Transition? What transition?

Update note, Monday a.m.– I wrote the following Sunday evening, before news came in that they’d brought the transition ‘ceremony’ forward. Most of the post still stands, except that where I’d speculated on a large-ish, TV-clip-friendly ceremony what they had ended up in a small back room, far from public view, for all the world like a drug deal or an illicit sexual liaison… Oh, and the flag on view–they had no space to ‘haul it up’– was the Saddam-era one… Read on…

Today, the counter on the CPA’s inimitable website breathlessly tells us, “4 days to a Sovereign Iraq©”. (Oops, how did that copyright symbol sneak in there?) If you go to this page on the CPA site, however, you’ll get a good idea of just how circumscribed that “sovereignty” will be.
That’s the page where they list and have (often non-functioning) “links” to the text of some 12 CPA “Regulations”; some 99 (and counting… ) “Orders”; 17 “Memoranda”; and a dozen or so “Public notices”.
It’s the “Orders” that are really important these days. You could call ’em diktats. You could call ’em edicts. You could call ’em fatwas. But “orders” is a fine, descriptive word. And that page even tells us about their status:

Orders are binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.

Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer has promulgated no fewer than 18 of these 99 orders since the beginning of May, and may well be promulgating additional ones even as I write.
“Penal consequences.” Sounds bad. And it could indeed be pretty bad, especially if anyone’s hoping for anything that might look like real sovereignty to be happening come July 1.
(That reminds me. I know from growing up in the UK that when a foreign country is “given” its independence there’s supposed to be a flag-raising ceremony. Have they figured out yet which flag they’re going to raise in Baghdad, come Thursday? Will it be the ridiculous, made-in-Washington “design” featuring the two suggestive blue stripes that Bremer came up with some weeks ago? Will it be Iraq’s traditional national flag, the red, white, and black stripes with the three green stars? Will it be Saddam’s adaption of that, that had “Allahu” and “Akbar” scrawled between the stars? Or perhaps, this?)
But anyway, I’ve been thinking some about flimsy, totally stage-managed “independence-granting” events that take place under circumstances of military occupation… The fate of the Palestinian Authority, created as a result of just such an event in the 1990s, immediately came to mind…

In spring of 2002, nine years after the PA was created under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the Government of Israel just summarily snuffed it out. Snuff! Just like that.
That was when Prime Minister Sharon sent his US-supplied warplanes and tanks to take out the PA’s entire security and economic infrastructure. He also summarily announced he “didn’t want to talk to PA Yasser Arafat any more”. And in June 2002, President Bush gave him substantial backing for that intransigence.
Since then, as we know, Sharon has gone even further toward defining and pursuing a purely “unilateralist” (= him and the Americans only) approach to stomping out the Palestinian “problem”.
But here’s the thing. Under international law Sharon could do that. It wasn’t illegal. Because despite the handover of some self-government powers to the PA after Oslo, Israel still, in law, enjoyed the prerogatives of an ‘occupying power’ over all the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
And those prerogatives included the power to work with a locally-appointed administrative council (the PA) if Israel should choose– or, to dismiss that council, if it should choose to do that.
(Remember folks, I’m talking international law here, not morality.)
Indeed, after Prime Minister Rabin signed the Oslo Accord with Yasser Arafat in September 1993, Israeli government lawyers were all at pains to point out that despite that act Israel still enjoyed all the underlying prerogatives of the occupying power… They could withdraw from Ramallah if they wanted, or go back into it. They could withdraw from Gaza if they wanted, or go back into it… But until there is a binding, final-status peace agreement under which Israel cedes territorial control finally and completely to a successor power, Israel still had all the occupier’s powers there.
H’mm. What does this tell us about Thursday’s so-called “handover” in Iraq?
As a political event, it will have considerably less credibility than Israel’s (sadly temporary) handover of some powers to the PA back in 1993-96. After all, no-one even tries to argue that the incoming “Iraqi” administration has any credible claim to “represent” the Iraqi people. It was appointed by Bremer, pure and simple. Okay, perhaps through the mediacy of the IGC; but that in turn was appointed by Bremer.
At least Arafat, in the 1990s, had the aura of having been the head of a genuine national-liberation struggle. At least Arafat won a territories-wide election as president of the PA in a January 1996 election held under worldwide monitoring and supervision.
And Allawi??
I note that talented Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar has a fairly jaded view of the nature of the upcoming “transition”. he writes:

The ‘thing’ which I [am] supposed to be calling the Iraqi government is going to get the blessings of bush in something like a week or less…
The 30th of June is being marketed by the bush administration as THE day, the day that Iraqis are going to have their ‘freedom’ and take their brand new free Iraq on a plate of silver as we say in Arabic, in a very similar procedure of some ancient tribes having creepy ceremonies and making tattoos on the bodies of teenagers to announce their maturity and adulthood.
Doesn’t it need a bit more to announce our liberation?
The handover of the small-boring-administrative-responsibilities to some selected groups of Iraq employees (guards, policemen, ministers, president) is not going to change anything on the ground for Iraqis. The real authorities and decision makers aren’t going to leave the fence of the green zone. They will send someone in the early morning of the 1st of July to change the small dirty ‘CPA’ banner full of bullet holes outside the green zone, and replace it with a smaller one with ‘the American embassy in Baghdad’. Unfortunately, this embassy is going to be the real government. The embushy is going to rule Iraq by small ‘representative offices’ distributed all around the country…
[N]ow comes the time that both of us, Iraqis and Americans, should work hard to give Iraq its freedom back, to stop building permanent military bases in Iraq, and to change this colonial strategy in keeping Iraq under the American political and economical control.
The American army is building six permanent bases in Iraq, three surrounding Baghdad, one in the south, on in the east and on in the north… These six bases are the cancer in the body of the new Iraq.
I have a clear position towards the thing happening at the end of this month. As a secular person with national beliefs, I dont see the bush administration step at the end of this month anything more than a political trick that will add more confusion to the world about the reality of what is happening in Iraq, it will start a new chapter of what will appear as an Iraqi-Iraqi conflicts and clashes, which is in real an Iraqi American one, but with Americans hiding behind Iraqis.
This will come along with other distracting moves like starting the Iraqi Hollywood: The Saddam Trial.
The right wing, conservative administration occupying the white house came to Iraq with bad intention, and it is a waste of time to try to fix and discuss their resolutions and decisions.
Both of us, the Iraqi and the American people, need another administration with different ideologies to start rebuilding the Iraq-American (and maybe the Arab-American) destroyed relations.

For another, more ‘academic’ take on the nature of the transition, this short article by George Washington University prof Nathan Brown gives some valuable perspective.
Brown notes that Security Council resolution 1511 –the recent one– reaffirmed the “temporary nature” of the “specific responsibilities” given to the CPA. But, as he also noted, resolution 1511 also recognized the IGC and its ministries as embodying “the sovereignty of the state of Iraq during the transitional period.”
Which maybe just shows how screwed-up and “political” the Security Council is. (I am shocked–shocked!–to learn that the Security Council is political… )
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that back in 1993-94, the Security Council gave fulsome backing to the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the PA. Not that that did the Palestinians any good when Sharon’s tanks went rolling back into downtown Ramallah.
Well, talking of tanks, I think it is the actual conduct of the US military commanders on the ground throughout Iraq– who will of course be following the orders of their political masters in Washington– that will be the main factor determining whether Iraq’s “transition” ends up having any real content to it, or not.
Bremer’s last-minute flurry of edicts, fatwas, and ukazes will probably not be worth the paper they’ve been written on, from the moment that a genuinely inter-Iraqi political process takes hold. As I certainly hope it does. But if that process does take hold, and the major Iraqi parties come to agreement on a policies that include the need for the speedy and total withdrawal of US troops or any other genuine diminishment of the US’s current stranglehold over the country–what will the US tanks do then?
That, to me, is the question.
In the meantime, we can assume that the Iraqi “freedom-granting” ceremony this Thursday will be designed first and foremost with its potential uses for the Bush presidential campaign in mind. Hey, I’ll bet there’s even an old, rolled-up banner reading “Mission Accomplished!” that they could haul out and re-use! (And how about that dude in a flightsuit?)