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MSNBC - February 28, 2006
Negroponte fears wider Islamic conflict
Iraq civil war could spark violence throughout region, intel chief tells panel
WASHINGTON - A civil war in Iraq could lead to a broader conflict in the Middle East, pitting the region’s rival Islamic sects against each another, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an unusually frank assessment Tuesday.
“If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country ... this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world,” Negroponte said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats.
Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to Baghdad before taking over as the nation’s top intelligence official last April.
Iraqis have faced a chain of attacks and reprisals since bombs destroyed the gold dome of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra last week. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died, including more than 65 who were killed Tuesday by suicide attackers, car bombers and insurgents firing mortars.
War would be ‘serious setback’
Negroponte tried to focus on progress in Iraq, but he acknowledged a civil war would be a “serious setback” to the global war on terrorism.
“The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic,” he said. “Clearly, it would seriously jeopardize the democratic political process on which they are presently embarked. And one can only begin to imagine what the political outcomes would be.”
Saudi Arabia and Jordan could support Iraq’s Sunnis, Negroponte said. And Iran, run by a Shiite Islamic theocracy, “has already got quite close ties with some of the extremist elements” inside Iraq, he added.
While Iraq’s neighbors “initially might be reluctant” to get involved in a broader Sunni-Shiite conflict, “that might well be a temptation,” Negroponte said.
Still, he told senators he is seeing progress in the overall political and security situation in Iraq. “And if we continue to make that kind of progress, yes, we can win in Iraq,” he said.
Democrats noted that Negroponte wouldn’t go quite as far as Bush did in his January State of the Union address. “We are winning,” Bush said then.
James Jeffrey, the State Department coordinator for Iraq, told reporters Tuesday that Iraqi security forces have managed to establish a normal and calm situation — “by Iraq standards.” The level of violence, he said, was about the same as before the shrine bombing.
Bleak outlook for Afghanistan
At the Senate hearing, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, painted a similarly stark picture of Afghanistan.
While the government has made progress in disarming private militias, Maples said, his agency estimates that violence from the Taliban and other anti-coalition groups in Afghanistan increased 20 percent last year.
“Insurgents now represent a greater threat to the expansion of Afghan government authority than at any point since late 2001, and will be active this spring,” Maples said in his written statement.
Afghan insurgents increased their suicide attacks almost fourfold and more than doubled their use of improvised explosive devices, he said……
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11610145/
Wall Street Journal Europe – March 3, 2006
U.S. Muslims turn angry over Iraq war's direction
Yochi J. Dreazen
DEARBORN, Michigan -- When insurgents bombed a revered Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra last week, the aftershocks reached as far as this Iraqi-American stronghold outside Detroit.
Hours after the bombing, hundreds of Shiites jammed a local community center to condemn the bombing and those responsible. Speakers argued that U.S. failures were responsible for the violence against Shiite civilian targets. Standing in front of large pictures of the heavily damaged mosque, Imam Mohammed Elahi of the Islamic House of Wisdom said the attack was a "big embarrassment for the administration" and demanded that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad "do a better job of being part of the solution rather than part of the problem."
The harsh words highlighted an important shift. Deteriorating conditions in Iraq are affecting public opinion among Muslim-Americans, with many exile leaders becoming increasingly vocal in their criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the war. The critics accuse the U.S. of failing to provide security or basic services to ordinary Iraqis and of trying to appease Sunni militants in Iraq by forcing the country's Shiite leadership to make political concessions.
"People tried to be as patient as possible when it comes to criticism of the administration because of how much they hated Saddam," Mr. Elahi says. "But even people who supported the war 100% are very frustrated and saddened by what is happening daily now. They see that despite all the troops and all the money, security is getting worse and not better."
The mounting disillusion has had a clear impact on Michigan's political landscape, where Arab-American voters constitute a voting bloc estimated at 130,000 to 400,000. In the 2000 presidential election, Arab-Americans, who have traditionally voted Democratic, split their votes evenly between the two main parties, giving U.S. President George W. Bush a boost. Nationally, the Arab-American community favored Mr. Bush two to one.
By the 2004 election, however, anger over the wars on terrorism and in Iraq led to overwhelming Arab-American support here for Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to Amaney Jamal, an expert on American Muslims at Princeton University in New Jersey. "There was so much anger at Bush that Kerry received the support almost automatically," she said.
It is a far cry from the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, when Iraqi-Americans were largely supportive of the Bush administration's efforts to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Just weeks before U.S. forces swept into Iraq, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asked hundreds of Iraqis at a town meeting here to return home to help the U.S. military stabilize and then rebuild the country. The crowd interrupted Mr. Wolfowitz with applause and chants of "Saddam must go."
Leaders here say there are many reasons for the community's mounting criticism of the administration, from revulsion over the abuses at the American-run prison in Abu Ghraib to a belief that the war on terror has unfairly targeted Muslim men. But many Arab-Americans say their biggest reasons are the anger and frustration they feel about the U.S.'s inability to bring matters in Iraq under control.
"I've heard many say they regret their support for their war," says Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. "Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant, but the shock-and-awe campaign of the American military has begotten the worst violence and extremism that Iraq has ever seen." . . .
Imam Hassan Qazwini, a scion of the Shiite religious aristocracy whose Islamic Center of America hosted the recent public event marking the destruction of Samarra's Golden Mosque, says he now fears the administration's Iraq policies have taken on an increasingly anti-Shiite tenor. . .
Mr. Qazwini, whose mosque is the largest in the U.S., says his anger spiked recently because of what he sees as open American interference with the internal affairs of the Shiite-led Iraqi government. Mr. Qazwini says it was wrong for American Ambassador to Iraq Zhalmay Khalilzad to accuse the Shiite-dominated security forces of assassinating and torturing Sunnis suspected of links to the insurgency and to demand that Shiite political leaders give Sunnis powerful posts in Iraq's next government. . .
Nibbling from a tray of small pastries in his tidy office here, Mr. Qazwini says local Muslim religious leaders are in discussions about forming delegations that could travel to Washington to relay the community's concerns to American officials there. Mr. Qazwini says he also hopes to see public protests outside the White House and U.S. State Department calling attention to the American responsibility for the deteriorating conditions inside Iraq.
"We feel that we have been betrayed by the U.S.," he says. "And we can no longer remain silent about it."
http://online.wsj.com/public/us
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