“Hot” news out of Baghdad today about the failure of the Iraqi Governing Council to sign what, it turns out, was to have been called the Transitional Administrative Law… Poignant pictures of the table all ready for the cermony with the 25 pens lined up down each side of it… The children’s choir members eagerly awaiting their turn on the stage. See this post from last Saturday (Feb. 28th), in which I argued that the attempt to ram through this law right now was “illegal… pointless and diversionary… and divisive.”
I’d like to quote Macbeth:
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
So let’s hope they quit banging their collective heads against that particular brick wall once and for all. Let’s hope they turn instead to the playbook so beautifully sketched out in the report that Lakhdar Brahimi presented to Kofi Annan last week.
The focus there is on how credible, legitimate elections can be organized in a country in a situation as complex as Iraq’s, in order to start to generate a credible, elected national leadership there.
That national leadership will then, at some point down the pike, deliberate on the issue of the Constitution. And on the Status of Forces Agreement (if any) with the US. And on federalism, and the role of women, and everything else.
Who gets to run the country in the meantime?
The USG has now stated clearly that it wants to abdicate all of its responsibilities as occupying power as of June 30. (Though actually, the matter is not quite as simple as that.)
But given that statement of intent to “abdicate”, and in the absence of a legitimate national government, only the UN can offer some veil of legitimacy, or “recognition”, to a transitional administration. And that transitional admionistration really doesn’t need a special new set of laws rushed into force at this point as a basis on which to operate. (The IGC has muddled along without any such new basic code in place, up until now.)
But at least, the UN–unlike the Bushies–has a decent, workable plan for generating a legitimate national leadership in Iraq within the next year.
Of course it won’t be easy. But having or not having that cobbled-together little Transitional Administrative Law in place makes, I submit, very little difference at all to the essentials of the situation.
9 thoughts on “Why I was not sitting on the edge of my chair…”
Comments are closed.
Of course you realize, Helena, that all this nonsense about an “interim constitution” or whatever they’re calling that ridiculous document now is just part of the latest increasingly frantic effort on the part of the Bush regime to make sure they end up with at least some of what they went into Iraq to obtain.
Securing a favorable Status of Forces Agreement before Iraqis can elect a real government is absolutely key, as is getting some kind of official rubber stamp for the economic system they are even now forcing into place. Without those two things they will have to either openly and officially reestablish the occupation – which will almost certainly require force, with the inevitable additional bloodshed – or abandon their plans for a permanent military presence, for a political system that suits their interests, and for western corporate control of Iraq’s economy.
Of course every little bit of this is as illegal as are that absurd document, and all the changes they have made in Iraq’s laws. And of course any benefit Iraqis may or may not realize from any of it will be purely coincidental.
What infuriates me almost beyond bearing is the way they have virtually completely taken the Iraqis out of the picture. I am sure even most well informed Americans are not aware of this, but it is Americans and their allies, not Iraqis who are making all the decisions about Iraq’s present and future. Sure, they have created a rather thin Iraqi facade with their carefully hand-picked so-called Governing Council and the equally carefully hand picked ministers, but these people have no actual power whatsoever, and some will even admit it off the record in private.
They won’t even let the Iraqis repair their own infrastructure. Why do people think none of the public services are at pre-invasion levels nearly one year later? It’s largely because the American rulers will not give access to the very Iraqi engineers and technicians who designed, built and maintained that infrastructure, so they can repair it. One friend of mine, I’ll call him Ali, was for years responsible for one aspect of the telecommunication system. As soon as the “shock and awe” phase was over, he and his crew went to work to make repairs and reestablish service. Within a couple of weeks they had managed to restore service to a few areas, and he went to tell the Americans. They told him to go home, stop work, and stop whatever service he had restored. They told him they had given the contract to a large American corporation and he and his crew were out of a job. Last week, nearly a year later, news media all over the country triumphantly announced that telephone service in Iraq had finally been restored – one of the Americans’ many unsung positive contributions to Iraq.
All this would be bad enough if the Americans were even remotely competent to run the country, repair the infrastrucure and so on, but they clearly aren’t. It is difficult to imagine a more amateurish, incompetent bunch of bunglers and fools – the Three Stooges look positively brilliant next to these clowns.
As a person who has always greatly valued the secularity and social progressiveness of Iraq, I never thought I would say something like this, but these days I am putting all my hopes in Ayatullah Ali Sistani. He alone has been able to bring the Americans to attention, and in my opinion he is the one person who has from day one managed the situation brilliantly and consistently in the best interest of all Iraqis. In the beginning many of us wondered what the hell he was doing – he seemed to be pandering to the Americans – but we should have trusted him. I hope he will continue to hold firm and succeed in putting Iraq back into the hands of Iraqis. God help us if anything happens to him.
Securing a favorable Status of Forces Agreement before Iraqis can elect a real government is absolutely key [for the Bushies], as is getting some kind of official rubber stamp for the economic system they are even now forcing into place.
Shirin, you’re absolutely right there. (As I’d already written a while back.)
I’m thinking, though nobody seems to be reporting on this much, that the UN officials must be doing some pretty serious negotiating/planning right now for the terms of reference for the conduct of any future, post-June UN election-monitoring presence in Iraq. Certainly, the UN bureaucrats would insist–after what happened last August 19–on a crystal-clear new Security Council resolution defining those terms of ref.
To me, that is the real story. The terms of reference must include some allocation of real responsibilities for the public-security part of the election-holding agenda. The US forces will be a part of that, I strongly expect… I don’t know if you read the pieces I wrote in Al-Hayat recently on the general topic of UN sponsorships of similarly tricky political transitions from illegal foreign rule to legitimate, democratically elected administrations?
Anyway, Shirin, just to let you know, too, that I really appreciate and enjoy yr presence on the JWN Comments boards. I don’t intend to let myself become obsessed by the diversionary and hostile Comments put up here by someone else…. (Okay, Lewis, that would be you.)
Helena,
No, I did not see your pieces in Al-Hayat. Could you post a link, or send them to me, please? I would be most interested. This is an issue we really need to focus on and think about a lot now.
Um, here’s the embarrassing thing, Shirin. Okay, here’s how it goes. I write the columns for Al-Hayat in English, send ’em to London, someone translates them (beautifully, in generally), then they schedule them… Often there’s a time-lag of between 10 and 30 days. So I don’t know exactly when they appear. And I don’t read Hayat daily, or indeed regularly at all… So I have to “rely on the kindness of strangers”, by and large, to tell me when my stuff appears there.
I am very interested in seeing when this particular series of three columns that i sent them, on the UN’s record of running transitions from illegal foreign rule to democratic indigenous rule, actually appeared. I sent all three of them together, at roughly the end of January. Then I went off to Egypt, Israel, and Palestine to have a few more of my own adventures. So I have no idea when they appeared…
The ‘Search’ facility on the English-language section of their website seems completely dysfunctional. And I don’t have an Arabic keyboard to do a search on their maiun Arabic-language section… If you have such a keyboard, could you search using my name; or “Namibia” or “East Timor” should also bring up what we’re looking for???
You can also get some of my thinking on this topic here on JWN: punch “Namibia” in the Search box here. This is a case, however, where I wrote more systematically for Hayat than I did here. (Not always true.)
Thanks Helena. I always use a keyboard which displays both alphabets (they are available on the internet, as are “stickers” you can put on the keys so they show both), so all I have to do is switch my software from one language to the other. But to save time, how do they spell your name in Arabic? There is more than one possibility there.
Shirin, yes, it’s the software thing I’d have to do, too… Maybe one day??
In the meantime, maybe you cd check if you’re at Hayat’s site sometime: he-ye-lam-ye-noon-long-alif, kaf-waw-be-alif-noon?
I was really quite pleased with those pieces. If you find them on the site, I would be very grateful if you cd post the links here or email them to me. Thanks!
Helena,
The software bit is very easy to do if you have Windows XP. Takes less than five minutes to change a few settings, that’s all. You might need the Win XP CD to do it.
Iraq’s Basic Law
An apology to readers for my absence–I’m studying for orals and I’m wrestling with an impossibly hard topic having to do with the asset-market theory of foreign exchange rates. Ensha’allah I’ll post about that this very night, but in the…
Fundamental Law–MacLean just doesn’t get it
(updated 0308 GMT 12 March) Below, I wrote that I’m mystified as to why the Fundamental Law per se is condemned. Here’s a shorter JRM:I’m not as horrified by the TAL [as Just World News & CSM writer Helena Cobbam…