie’s ability to navigate in both worlds; when President Bush landed in Baghdad for Thanksgiving dinner, clearly he’d been briefed. As al-Rubaie remembers their encounter, the president pointed at him and said, "Dr. al-Rubaie, I want you to convey this message to Mr. Sistani. Tell him that I pray to the same god he prays to… Tell Sistani I have nothing but praise for your religion. I have many millions of Muslims in my country back home."

Mr. al-Rubaie also was instrumental in getting Moqtada al-Sadr into the current Iraqi government. In 2004, Mr. al-Rubaie fell out with then Prime Minister Allawi over how to confront Moqtada al-Sadr:

The approach appears to be straining the Iraqi government as well. On Monday, the office of Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser, had been relieved of his duties and replaced with a close ally of Dr. Allawi, Qassim Daoud.

The precise reasons for Dr. Rubaie’s dismissal were unclear, but he and Dr. Allawi disagreed sharply over how to quell the insurgency and, in particular, how to deal with Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel Shiite cleric. While Dr. Rubaie favors coaxing Mr. Sadr into the political mainstream, Dr. Allawi is demanding Mr. Sadr’s surrender first.

Mr. al-Rubaie has since played a crucial role in positioning the Dawa Party in the center of the Iraqi governmental pie. Last summer he wrote a Washington Post op-ed sketching out a "road map" for an American withdrawal from Iraq while leaving the keys with the Dawa Party.

In short, Mr. al-Rubaie is a powerful man in the current Iraqi government with all the right connections. If he is implicated in the Saddam execution fiasco, it will also implicate the Dawa Party and Ayatollah al-Sistani. If al-Rubaie falls, so falls the Dawa Party. With Maliki weakened and al-Sadr targeted by the Americans, this could be the beginning of a coup attempt in Baghdad. The only Shia party that can gain from such a coup is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

Suddenly, Mr. Bush’s photo-op with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim comes into focus.

Update: The New York Times has removed the reference to Mr. al-Rubaie from the web edition of the article. The changed passage reads:

A prosecutor who attended the execution, Munkith al-Faroun, said he thought one of the invited witnesses had recorded the session on a cellphone, but he could not recall his name.

MSNBC reports that Mr. al-Faroun, who was quoted in the New York Times article, is now retracting his accusation:

On Wednesday, an Iraqi prosecutor who was also present at the execution denied a report that he had accused National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie of possible responsibility for the leaked video. “I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and I did not see him taking pictures,” Munqith al-Faroon, a prosecutor in the case that sent Saddam to the gallows, told The Associated Press. “But I saw two of the government officials who were … present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution. They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces,” al-Faroon said in a telephone interview. … The New York Times on Wednesday reported that al-Faroon told the newspaper “one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein’s last moments up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser.” The Times said it had been unable to reach al-Rubaie for comment. AP also could not reach him Wednesday. His secretary said the security adviser, a close aide to al-Maliki, was in Najaf and would not return until later.

The plot thickens.

The Iraq debate in Washington is all about "cutting and running" versus "stay the course". The war in Iraq now is being spun by domestic American politics. However, notwithstanding the food fight in Washington, there is still a real war raging in Iraq. The politics in Washington is still overshadowed by events in Baghdad. Such is the predicament of the Bush Administration. It has led the United States into a conflict that it cannot control.

Last week President Bush, fresh from his victory lap in Baghdad, announced his determination to "stay the course" in Iraq:

"One message I will continue to send to the enemy is, ‘Don’t count on us leaving before the mission is complete,’ " Bush said at a White House news conference.

"Don’t bet on American politics forcing my hand, because it’s not going to happen," he said. "I’m going to make decisions not based upon politics but based upon what’s best for the United States of America."

"What you hear from me no matter what these polls and all the business look like, is that it’s worth it, it is necessary and we will succeed," Bush said.

After surprising Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad, Mr. Bush was undoubtedly feeling his oats. He was back to the tough talking Commander-in-Chief that his handlers believe wins votes.

The Republicans in the House last week outmaneuvered the Democrats by passing a resolution connecting Iraq to the War on Terror and supporting Mr. Bush’s policy in Iraq:

The House voted 256 to 153 yesterday to back President Bush’s policies in Iraq after two days of passionate and partisan debate that saw Republicans try to recast an unpopular conflict as part of a broader war on terrorism and totalitarianism.

Forty-two Democrats bucked their leadership to join a virtually united Republican Party and to declare that the United States must complete "the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure and united Iraq" without setting "an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment" of U.S. troops

The Republicans in the House succeeded in devolving a much-needed debate on the war in Iraq to campaign slogans for the upcoming Congressional elections in November.

Earlier the Republicans in the Senate flexed their political muscle by rejecting any notion of an Iraq withdrawal:

Across Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats alike provided a preview of potential strategies for discussing the three-year-old conflict in the run-up to November’s midterm elections.

As the U.S. death toll in Iraq reached 2,500, the Senate soundly rejected a call to withdraw combat troops by year’s end, and House Republicans laid the groundwork for their own vote.

In a move Democrats criticized as gamesmanship, Senate Republicans brought up the withdrawal measure and quickly dispatched it — for now — on a 93-6 vote.

By week’s end, the Democrats were cowering.

Over the weekend, Senate Democrats regrouped and today presented an Iraq pullout plan to try to regain the political upper hand. The Democratic plan calls for the United States to begin pulling out troops by the end of the year but does not set a deadline for complete withdrawal. With this plan, the Democrats hope to show the voters in November that they are serious thinkers and not wimps who just want to "cut and run".

But, the political debate in Washington ignores the reality in Iraq. The reality in Iraq is that the Bush Administration has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in installing an Islamist regime in Iraq. The Islamists in Iraq have played the Bush Administration masterfully. They have used the American occupation as cover to do a little bit of house cleaning (ethnic cleansing) and have consolidated power within the military and the police forces. Having consolidated power, now it is time to give the Americans the boot.

In a particularly well-timed op-ed in the Washington Post, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s National Security Advisor, shows the United States the door:

With the governors of each province meeting these strict objectives, Iraq’s ambition is to have full control of the country by the end of 2008. In practice this will mean a significant foreign troop reduction. We envisage the U.S. troop presence by year’s end to be under 100,000, with most of the remaining troops to return home by the end of 2007.

So, there’s your timetable: Leave Iraq by the end of 2007. This kind of clarity from the Iraqi government makes the debate in Washington, to borrow our Attorney General’s word, "quaint".

Mr. al-Rubaie also kicks a little bit of sand in Dick Cheney’s eyes by labeling Americans as "occupiers", albeit by indirection:

The eventual removal of coalition troops from Iraqi streets will help the Iraqis, who now see foreign troops as occupiers rather than the liberators they were meant to be. It will remove psychological barriers and the reason that many Iraqis joined the so-called resistance in the first place. The removal of troops will also allow the Iraqi government to engage with some of our neighbors that have to date been at the very least sympathetic to the resistance because of what they call the "coalition occupation." If the sectarian issue continues to cause conflict with Iraq’s neighbors, this matter needs to be addressed urgently and openly — not in the guise of aversion to the presence of foreign troops. [Emphasis added by me.]

This turn of events should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following events in Iraq over the past few years. Although it may come as a surprise to the still significant number of Americans who believe we are bringing "freedom" to the Iraqi people. It should also not have been a surprise when the Iraqi government declared last week that they would grant amnesty to insurgents who had killed American troops. Even though the Iraqis backtracked from that declaration, it was nonetheless symptomatic of the environment in Iraq where Americans have long been viewed as occupiers.

We have handed the reigns of power in Iraq to the al-Dawa party and the SCIRI, both Iranian backed and nurtured parties. We have handed power to the very terrorist organization that killed American soldiers in Kuwait and Lebanon in the 1980s. Mr. al-Rubaie himself was the spokesman for this terrorist organization in the 1980s. In his latest incarnation, Mr. al-Rubaie speaks not only for the al-Dawa party but also the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. So much so, the President of the United States, on his Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad, had the following exchange with Mr. al-Rubaie:

American officials in Iraq are well aware of al-Rubaie’s ability to navigate in both worlds; when President Bush landed in Baghdad for Thanksgiving dinner, clearly he’d been briefed. As al-Rubaie remembers their encounter, the president pointed at him and said, "Dr. al-Rubaie, I want you to convey this message to Mr. Sistani. Tell him that I pray to the same god he prays to… Tell Sistani I have nothing but praise for your religion. I have many millions of Muslims in my country back home." [Emphasis added by me.]

I am sure Mr. Bush’s evangelical friends on the right really appreciate that Mr. Bush prays to the same God as Muslims.

To complete the humiliation in Iraq, the same terrorists who killed Americans in the 1980s are now telling us to get out of Baghdad. I wonder if Mr. Bush will consider such an exit to be in the best interests of the United States. I have long argued that the United States does more harm to Iraq and its own credibility by staying in Iraq. Our credibility is already damaged in Iraq. Withdrawing from Iraq under our own terms would not have damaged our credibility that much more. However, being told to leave by the Iraqi government will round out the humiliation. That is exactly what is now happening.

It appears that Mr. Cheney was partially right about "last throes" in Iraq, only it is our occupation that is in its last throes.