Melik Kaylan writes a fawning piece on Ahmad Chalabi for the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, calling him the “nearest thing Iraqis currently possess to a genuine walk-and-talk democratic politician.” For many Americans, that may be hard to stomach, as the guy has been roundly criticized for peddling false WMD information to eager listeners at the Pentagon. (He once said, “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. … We are heroes in error.”) In Chalabi’s views, everything would have been hunky-dory in Baghdad if the Americans had just let the Iraqis run the show, presumably with him in charge. (Which was pretty much the plan until those meddlin’ State Department kids showed up.) Furthermore, without once mentioning that Chalabi is Shi’ite himself, Kaylan says Chalabi recognizes the realities of Iraq and its ethnic makeup, admitting that Shi’ites will be dominant. Well, other than Sunni insurgents, does anyone really dispute that? Kaylan seems to have been snookered by Chalabi, who thrills Iraqis by wandering amongst the people. Admirable yes, but Chalabi has almost zero support in Iraq and perhaps the reason he’s able to walk and talk relatively safely in public is because no one takes him seriously anymore.

The quote from Chalabi that I reference can be found here, way back from February 2004.

Lives suspended by war AMMAN, Jordan — Rana crosses her legs on the threadbare carpet in her living room in this poor Palestinian section of town and watches as her three children light a candle. The kids are having a pretend birthday party without a cake or presents, but their faces are painted a magnificent shade of gold by the candlelight.

Across town, Hasa and his family sit in their richly-appointed apartment, with all the modern conveniences and bedrooms for everyone. The kitchen is especially bright and clean.

Rana and Hasa live in separate worlds, but have much in common.

Both families are Iraqi refugees facing an uncertain future in a foreign country. Both want to return to their shattered country. And both agreed to be interviewed and photographed for this story only if their real names would not be used because they fear deportation from Jordan and retribution in Iraq.
Driven from their homes by violence and threats of death, Rana and Hasa also provide rare portraits of the refugee life facing many Iraqis. The two families are among the 750,000 Iraqi refugees estimated to be living in Jordan, a country about the size of Pennsylvania and choking on the staggering burden of its new population. (The Iraqis account for about 15 percent of the people living in Jordan.)

Things have changed, though.

Hasa now complains government regulations make it impossible for him to run his businesses here or in Iraq, and his life savings is being bled dry.
At the same time, he rages at the U.S. government.

Two families in a country where they don’t want to be.

Two families in a country that really doesn’t want them. …

Please read the whole thing. It should be noted that two days after the story appeared, the UNHCR raised the number of Iraqis who are displaced or refugees to 4.4 million — almost twice the numbers that were available to me at the time of my reporting. That’s 16 percent of the entire Iraqi population, making it the largest human catastrophe to hit the Middle East in recorded history. It dwarfs the Palestinian displacements in 1948 and 1967. If something isn’t done about this, it will further destabilize an already volatile region.

By the way, can someone recommend a good server host? Yahoo! is terrible and I keep getting 500 Server Errors preventing me from getting into the blog, rebuilding it, etc.

BEIRUT – Lebanon’s capital is once again a tinderbox, ready to blow because of political rivalries exacerbated by sectarian tensions. Increasingly, the political disputes — which are ostensibly over international tribunals, presidential terms and the legitimacy of a government — have grown into religious disputes, mirroring the sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites across the region. Which leader one supporters is often determined by one’s faith. Shi’ites support the Syrian-backed Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who has called for the overthrow of the current government as being too close to the United States and cutting Shi’ites out of power for too long. Sunnis, however, support the current government because it is lead by Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, who is a member of the Future Movement, a political party headed Saad Hariri, the son of the murdered ex-premier Rafik, who was killed in 2005.
“The political issues are sectarian,” explained Tariq Tarqawi, 20, who is, in order, a Palestinian, a Sunni and a car electrician. He lives in Ard Jalloul, a mainly Sunni neighborhood that abuts the mainly Shi’ite suburbs of Beirut. “They love Nasrallah, we love Hariri.”
It’s a political crisis that has come to a head in the past week, with hundreds of thousands of pro-Syrian supporters filling downtown Beirut and street clashes between Sunni and Shi’ite youths from rival neighborhoods. Nasrallah says his people will continue to demonstrate and paralyze central Beirut until the government resigns. Siniora says he’s staying. Where this ends up is anyone’s guess, but it’s already turned deadly.
Ali Ahmad Mahmoud, a 20-year-old Shi’ite from the neighborhood, was killed Sunday night in fighting between Shi’ites and Sunnis in Ard Jalloul. Details are murky, but residents say Shi’ite protesters apparently entered the neighborhood spoiling for a fight.
“If we hadn’t fought them, they would have come in here and broken everything,” said Khalid Hashem, 20, a Sunni from the neighborhood. He was, he added, a friend of Mahmoud. “The Shi’ites are known for this.”
According to others, the intruders chanted slogans and insulted Sunni religious figures.
“We could not bear it anymore,” said one woman in a pharmacy whose husband would not allow her name to be used. “I did not like Hariri and I had nothing against the Shi’ites, but now things are changing. This is not a political demonstration anymore.”
Both Shi’ite and Sunni partisans blame the other side for the shooting, but the question remains: Who killed Ali Ahmad Mahmoud?
The situation is so knife-edge balanced that the head of Lebanese army warned that his forces were being strained to the breaking point as they tried to cope with the security downtown and maintain calm through the tenser neighborhoods of the city. If the protests continued, or worse, turned more violent, the army would be unable to cope, he said.
On Monday, Mahmoud’s body was taken down to the demonstration surrounding the Grand Serail, the old Ottoman fortress that serves as the prime minister’s office and now, the sleeping quarters for a significant portion of Siniora’s cabinet.
The sight of Mahmoud’s coffin brought a fresh surge of fury at the government and protestors crowded around the ambulance carrying it. Many carried signs proclaiming Mahmoud a martyr. “Martyred at the hands of the government’s militias,” read one.
Almost gone were the initial political considerations that had brought the hundreds of thousands into downtown Beirut: the international tribunal, presidential terms and Shi’ite representation. Monday was a day of mourning and passion.
“The blood of the Shi’ites is boiling,” chanted the protestors. “Death to Siniora.”
Downtown Beirut is a tent city, with the canvas constructions lined up below the Grand Serail, like many a besieging army has done over the centuries in this part of the world. At any hour, chanting protestors crowd up against coils of concertina wire while Lebanese Army and Hezbollah discipline men keep them relatively at bay.
For Iman Fakhiya, 29, from the Shi’ite town of Taibe in the south, this protest is simply a matter of fairness for the Shi’ites, who have traditionally been the underdogs in Lebanon.
Hezbollah gained support in the south because the government in Beirut rarely provided services to the rural and impoverished South and Bekaa Valley, the homelands for the country’s Shi’ites. And over 23 years, since its formation in 1982, it has softened its Islamic rhetoric, and now provides for Shi’ites when the government doesn’t, such as schools and hospitals, and defends them when the elite of Lebanon won’t. Even today, on online forums revolving around events in Beirut, supporters of the government often talk of the Shi’ites downtown as “scum” and dirty outsiders.
“I think my parents’ generation accepted this but we won’t,” she said. “They want to keep us down. We just want our rights. Why is the presidency for the Christians and the prime ministership for the Sunnis?”
For her, it is only a matter of time, literally. She would stay for as long as it takes, she said, no matter how uncomfortable she was.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said as she pulled the blanket tighter. “We’ve been hurting for a long time. We are used to it.”

Also, I’ll be traveling for the next few weeks, so postings will be infrequent. I hope things don’t get out of control here. IMPORTANT CHANGE: Comments have been changed to allow authenticated commenters only. This means you will have to sign up for a TypeKey account to comment. This will cut down on spam and drive-by commenters. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s a necessary evil these days.

Anyway, LGF is warning that Lebanon is hanging in the balance with Hezbollah’s coming putsch against the American-friendly Siniora government. Now, like a broken clock, even bloviating idiots can be right now and then assuming they talk enough, but the LGF’s commenters of course blow it:

There should be some way to get Lebanese Christians out of there before it’s too late.

I have a couple of frends, Lebanese Christians, that still have family there. I hope they get out before it’s too late.

The Christian city dwellers will rue the day they let these savages immigrate. (not sure what this means… — CA)

The Christians in Beirut have been whistling past the graveyard.

Christians are being heavily persecuted in most of the muslim countries, with the worst in the ME. Persecution.com has lots of information about it.

Lebanon

In 1968 70% Christian.

In 2006 45% Christian.

The gain was almost all for the muslims; the palestinian tsunami.

Such comments always inspire in me a Lou Reed-size world-weary sigh. Yes, it’s all so simple: evil Muslims, persecuted Christians.

Except, it’s completely wrong.

Hezbollah’s strongest ally in its push to topple the government is … Christian. It’s the Free Patriotic Movement headed by Maronite politician Michel Aoun, a man who’s so obsessed with being President that he will ally with the people who work for his old enemy: Syria.

And the Free Patriotic Movement is supported by — by some estimates — up to 70 percent of Lebanon’s Christians. The rest fall mainly into Samir Geagea’s camp, the Lebanese Forces, a party/militia that owes traces it its pedegree to the Hitler Youth of the 1930s. (No wonder the LGF ogres like it.)

This current political fight here has very little to do with Christian vs. Muslims. Instead, it’s a fight between a pro-Syrian bloc (Hezbollah, Amal, FPM and a few smaller parties) and an anti-Syrian bloc (Future Movement, Lebanese Forces and Progressive Socialist Party). And this split in the Lebanese political society mirrors the greater struggle for the Middle East: the contest for influence between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

There’s lot more to say about this — I’ve written about it before here and here — but I’m on deadline. More later, if possible.

Oh, and comments are still fubar’ed. Still trying to fix that.

BEIRUT – Lebanon found itself hurtling further toward political crisis today, brought on by a head-on collision between pro– and anti-Syrian blocs over what appeared to be disputes concerning power-sharing in the government and the approval of an international tribunal to try suspects in the murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. The tensions boiled over when five Shi’ite and one Christian cabinet ministers resigned from Prime Minister Fuad Siniora’s government yesterday and today after a new round of national reconciliation talks broke down last week. The Shi’ites, represented mainly by the militant group Hezbollah, are demanding a “national unity” government with one-third of the seats in Siniora’s cabinet for themselves and their pro-Syrian political allies, a distribution of power that would give them veto power over any decisions the government makes.
And one of the decisions concerns the approval of an international tribunal to try suspects in the murder of Hariri, who was killed along with 22 other people on Feb. 14, 2005, in a massive car bomb in central Beirut. Siniora’s cabinet approved the tribunal Monday after a three-hour meeting downtown, despite the absence of the six pro-Syrian ministers.
“Our aim is to achieve justice and only justice,” Siniora said after the meeting. The draft document now goes to the Security Council for endorsement.
But whether Lebanon’s prime minister can achieve anything with Hezbollah and its allies arrayed against him is questionable. Were Hezbollah and its allies to gain the veto power they want, the could scuttle the international tribunal.
“We have been waiting for the court to take shape and to reach this day,” said Tourism Minister and Siniora ally Joe Sarkis. “If the intentions of all were pure, everyone should have participated in uncovering the truth about who killed Rafik Hariri. … We should have all been united over this and they could have resigned tomorrow.”
Under Lebanon’s complicated rules of governance, if one-third of the cabinet resigns, the government collapses and a new must be formed. The remaining 18 ministers seem loyal to Siniora, however, and seem unlikely to resign.
That hasn’t stopped some opposition figures from from questioning Siniora’s legitimacy. President Emile Lahoud, a Maronite Christian and Syrian ally, said Sunday that Siniora’s government was no longer legitimate because the Lebanese constitution requires that “all sects should be justly represented in the Cabinet.” He further claimed that with the Shi’ite walkout, all decisions of the cabinet were “null and void.”
Siniora says his government has all the legitimacy it needs but without Hezbollah’s backing in Parliament, he will find it difficult to get any legislation passed, especially the international tribunal. After its endorsement by the Security Council, it is handed back to the cabinet for final approval, signed by the president and passed by parliament.
The Shi’ite militia has threatened massive street protests unless the cabinet is reshuffled more to its liking, a political switch-up that the group says reflects its real support among the Lebanese in the wake of this summer’s 34-day between Hezbollah and Israel, brought on by the group’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12. It was a war that ended in what could best be called a stalemate, but which Hezbollah supporters hailed as a “divine victory.” Hezbollah’s enemies in the government, however, saw the war as a reckless adventure into which the group dragged Lebanon against its will.
The Shi’ite group was emboldened however, and with what the United States says is backing from Iran and Syria, has made a political putsch against the current, pro-Western Siniora government. There are many in Lebanon who feel that the international tribunal will implicate senior members of the Syrian regime, which relies on Hezbollah to guard its interests in Lebanon and to serve as a vanguard against Israel.
However, the frightful Israeli military response likely left Hezbollah more damaged than it’s willing to let on, and its enemies smelled blood in the water. This wasn’t something Hezbollah could allow.
“Hezbollah is more concerned, more weakened,” said Reinoud Leenders, a former analyst for the International Crisis Group in Beirut. The walkout, the threats and the demands, he said, are intended to tie up the political process in Beirut and buy them time to rearm. “This ‘unity government’ is clearly designed to paralyze any decision-making process.”
Not so, counters Nawar Sahili, a Hezbollah member of parliament but not a cabinet member. By walking out, he says, they are following in the tradition of democracy in which opposition parties don’t take part in government.
“I don’t think this is very dangerous,” he said, but added that elections aren’t scheduled until 2009 and that’s too long to wait for the pro-Syrian bloc. “Why should we wait when we don’t have any power in the government?” he asked.
He played down the possibilities of street protests, which have been effective weapons for Hezbollah in the past. “Maybe it will come later,” he said.
But with these latest developments, Lebanon has found itself back in an unwelcome role: as a battlefield for regional and global powers to play out their conflicts. With Iran and Syria backing Hezbollah and its allies, and the U.S. and the West backing the Siniora government, Lebanon’s political crisis is a another battle in the new cold war shaping up between Iran and the United States for dominance in Southwest Asia and its oil.

Personal observations:
The feeling here is one of nervous tension among the Sunnis and the anti-Syrian Christians (mainly Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces) and confidence among the Shi’ites and their allies, including the Christian Michel Aoun. (He really wants to be president and sees an alliance with Hezbollah as the way to get there.)
Ultimately, however, this is a proxy battle in the current tussle between the U.S.–Western alliance, which includes Europe, Israel and the United States, and an Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis. This is an idea I’ve been promoting for most of 2006. The idea was sparked by the May contretemps between Hezbollah and Israel following the assassination of two Islamic Jihad members in Saida and a couple of Katyushas got tossed at Israel in retaliation. The Jewish state responded harshly, with air raids across the south, causing Hezbollah to counter-strike.
I said at the time, “Iran’s activities in Lebanon are part of its larger plans for the region. By working through and with local Shiite communities, which are found in Bahrain, Iraq, eastern Saudi Arabia and stretching through Syria to Lebanon and Israel’s northern frontier, Tehran is well on its way to creating a ‘Shiite Crescent’ — a regional axis that allows it to hold most of the cards in any confrontation with the United States or Israel. And nowhere else, with the possible exception of Iraq, is Iran so well positioned as in Lebanon.”
The May confrontation settled down after a day. But obviously tensions remained — until they finally boiled over July 12, when the Shi’ite militant group captured two Israeli soldiers and sparked a 34-day war that killed more than 1,200 people and left up to 4,000 wounded. Lebanon was devastated by the Israeli air force, but Hezbollah emerged politically stronger.
Since then, they’ve been flexing their muscles and trying to force their way into position in the cabinet that would give them the veto over any decisions — a recipe for governmental gridlock that would maintain their freedom to do what they please in the south without interference from the U.S.–backed Siniora government.

Probably, the story is fundamentally true, in that Iran is sending advanced weaponry, including Strela-7 missiles and lots of Kalashnikovs, to Sunni insurgents. Some of these weapons will inevitably find their way to Zarqawi’s boys. Iran is also lending support to the Shi’ite militias such as the Badr Organization and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. A certain amount of chaos next door benefits Tehran.

Thanks to a network of middlemen, it is unlikely the Sunnis fighters know the ultimate source of the weapons, and if they do, they possibly don’t care. The Ba’athists, mainly, are fighting alongside Zarqawi now because their enemies are more or less the same, but Ba’athist commanders know that should they dislodge the Shi’ites from power — a highly unlikely event, in my opinion — Zarqawi will turn his guns on them. They (mostly) cooperate with AQI anyway, because he’s got the money.

Iran is willing to fund guys to blow up Shi’ites if their larger aims — keeping America off-balance and bogged down, and cementing their hold on Iraq’s government — are met.

No. 3 is a controversial claim, I know, and some people (cough, cough Juan Cole) refuse to entertain the idea that Iran would sacrifice Iraqi Shi’ites for their plans. That kind of thinking works well in logical, algebraic formulations of the issue, but it doesn’t work well with the hard, geopolitical facts on the ground in Iran and Iraq. Iran was quite willing to send 15-year-old Shi’ites to their deaths on the front-line with Iraq in that 1980–88 war because they’d be martyrs, which has a long tradition in Shi’ism. Plus, they’re dealing with Iraqi Arab Shi’ites. A lot of Iraqi Shi’ites died so that Iran wouldn’t break out of the Fao during the Iran-Iraq War, and it’s unlikely Tehran has forgotten that. Iraqi Shi’ites may share a faith, but they don’t always see eye to eye.
So, the mullahs in Tehran could regard the Shi’ite losses in Iraq as a) regrettable but acceptable losses and b) a convenient reason to expand their influence next door, in much the same way that Turkey regards violence against Turkomans as a reason to keep their fingers in Kurdish affairs. (“We must protect our Shi’ite brothers!”)
Hard-nosed power politics makes for strange bedfellows indeed.

Jabr’s and his forces’ growing reputation for brutality comes at a particularly inopportune moment for the Bush Administration, which would like to hand over security responsibilities to those same police units as quickly as possible. That has raised the distinct and disturbing possibility that the U.S. is in fact training and arming one side in a conflict seeming to grow worse by the day. “Militias are the infrastructure of civil war,” U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told TIME recently. Khalilzad has been publicly critical of Jabr and warned that the new security ministries under the next, permanent Iraqi government should be run by competent people who have no ties to militias and who are “non-sectarian.” Further U.S. support for training the police and army, he said, depends on it.
But ever since Jabr was appointed Interior Minister after the January 2005 election brought a religious Sh’ite coalition to power, Sunnis allege, he began remaking the paramilitary National Police into Shi’ite shock troops. A member of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Jabr fled to Iran in the 1970s to avoid Saddam’s crackdown. Jerry Burke, a former civilian senior police advisor to the Interior Ministry, said Jabr’s experience with Saddam’s government has left him bitter and distrustful of anyone he suspects has ties to the previous regime. That would most certainly include the former members of Saddam Hussein’s Special Forces and Republican Guards which initially made up the bulk of the National Police when Jabr took charge.
To help facilitate his transformation of the police forces, Jabr made sure to enlist the help of SCIRI’s armed wing, the Badr Organization. Members of the militia have been a growing presence in the National Police, which now consists of nine brigades, with about 17,500 members divided between the Special Police Commandos, the Public Order brigades and a mechanized brigade, which will soon be transferred to the Ministry of Defense. “Leadership in the commando positions has been turned over to Badr,” said Matt Sherman, a former CPA advisor to the Interior Ministry. “And new recruits are mostly Badr.”

Like so many things in Iraq right now, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. As far back as December 2003, David Gompert, the former National Security Advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority, realized the dangers sectarian militias posed to Iraq’s stability. And in the waning days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, American viceroy L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer issued Order 91, which was intended to demobilize or integrate nine militias totaling about 100,000 men into the Iraqi security forces. But the Kurdish pesh merga and the armed wing of SCIRI, the Badr Organization, still exist today because the order was never completely or competently carried out.
For that, Gompert puts the blame squarely on the Iraqi government, then under Iyad Allawi, as well as the American embassy. With the U.S. military engaged in several major operations in 2004 and the government transitioning from the CPA to a more traditional diplomatic presence with the arrival of U.S. ambassador John Negroponte at the end of June, Gompert says, neither Allawi nor the U.S made the reintegration program a priority. Job training programs run by Allawi’s Labor Ministry were cancelled over personal feuds and pension programs and other aspects of the program of DDR
U.S. U.S. military intelligence officers, not civilian police advisors.
This grave oversight, which stemmed from the military’s unfamiliarity with civilian police methods and its unwillingness to learn, has led to numerous abuses and little accountability. The U.S. State Department, in a report released two weeks ago, documented numerous incidents in 2005, dating back to early May when Jabr was first appointed Interior Minister, where Sunni men were killed execution-style by Interior Ministry police or Shi’ite militias. In each case, Jabr ordered an investigation, and in each case the investigation had yet to report any findings.
Thanks in part to the Interior Minister’s “nonfeasance,” said Burke, the former Interior Ministry adviser, Jabr was at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of military-age Sunni men whose bodies have turned up at the sewage plant in southeast Baghdad since late December. Men in police uniforms and vehicles routinely travel through the city in daylight hours with bodies in the back of trucks for disposal at the sewage plant, he said. Prisoners often disappear, Burke said, because they’re picked up at night and no one has an accurate account of who is arrested and where they are taken. “The Special Police Commandos,” he said, using their old name, “are most definitely out of control.”
U.S. Gen. George Casey, commander of American forces in Iraq.
U.S. military police and military personnel will be assigned to train them. The Special Police Transition Teams (SPTTs) are the model that will be followed. “The SPTTs have been very successful in their efforts,” the spokeswoman said. No change is planned for the oversight program on the National Police.

…Sunnis were killing Shia civilians, and Shia, often under official cover, were retaliating. I asked Haidar if the rumors I’d heard were true — that the Ministry of Interior had been infiltrated and dominated by the Badr Organization Militia, the military forces of the radical Shia Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, or SCIRI. Yes, he said, and added that Ministry of Interior members affiliated with Badr were assassinating Sunnis throughout Iraq. Sunni officers were being removed and replaced by unknown Shias.

This jives with my own reporting on this, which will be published tomorrow on TIME.com.