The major media are usually drawn to war and violence like a moth to light. Bang-bang-bang!!! That will get you on the front page! Anyway, war is just so much more, well, exciting, and graphic…
All the better news to see, therefore, that Monday WaPo has an intriguing piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that leads with this:
- Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Sunday that he had held private meetings with representatives of insurgent groups from the restive cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra to persuade them to accept a government amnesty offer.
Allawi described the meetings as designed,
- to split the insurgency by luring lower-ranking members away from harder-core elements. Although he said he has not reached agreement with any of the groups, he insisted that some of the representatives are “changing horses . . . and taking the amnesty seriously.”
As Chandra notes, these meetings,
- represent the most significant effort yet to address the insurgency [in western Iraq] through political rather than military means.
Is peace about to break out in Iraq? Well, it’s far too early to conclude that yet. There is still a lot of violence and killing in various different parts of the country.
But still, it is notable that the dramatic initiative that Ayatollah Sistani undertook last week has cleared some space in which some political rather than only military interactions have started to happen.
Hallalujah!
As Chandra notes, Allawi’s meetings with the emissaries from Fallujah, etc., have not been the only acts of political bridge-building in recent days:
- There were signs on Sunday that a peace agreement was within reach in the Baghdad slum known as Sadr City, a stronghold of Moqtada Sadr’s that has been wracked by violence for the past month and was not covered by Friday’s deal in Najaf. After 10 people died in fighting in Sadr City on Saturday, a group of tribal sheiks allied with Sadr met with a U.S. military officer and an Iraqi police commander to hammer out a cease-fire deal.
An official with Sadr’s political office, Ali Yassiri, said the talks were productive and would continue on Monday. “All the indications are that we will reach a positive step,” he said.
Sadr’s representatives are pushing for an arrangement similar to the one implemented in Najaf: Armed militiamen would leave the streets in exchange for a pullout of U.S. forces, leaving Iraqi police to maintain order.
But Yassiri said a disagreement remained over what would become of the weapons used by Sadr’s militiamen.
Another version of that story about negotiations over Sadr City came earlier from the AP’s Todd Pitman:
- U.S. military officials and representatives of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held talks Sunday aimed at reducing violence in the restive Baghdad slum of Sadr City, a day after clashes there killed 10 people, officials said. British forces in the southern city of Basra, also the site of recent fighting, held similar talks with al-Sadr officials there.
Pitman confirmed that the major remaining sticking point in the talks was the decommissioning (or otherwise) of the local Sadrists’ weapons. Interestingly he wrote that Sadr City police chief Col. Maarouf Moussa Omran, “said all sides agreed to observe a one-day truce until Monday morning to give the Iraqi government time to discuss the results of the meeting.” But the American military had a different view:
- Lt. Col. Jim Hutton, a spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, said “there has been no agreement of any kind,” adding that the talks were not negotiations.
Let’s see how that works out, eh? And once again, pray for the best…
Oh, I just read Erik Eckholm’s piece in the NYT on the same subject. He gives a slightly different take from Chandra’s. According to Eckholm,
- The American military met for five hours on Sunday with representatives of the rebellious cleric Moktada al-Sadr in the volatile Baghdad Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City…
… and it was only after those meetings–which ended in a public handshake between Lt. Col. Gary Volesky of the United States First Cavalry Division and Mr. Sadr’s chief Baghdad representative–that the Sadrists’ negotiators went off to see Allawi.
Eckholm had virtually the same quote from Col. Hutton as Chandra. But he also had hHutton saying, “We are not pulling out of Sadr City, and we will make no change in the way we operate there. Our troops will go in and out as always.”
I guess it must be difficult for the Sadrists–or the folks from Fallujah or anywhere else–to know who it is they need to negotiate with to get a deal that sticks: Allawi or the Americans. But still, it’s extremely encouraging to me that all these parties are willing to try talking with each other…
All for their own, possibly selfish, reasons–quite possibly. But trying to sort things out through talking is always so much better a way than through bullying and violence! Through talking, relationships can be transformed, common ground found, violence de-escalated, and solutions found…
Thank God, again, that Sistani created the space in which that process could start to happen. I applaud, too, his steadfast focus on the whole question of elections. Elections truly are a common-ground project that can prepare the way for the rapid restoration of true sovereignty and the withdrawal of all US troops.
It can happen.
(Btw, what a pity that Chandra’s piece about the peacemaking moves gets stuck on the WaPo’s p.A18. Not “bloody” enough for the front page, I guess.)
I don’t see it. The whole reason for going into Iraq (the REAL reason) is to create bases for projecting an American presence in the region. America will NEVER leave there peacefully now that we are there.
Warren,
From what I understand the Bush administration has not stopped its project of building permanent military bases at all. It seems the plan is that these bases will, like Guantanamo, be considered U.S. territory, and therefore no Iraqi government will have the right to evict the American military from them.
While I do not agree with you that the bases are the sole reason for invading Iraq, I do agree that the U.S. will never leave peaceably.
Peace in Iraq is possible – even with the American military occupation. The occupation makes peace harder to achieve; however, it is still possible to develop independent democratic organizations with American forces in the region.
I hope that Bush will begin to withdraw troops from Iraq – even if it is for political pre-election reasons.
Sistani’s recent actions show him to be a good and intelligent leader. I think that he will be able to stabilize the situation – his next goal should be national elections. January is the promise; however, militant violence and the brutal occupation may impede the elections.
I agree with helena, the elections will serve as a rubric for any future movement towards peace.
Warren, I agree with you – in part. The reason for invading Iraq was geopolitical; however, with massive opposition at home and in Iraq the Bush administration may have to pull a Vietnam circa 1975.
Tony, until the Americans leave there can be no independent Iraqi processes of any sort – not democratic and not any other kind. The Americans must continue to control Iraq economically and politically in order to achieve their goal of transforming the country into a dependent client state.
Tony, you assume the administration WANTS ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’ in Iraq. In my opinion they do not. Both Isreal and Saudi Arabia would prefer a destabilized Iraq. As someone said (sorry, i forget who), “If you want to know the truth about Iraq, look at the size of the army we are ‘allowing’. A country with a 50,000 man army cannot defend itself, and must depend on others for defense”. That means a permanent American presence.
As i said in Helena’s post yesterday, i believe Sistani is making a fatal mistake.
I agree with y’all that it may indeed be the case that the Bush administration–and even, probably, Kerry– would strongly like to keep permanent military bases in Iraq. That doesn’t mean they’ll get what they want! Negotiations have a way of developing their own momentum… E.g., when De Klerk started talking w/ Mandela and the ANC, and even when he and his National Party agreed to democratic elections inside SA–they still thought the NP could win those elections (amazingly enough). So they were sort of beguiled into holding the elections and we saw what the outcome was…
Also, remember that the Bushies have already had to scale back their goals in this war effort. I firmly believe that, as of April 8, 2003, the most influential policymakers in Washington still saw the military victory in Iraq as just a prelude to forced “regime change” in Iran and Syria. But those goals pretty soon had to be set aside…
There is every possibility that this existing process of scaling back can be continued to the point we all want to see it at. (For me, that equals no US forces in Iraq or anywhere else outside US borders, and the transformation of the world’s security system into one under UN not US auspices–along w/ major reform of UN decisionmaking.)
I truly do not see any fairly elected Iraqi government signing any “treaty” w/ the US that gives the US permanent basing rights a la Gitmo. An independent “Kurdistan” might do so, which imho is a very good reason for Iraqi Arabs to find a way to keep the Kurds inside a federated state.
LIke most of you, I think that the US wants to install permanent bases in Iraq and thus the guerilla war can last for years.
One thing alarmed me in the deal proposed by Sistani : the last point. It wasn’t developped extensively by the news; many didn’t even mention it. Other only spoke about the necessity to hold free and fair elections in January. However in the first wire I read, Sistani was explicitly calling for a fast census.
What, aren’t they organizing this census since months ? There were already projects for a fast census lying on the table of the Provisionnal Authority in November 2002. It was then ignored by Chalabi and al. and by the CPA. Where are these works now ? If these works haven’t yet begun, it is really a bad sign for the coming elections. You need at least six months for a rapid census it seems already too late if it hasn’t yet begun.
Shirin, I agree with you – I don’t think that the Bush administration cares about the Iraqi people; however, a pax Americana in the region would be much better for public relations. In the aforementioned sense, Bush wants stability not democracy (any democratic government would be forced by its electorate to ask for the withdrawal of American forces).
Warren, how are Sistansi’s actions for a peaceful settlement a “fatal mistake”?
I am a troll waiting for Warren’s answer to Christiane. As a memetic direct descendent of Fatima, I favor the Alavid Shiite view of the individuation processs (ens) as a developmental biology of carbon in water life, living being a continuity of single cells. So what is Ayatollah Sistani doing wrong favoring elections and peace? Contemplate your death, and IBM think. Findow
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