Rhetorical question

I'm sure all of you, good blog-readers all, are already aware of this story.

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs. ...

[T]he informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence.

The first point that has to be made clear is that this comes from the Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia), an internationally-respected newspaper. Okay? And the reporter, questioned later on Australian TV, emphasized that he got the story not as a rumor but from two people who claimed to be eyewitnesses, neither of who knew the other had spoken to him.

The two witnesses [the Morning Herald article says] were independently and separately found by the Herald. Neither approached the newspaper. They were interviewed on different days in a private home in Baghdad, without being told the other had spoken. A condition of the co-operation of each man was that no personal information would be published.

Both interviews lasted more than 90 minutes and were conducted through an interpreter, with another journalist present for one of the meetings. The witnesses were not paid for the interviews.

And as the article took pains to point out,

in a sharp reminder of the Iraqi hunger for security above all else, the witnesses did not perceive themselves as whistle-blowers. In interviews with the Herald they were enthusiastic about such killings, with one of them arguing: "These criminals were terrorists. They are the ones who plant the bombs."

So all in all the story would seem to be well-sourced enough to merit at least some attention.

So here's the question: What are the chances it will actually be investigated seriously?

Absolutely none.

Consider first the official responses.

The Herald has established the names of three of the prisoners alleged to have been killed. ...

The three names were provided to the Interior Ministry, where senior adviser Sabah Khadum undertook to provide a status report on each. He was asked if they were prisoners, were they alive or had they died in custody.

But the next day he cut short an interview by hanging up the phone, saying only: "I have no information - I don't want to comment on that specific matter." ...

Sabah Khadum, a senior adviser to Interior Minister Mr Naqib, whose portfolio covers police matters, also dismissed the accounts. Rejecting them as "ludicrous", Mr Khadum said of Dr Allawi: "He is a doctor and I know him. He was my neighbour in London. He just doesn't have it in him. Baghdad is a city of rumours. This is not worth discussing."

For its part, the US issued a non-denial, with ambassador John Negroponte saying "If we attempted to refute each [rumor], we would have no time for other business. ... [T]his case is closed."

Well, not quite closed. Certain appearances must be maintained. The next day, Iraq's Human Rights Minister, Bakhtiar Amin, said that he would investigate the claims

although he had serious doubts they were true. "I will check this and I will talk to the Prime Minister as well. We will check this information.

"This is not the Iyad Allawi I know. He's not a killer. And he's not the type of person who goes out killing people. You don't see him carrying weapons."

That all presages a hard-hitting, open-minded inquiry, doesn't it?

(Sidebar: Ludicrously, Allawi spokesman Taha Hussein said

Dr Allawi is turning this country into a free and democratic nation run by the rule of law; so if your sources are as credible as they say they are, then they are more than welcome to file a complaint in a court of law against the Prime Minister"

and in its follow-up, the Morning Herald said

Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, expressed his confidence in Mr Amin's investigation and repeated his call for [reporter] Paul McGeough, to take his evidence to Iraq's police,

saying "There's no reason to believe he won't examine the claims properly.")

Then consider the response of the US media - which is actually kind of hard because there really hasn't been any. Apparently, the only ones to mention it so far are the Washington Times (yes, that Washington Times), the Philadelphia Daily News, and now the July 19 Daily Update on terrorism of the Christian Science Monitor. Why the blackout? Now, I don't go much for media conspiracy theories, that is, the idea that the media are deliberately spiking it in order to advance the US agenda in Iraq, which this certainly has the potential to damage. I usually go for the sloppy, lazy, sheep explanation: It hasn't been covered because no big-name US politician (preferably at the White House) has brought it up and lacking that there is no "domestic hook." Besides, they say, we're too busy with really important stories like do John Kerry and John Edwards touch each other too much?

There are, however, two other explanations more likely than either of those. The first is a calculated pose of worldly cynicism, in which any such story is laughed off as the product of those Middle Easterners' over-active imaginations. It's just not taken seriously. That's the attitude Newsweek adopted:

Baghdad's streets are as mean as any in the world, and since Ayad Allawi took office, the stories people tell in them are even meaner. Soon after he became prime minister of the interim government last month, many Iraqis whisper, he ordered two suspected insurgents shot in front of him. Or, goes another account, he shot seven captive terrorists himself, one after another. Or he personally chopped off the hand of a suspect with an ax.

That is, this is just one more of those silly, bizarre rumors running around Baghdad. The fact that this particular story is published in a respected newspaper backed by two independent eyewitness accounts makes no difference. It didn't come from "official" sources, so you just can't credit it and you're afraid of looking foolishly naive to your colleagues if you go with it.

The other is what Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler refers to as the meme of a story, the line, the frame, that gets adopted and into which all coverage must then fit. And of course the meme for Iyad Allawi is that he's the Great Hope for Stability and the Future of Democratic Iraq and the idea that he could be or become another Saddam-type thug just doesn't fit the picture - so it gets ignored.

But a there is every reason to think that a thug is exactly what Allawi was, is, and can/will be. Indeed, the Morning Herald says that according to the memoirs of Talib Shabib, a foreign minister under Saddam who broke with the regime in 1978, he began his political career in 1963 - as an assassin.

Seymour Hersh fleshed things out a bit in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker.

[H]is role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies — Saddam became President in 1979 — is much less well known. "Allawi helped Saddam get to power," an American intelligence officer told me. "He was a very effective operator and a true believer." Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, "Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug."

Early this year, one of Allawi's former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a "big husky man ... who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students." Allawi's medical degree, she wrote, "was conferred upon him by the Baath party." Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.

"If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does," Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. "He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. ... At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.

It was only then that he began his association with MI6 and the CIA, the latter of which funded and still funds his Iraqi National Accord, including supporting an INA campaign of car bombings in Baghdad in the mid-1990s, notes Edinburgh's Sunday Herald for July 18, which also says

[t]he break with Saddam came, it is suggested, over money – not political principle.

All of which seems to blow several huge holes in the "Oh no, he couldn't do that!" defense. But it won't matter, because too much of the media is either too scared or too lazy to be out in front of the pack unless it involves personal scandal with at least a whiff of sex. Just like "welfare reform" was judged a success because welfare rolls dropped even as officials admitted they had no idea what happened to the rest - Did their situation improve or did they just get dumped in the gutter without hope of help? - so here will Allawi be judged a "success" if the number of "terrorist incidents" declines - no matter how that decline was brought about.

Before the shootings, [the Morning Herald reports,] the 58-year-old Prime Minister is said to have told the policemen they must have courage in their work and that he would shield them from any repercussions if they killed insurgents in the course of their duty.

The witnesses said the Iraqi police observers were "shocked and surprised". But asked what message they might take from such an act, one said: "Any terrorists in Iraq should have the same destiny. This is the new Iraq.

"Allawi wanted to send a message to his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if they kill anyone - especially, they are not to worry about tribal revenge. He said there would be an order from him and the Interior Ministry that all would be fully protected."

That is, it appears, you can kill enemies of the state with impunity.

Even Newsweek, busily dismissing reports about Allawi as just rumors, admits that

only weeks after taking office, Allawi is already flirting with dictatorship....

Allawi has flooded the streets with cops, many of them from the old regime. He's started a new General Security Directorate, otherwise known as the secret police. Every few days his troops attack neighborhoods where criminals have gathered, rounding up men by the hundreds, cracking heads and sometimes fighting running gun battles. Iraqi TV shows footage of exultant policemen firing their guns into the air as they leave the scene of a roundup. Magistrates have been put on 24-hour duty to handle the intake of prisoners - 527 from one raid alone. "He's tough as nails on security," says the U.S. official. "Tougher than we are."

And there is, of course, also the matter of the new security law, reinstating the death penalty, and the fact that Allawi hinted about delaying elections before quickly backing down. Testing the waters, perhaps?

The thing is, as I noted on June 30 and more recently on Saturday, a goodly number of Iraqis would favor tough measures even at the expense of democracy and personal freedom, seeing them as necessities and even arguing that a strongman is exactly what Iraq needs.

"You can have an overdose of democracy," a young Iraqi translator tried to explain last week to the American colonel he works for. "That was our problem. We need somebody strong,"

said Newsweek.

After a decade of sanctions and 15 months of chaos, violence, and terror involving hunger, unemployment, and between 11,000 and 13,000 civilian dead, that desire for security, for stability, is undoubtedly strong and equally understandable. But it won't come easily and could well come at the cost of the democracy we claim to be establishing. On Saturday, I mentioned Saddam and Tito as examples of the "strongman" who keeps a divisive and divided nation together. But they did it by utter brutality, by crushing dissent, by playing one faction off against another - by being dictators who were ruthless to whatever degree was necessary at the moment. (Tito moderated over the years, as his own personality rather than repression became the uniting force, but that's not how it got started.)

So is that what it's all about? Is that what it's come down to? Meet the new SOB, same as the old SOB? And I mean the old SOB, the 1980s SOB, the one that was an SOB but was our SOB. In the wake of Gulf War I, the US stood by as popular rebellions rose against Saddam both among Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. According to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report from May, 1991,

the United States did not want the popular rebellion to succeed...Administration officials [said] that they were looking for a military, not a popular, alternative to Saddam Hussein.

In a letter of December 10, 1991, I noted that the same staff report also quoted a National Security Council aide as saying "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, not his regime."

It's taken over a decade and come in a very roundabout way, but it's possible that at the end of the day that's exactly what Iraq might wind up with. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?" It seems to me that by virtue of our ignorance, our arrogance, our conceit, our selfishness, all we have succeeded in doing in Iraq is putting people through 15 months of madness in order to face them with the choice where do we go from here: chaos or dictatorship, hot-blooded civil war or cold-blooded brutality?

You tell me which is worse. Because I really don't know.