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Regards,

The Management

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Sistani goes to London

Here's your Iraqi ayatollah health update from Reuters:

Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani arrived in London on Friday for treatment for a heart condition.

. . . The Middle East Airlines jet taxied to a point away from Heathrow's terminal three and Sistani, dressed in black robes, walked down the steps and into a limousine while armed police stood guard.

. . . During a brief stopover in Beirut where he changed planes, officials said the 73-year-old cleric was able to walk with some help. There had been fears fighting in the holy city of Najaf, where he lives, could hamper his access to proper medical care.

Journalist Chris Allbritton in Baghdad reports an array of hysterical rumors about Sistani being critically ill, but hopefully these are untrue if he is able to walk and did not need continuous medical attention during the stop in Beirut. This Associated Press report, though, acknowledges that it's no minor issue:

"The ayatollah suffered a health crisis related to his heart a few days ago," his spokesman in Beirut, Lebanon, Sheik Hamed Khafaf, told AP on Thursday. "A team of specialist doctors are treating him and providing care."

Khafaf said al-Sistani "needs special treatment, but he is not in a deteriorated state."

He'd better keep it together while Needlenose is moving to its new home later today and tomorrow, or I'm going to be ticked off.

Update: Some more detail from the New York Times:

"A spokesman for the Khoei Foundation, a Shiite religious institution in London, said Mr. Sistani has three blocked arteries, but gave no further information on his condition."

If this is correct, Sistani is likely to need open-heart surgery and several weeks of recovery time. Will someone else step forward on behalf of the Hawza (the senior Shiite ayatollahs) during that time to provide a public voice to balance that of Moqtada al-Sadr?

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Hold on tight, we're going into the tunnel

If Green Boy's promise below holds true, we'll be starting to move to our new server host and software platform in about an hour.

So if you try to visit us later today, don't be surprised if you don't get through. (For once, it will be intentional!) As the weekend progresses and the new site location gets picked up by ISPs, we will arise, phoenix-like, in our our new home and not-entirely-finished design. See you there!

Update 1: Looks like we're still here, as of 3:30 PDT. If this site is still accessible a little later, I'll most likely post something.

Update 2: Well, isn't that life for you? I gather we're having technical problems that are keeping us online. :-)

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About that corner...

In writing a week ago about Dubya's new campaign theme ("We've turned a corner, and we're not turning back"), I wondered how long it would last, given how quickly Kerry's campaign turned it around with references to Herbert Hoover's infamous "Prosperity is just around the corner."

As it turns out, it didn't even last the weekend. In a GoogleNews search, I couldn't find any instance of Bush using the line since Kerry's riposte -- the revised slogan is "We're moving America forward and we're not turning back."

Good campaign planning there, guys. Of course, "moving America forward" makes them seem even more out of touch with the stagnant economy and the deepening quicksand in Iraq, but you have to understand, it's hard when you don't have any legitimate material to work with.

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Think Iraq may break into three pieces? You're an optimist

Col Lounsbury has been on an absolute roll for the past week or so, with his always-dyspeptic commentary on the troubles of being an investment entrepreneur in Iraq and other Arab countries more outrageously humorous than ever. And then, when you're beginning to realize you read him just for entertainment, he slips in this bit of insight about Iraq:

. . . any intelligent observer can see the country is slowly, but surely sliding towards Lebanonization circa 1975. That means a slow, but sure slide into communitarian violence. Pauses will occur, there will be hope in regards to pulling out, but inexorably the hard core factions in each (major) community will see greater benefit in trying to grab power rather than share it. The logic is there, the ingredients are there, and I see absolutely no real countervailing measures to prevent this slide. Except perhaps an international peace keeping force, although that is not going to happen, and in reality I suspect the factions are too heavily armed to be able to successfully be suppressed (except by massive and bloody force that is unacceptable to all in that context).

. . . you have to think about where the enclaves are likely to be, and where the "green lines" are likely to be. Central region is likely to be a fucking mess. North West of Baghdad a Sunni controlled zone, North east perhaps neutralish, Kurdish region, long line of skirmishing, with Kirkuk a mini Baghdad cauldron of violence, south of Baghdad, another skirmish zone. Baghdad, the heart of darkness.

For my money, I bet Basra may emerge as another economic center over the next decade.

That's about as concise, and yet detailed, a description as I've seen anywhere of the likely scenario if none of the factions are able to ally with one another. And there have been any signs lately that any of them will.

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Captions

- President Bush was photographed today asking for campaign contributions.
- The search for WMDs continued today -- with mixed results.

Captions anyone?

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Kerry's media troubles in 3.. 2..

For Howard Dean, the beginning of his decline in news coverage can be traced back to December 2003, when he gave out an interview on MSNBC's Hardball where he decried media consolidation in this country. The host Chris Matthews pushed him a bit on that issue:

MATTHEWS: Are you going to break up the giant media enterprises in this country?

DEAN: Yes, we’re going to break up giant media enterprises. That doesn’t mean we’re going to break up all of GE.

What we’re going to do is say that media enterprises can’t be as big as they are today. I don’t think we actually have to break them up, which Teddy Roosevelt had to do with the leftovers from the McKinley administration.

Funny how that worked. That was the last time we saw any more favorable magazine covers. We all know what happened next...

So it was with a sense of deja-vu that I read this report of a speech Kerry recently gave to minority journalists:

Lamenting the concentration of power in a shrinking number of big media companies, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry pledged today to resist mergers that limit the number of news and entertainment outlets.

Granted, resisting mergers is not in the same league as breaking them up, but still... it will be illuminating how quickly the corporate media outlets will start backtracking on the Kerry lovefest.

Stay tuned.

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Son of Needlenose, Chapter II

As some of you may have noticed, the hamster powering our server has been increasingly erratic. The three of us have been working feverishly (some more than others) to migrate this blog to a new server (Dreamhost) and move it onto a new platform (Drupal).

Our plan is to switch the domain registry to the new host tomorrow after 3PM. We'll be turning off comments, and we'll stop posting, until the domain registration propagates, probably in 24-48 hours. Of course the minute after we do this, Sistani will kick off, Israel will gun down a thousand innocent protesters, North Korea will launch a new, long range test missile...and who knows what else. So it goes.

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Not a good time for this

Hot off the wires from Reuters:

Iraq's Top Shiite Cleric Has Heart Problems

Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has heart trouble and is being treated by a team of specialists, one of his aides said Thursday.

"He canceled all his meetings for last week and a group of Iraqi cardiologists are looking after him," Hamed Khafaf told Reuters. He said it was the first time Sistani, 73, had experienced heart problems.

Not to be melodramatic or anything, but if Sistani goes, all of Iraq is likely to follow in short order. Whatever his ultimate personal goals for the country might be, he's been the only player in the political drama who's thought about more than just grabbing as much power for himself as soon as possible.

Sistani's health forcing him to the sidelines is probably part of the influence behind Moqtada al-Sadr deciding to reclaim the spotlight by inciting more violent resistance from his militia (which has been battling police again and shot down a U.S. helicopter today). Another likely motivation was the American accidental assault near where al-Sadr was staying in Najaf, which demonstrated how skittish the U.S. still is about the possibility of provoking another Shiite rebellion.

Should Ayatollah Sistani have the bad timing to die, though, al-Sadr would be perfectly positioned to finish usurping his role as the popular leader of Shiites resisting the occupation. And a bloody nationwide rebellion might be exactly what he has in mind.


Update: In comments, haydar (along with Juan Cole by email) reminds me that Sistani is one of four senior Shiite ayatollahs, and in the event of his death one of the other three would step up to take his place in the religious hierarchy. I was trying to allude to a scenario that I think Prof. Cole has written about before -- where al-Sadr can render the Hawza briefly irrelevant by channeling the passion of the moment into a rebellion, in this case by calling for an uprising at roughly the time that Sistani dies or is incapacitated.

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Here we go again

After yesterday's premature deflation of the Orwell Bush administration's post-Democratic convention fear offensive, it's no surprise that the Bushites spent Wednesday trying to relaunch their War on Terror™ trial balloon. And so it is that both the Washington Post and New York Times have major articles for this morning with anonymous Bushite officials boasting that the dubious intelligence behind this weekend's highly publicized warning led to the arrest of "a suspected senior member of Al Qaeda in Britain."

Except that there seem to be the usual troubles with getting their story straight. While both the Times and Post say that the cell leader in question (Eisa al-Hindi) was arrested as a result of the intelligence on Tuesday, Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder reports that a key part of the intelligence on which the warning was based came from an unnamed "senior al-Qaida operative" who was already "in British custody" -- and, in fact, was reported as such on Monday.

This is disturbingly familiar, and not just because of Knight Ridder bucking the official line. Didn't we just get through another fear-oriented PR blitz with anonymous Bushites telling ominous stories to newspapers and suggesting it was the "tip of the iceberg," followed by stern-looking officials going on TV to advertise their determination to protect us from evil?

It turned out that the fairy tales reports of Iraq's nefarious plans weren't the tip of the iceberg, after all -- in fact, the iceberg itself was more like a unicorn, something that only existed in the storytellers' imagination.

Is our press going to let itself be stampeded again into believing that the Orwell Bush administration is our only bulwark against terrorist-inflicted doom? Are we going to let ourselves be stampeded again?

Update: The stampede continues, says CNN:

Two leaders of a mosque in Albany, New York, were arrested on charges stemming from an alleged plot to help a man they thought was a terrorist who wanted to purchase a shoulder-fired missile, federal authorities said Thursday.

. . . The individual was an undercover government agent and no missile ever changed hands. Aref and Hoosain were allegedly involved in money-laundering aspects of the plot, the officials said.

The investigation has been going on for a year and is not related to the Bush administration's decision earlier this week to raise the terror alert level for certain financial sector buildings in New York and Washington, the officials said.

The headlines will say "Missile Plot Disrupted," but of course the only terrorist plot existed in the minds of the federal agents. And, of course, since there was no real plot, they could schedule the announcement of the arrests whenever it was convenient.

Are they really going to try to trot something like this out every day between now and the election, or will they settle for a little flurry here and there whenever they think it's necessary to shore up their poll numbers?

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