Iraq open thread #6

So it looks like the latest US-“Iraqi” offensive against Tal Afar was predictably unsuccessful?

    Insurgents staged a classic guerrilla retreat from Tal Afar on Sunday, melting into the countryside through a network of tunnels… [Gosh, those sneaky Eye-raqis! Don’t you just hate it when they do that?]
    With the city swept clear of extremists for the second time in a year, Iraqi and U.S. military leaders vowed to redouble efforts to crush insurgents operating all along the Syrian frontier and in the Euphrates River valley… [bla-bla-bla]

It is, of course, almost exactly a year since the US-led forces decisively “took” Tall Afar the last time… And then, very rapidly, it fell back into the sway of anti-US insurgents.
This city has particular significance because of the strong presence within it– as within a few other key cities- of ethnic Turkmens, who have some significant backing within Turkey. A not-insignificant power in the region, in case you hadn’t noticed.
I guess my big question right now is why, in the lead-up to the October 15 referendum on the Constitution, the US and its allies inside Iraq seem so intent on antagonizing the Iraqi Sunnis?
Aaaargh, silly question, Helena. The imminence of a significant voting moment didn’t stop them from launching the attack against Fallujah last November, did it?
But you’d think that some “intelligent” power in Washington just might note that, in the run-up to a significant electoral moment in Iraq, it is not actually particularly helpful or appropriate to launch a new military offensive against the Sunnis??
Yeah, you might think that. If you cared about “democracy” and “inclusiveness” and all those fine things…
Anyway, I’m too tired to do much more to hunt down the details on this story right now. But if folks would like to post their own well-considered analyses, or info regarding the humanitarian costs of all these pointless operations, that would be really helpful.
Here’s your chance…

26 thoughts on “Iraq open thread #6”

  1. Haven’t Fallujah style assaults been occuring for some time now beyond the view of the media? How is this assualt different from the ones that have been going on against other cities?
    I don’t think this attack will lead to an election boycott; from what I have read Sunnis are trying to register to vote so they can nix the constitution.

  2. As I had predicted a few months ago, this blog has come to disuse and abandonment…
    [More nonsensical bla-bla from this perennial troll whom I banned from the blog three months or so back because of his repeated infractions of the guidelines.
    Raza, if you read this, go buy your own space on the WWW. You’re very welcome to continue your ranting there.
    Btw, re ‘disuse & abandonment’, this another area in which Raza doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about… The Distinct Hosts Served numbers are steadily climbing, as are the ##s of comments and commenters. I guess Raza didn’t even bother to notice that I put five posts up in the past two days, and they’ve already launched some interesting discussions.]

  3. We never got the full story on those ghastly beheadings of Nick Berg and others. Nor have we ever understood who killed the American mercenaries in Fallujah that eventually precipitated one of the great slaughters in history. Nor have we ever been able to discern if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is actually a real person or just another bin Ladenesque boogeyman. Nor if the al-Qaeda website which claims responsibility for various atrocities is not really run by the CIA.

  4. Salah,
    “…one of the great slaughters in history….”
    Come on! Do you know what “hyperbole” means?
    Razavipour,
    You are correct. This blog is a denial mechanism for “progressives” in cahoots with the world’s greatest reactionaries.

  5. Razavipour, your return speakng hatred as usual, but I prefer to ignore that.
    Because there is something in what you say. Not that there is anything wrong with this blog or Helena Cobban’s writing. Rather, it is that there is a general lull on the Internet. I think there are several possible explanations.
    The most crucial is that the critique that has grown up around the Iraq war has reached a stage of hegemony, but not power. Bush still stands up as President, even though the basis for his actions and his very presence in that position cannot be defended any more in any rational way.
    Those who have taken part in the building of this critique, largely through the Internet, consequently possess a strong degree of conviction and manifest support, and an opponent who is an emperor without clothes. Yet it seems not to be possible to take any further steps of any consequence. It is a hiatus.
    The Razavipours and WarrenWs sense this moment very well, seeing it as an opportunity to renew their aggressive insults without restraint. They are a symptom, also of their own impotence, because they have lost all the arguments by now, over and again, and that is plain to see. All they have left is a kind of irrational, fascist, stampeding tactic, which also is not going to work.
    The way out of this is for people to learn to build political organisation from first principles and from scratch in the USA. As somebody wrote today, the exposure of the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party has been the outstanding feature of the last four years. That must not be forgotten.

  6. Iraq testimony a blot says Powell ‎
    WASHINGTON: Former US secretary of state Colin Powell, who told the United ‎Nations that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction, has ‎conceded the assertion will always be a “painful blot” on his record.‎
    During a lengthy TV intreview‎ with Barbara Walters, of the ABC, Mr Powell tried to ‎explain how the West had made mistakes in the run-up to war.‎
    Asked whether the statement about WMD tarnished his reputation, the former general ‎responded: “Of course it will. It’s a blot. I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the ‎United States to the world and it will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s ‎painful now.” ‎
    http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/10/wirq10.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/09/10/ixnewstop.html
    West had made mistakes in the run-up to war.= West had made lies in the run-up to ‎war

  7. I found this report very alarming and agree with edq. Things don’t look much better in Tal Afar than in Falludja. With all reporters closed down in the Green zone, we are left with whatever the Pentagon wants to tell us. From this report it seems that they are using the same tactic as in Falludja : they gave 72 hours to a population of approximatively 400’000 inhabitants to evacuate ! There are no word concerning who is allowed to evacuate, whether it concerns all the population or whether like in Falludja all the males between 15-50 are kept by the troops.
    Concerning Helena’s remark that it’s unwise to undertake military operations against Sunnis just weeks before the vote on the constitution, I’m sure the Pentagon doesn’t care the least. They have already said publicly that the US troops were there occuying Iraq for at least a decade.
    I just hope that after Katrina, the US opinion will swing and the administration will be constrained to withdraw. Bush needs to be impeached.

  8. it seems not to be possible to take any further steps of any consequence. It is a hiatus.
    Dominic, I see the situation a little differently from here in Virginia. Despite the criticisms of last week’s big confab in DC that I voiced here, the fact remains that it did show that some previously very hard-to-voice critiques of the Bushies’ policies are indeed now entering the (elite) “mainstream”.
    This is an advance, even if it doesn’t go nearly as far as I would like to see. And more generally, the antiwar movement continues to grow in size and to transcend a number of different markers.
    I don’t see it as a hiatus, but as a gathering of steam.
    Yes, of course it would also be great if we had an opposition party here. But we enter this struggle for the conscience of our citizenry with the politics we have, rather than the politics we want… (And always with the intention of transforming of it.)

  9. I think you are right, Helena, and you all have got a good head of steam. I don’t want to discourage anybody. On the contrary.
    All I’m saying is that at a certain point one needs a new kind of vehicle. You do indeed start with the politics you inherit but you have to re-fashion it for the new purposes.
    I’ve partly got South Africa in mind as usual. We also have arrived at some kind of cathartic, or alternatively anti-climactic, point, because of our succession crisis. In our case we have to hang on to the structures we’ve got (the Alliance) and not jump for a new one.
    In the US case I suspect the experience of last year’s election means that the Democratic machinery can only be seen as a bottomless pit of lost hopes, and therefore abandoned. I could be completely wrong about this. I do wish I could get an idea of how the US people are going to take charge of their destiny again at alst.

  10. If the insurgents had stood up and fought you would have pointed out that this meant the war is going badly for the US. If they run away you also interpret this to mean that the war is going badly for the US. I know it’s difficult be objective about war but do give it a try.
    The Iraqi people clearly want democracy and do not want a minority pastiche of Sadaamists and al Qaeda wannabes to run their country. The call for the US to retire from the field in Iraq is a call for tyranny, oppression and mass murder on a large scale.

  11. The call for the US to retire from the field in Iraq is a call for tyranny, oppression and mass murder on a large scale. Posted by WarrenW
    I would say it is just the opposite. The longer the US military is there, the more civilian Iraqis get killed (either by US forces, terrorists who weren’t there prior to 2003, resistance fighters, or inter-tribal fighting). There are other indicators of how things are going in Iraq besides security- employment, electricity, water supply, water quality, medical care, standard of living, sanitation facilities, food production, transportation, oil supplies – and by EVERY indication, things are much worse than there now than they were before 2003 for ordinary Iraqis.
    But when you have a US federal government and US military that cannot get food and water to thousands of Americans for over four days when they happen to be “hiding” at a major US landmark in a major US city – well, we cannont expect much, can we?

  12. WarrenW, you are regressing like Hal 9000, the computer in “2001” that got more and more childish as its processors got pulled out one by one.
    How about some good news for a change? England winning the Ashes, for example?

  14. “the critique that has grown up around the Iraq war has reached a stage of hegemony, but not power. Bush still stands up as President”
    I also sense a period of malaise settling in. Dominic has identified part of the reason. But it goes beyond the war in Iraq, GWOT and all that. You have to remember that those things were originally conceived as tools for the implementation of a utopian economic theory, in which the natural law of the “free market” would finally reign triumphant over the globe. Remember the metaphor of the rising tide that would lift all boats? Well now we’ve seen what a rising tide really means.
    I think Americans are starting to realize that win, lose or draw in Iraq, we are in for some tough economic times in this country. We are like the chronic gambler who has mortgaged his house, pawned his furniture, abandoned his friends and family, and staked everything on a game where the odds were fixed against him from the beginning.
    I admire Helena’s optimism and hard work, and I hope she’s right about the beginning of a new dialogue. We have to start somewhere.

  15. John C.‎
    ‎I think Americans are starting to realize that win, lose or draw in Iraq, we are in ‎for some tough economic times in this country‎
    I don

  16. Salah, the gulf between the American people and their “leadership” is wide and growing wider. I agree with you that this is a perilous moment, when the moral weakness and incompetence of the would-be imperialists has been exposed, but they still have the ability to unleash horrific destruction. What can we do but keep trying to talk sense to people?

  17. JC and all, won’t you take a look at “Werther” in Counterpunch? The article is called “Jackals and Jackasses”. It’s at http://www.counterpunch.org/werther09132005.html .
    Werther doesn’t think that G W Bush will lose a lot of support because of the New Orleans disaster (but do read to the end).
    His point is that the US people are too stupid, as the Germans proved to be after Stalingrad. Bush’s popularity may even rise.
    Werther is not a cynic. I think he is a supprter of enlightened democracy in the same way that Machiavelli was, even while he was writing “The Prince”. Me, too. I’m not trying to say we can’t do the job. I’m only keen that we size the job up properly and don’t harbour any delusions about it.

  18. “Jackals and Jackasses”
    Werther has a good point about the 35% rule – not needing a majority to govern. I don’t find his claim of a “Stalingrad Effect” very enlightening as an explanation of current American politics. I don’t think we are nearly in a Stanlingrad situation. Because things are not that dire, it has been possible and will become even easier for centrist Republicans and even some of the “Christain coalition” to distance themselves from Bush-Cheney.
    It really was a very odd alliance between Jewish American Likudniks (the “neocons”), Southern Christian fundamentalists, Texas oil men, and old cold warriors that got us into this Iraq mess. These groups are not natural bedfellows. I guess I’m saying our Dear Leader is going to have trouble holding even his 35% base together for the next 3 years, as the military falls apart, the economy goes into a tailspin, and the professional pols start concentrating on 2008.

  19. JC,
    The name “Werther” is a reference to Goethe, isn’t it? “Young Werther”? This Werther is steeped in German references (I detect Clausewitz and Hegel in addition to Goethe), as well as being in his own life a “defense analyst” in the USA.
    I don’t think he is postulating a specifically Stalingrad-type situation. He is pointing to the subjective side of such situations. He is saying the opposite of what you are suggesting. The objective situation, even in extreme cases, does not spontaneously drive the subjective feelings of the mass of the people.
    So when you say “the military falls apart, the economy goes into a tailspin” and that it follows that “our Dear Leader is going to have trouble holding even his 35% base together” you are ignoring Werther’s main point.
    Werther is saying that the latter does not follow from the former, and I believe he is correct. Circumstances to not lead people en masse to come to better conclusions. Often the reverse is the case. It depends on the leadership.
    The formation of a collective subjective determination (I mean something stronger than passive “public opinion”) requires its articulation in the public forum. In short, if there is no other leadership, then the existing leader (a Bush, or a Goebbels) can quite easily turn a disaster of his own making into a public-opinion asset for himself.
    This is bound to happen in the present circumstances. Bush, with Rove and his whole entourage, are busily working to turn every circumstance to their advantage. They may do so in a crass way that makes you wince, but it works because they have a monopoly. The Democrats are nowhere, or else they are broadly complicit in the same project (of fooling all the people all the time). And the traditon of mass movement is broken in the USA.
    My question is, how is the challenge to be mounted? I don’t think you can answer, yet again, that when things get worse, they will get better, (i.e. because the masses will spontaneously come to their senses, in spite of the Bush propaganda). So what is your answer?

  20. Dominic-
    I understand and agree with the basic premise that worsening conditions do not automatically lead to a shift in political power, and may have the opposite effect, at least for a time. The 2004 presidential election in the U.S. is an excellent example. The reason I reject Stalingrad as a useful analogy is, as I said, because things are simply not THAT bad in the U.S. today (despite my many “doom and gloom” rants).
    Bush is only pretending that GWOT is a struggle for our national survival. People know, at varying levels of consciousness, that this isn’t really true. If the American people thought they were seriously in danger of annihilation, they would certainly rally around the Dear Leader, even if the threat was due entirely to his actions, as in Stalingrad. But in the absence of such a dire national emergency, greed and selfishness have room to express themselves in multiple ways.
    It’s not that I expect a popular revolution to overthrow our current system of government – far from it – although popular movements are possible, and can influence government (e.g., women’s suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights for blacks). Rather, I think the entrenched elites are getting fed up with all the bungling by their current representatives in government, and would like to get things back on a more normal track. The natives are getting restless (if you’ll pardon the expression), and that’s not good for the stability of the markets.
    I would expect to see the old establishment reassert itself over the next few years, since (contrary to some media reports) they have not gone away and still own most everything. At least some of those people have a sense of noblesse oblige (really nothing more than an upper class survival instinct) that may lead to marginally better conditions for the underclass over time. The New Deal, after all, was not the result of a proletariat revolution, but of Eastern establishment pragmatism.
    I suspect the Bill Clinton-Bush Sr. alliance may be a sign of something deeper and more important (to the elites) than raising money for disaster relief – likewise the Hillary-Newt alliance, Helena’s conference, etc. This is as optimistic as I get.
    My God, I’ve gotten longwinded. Sorry, Helena. It’s Dominic’s fault.

  22. JC, I have to reply, and thanks for the long response.
    What comes to my mind is a pamphlet I once saw years ago from a small ultra-left sect operating out of a print shop under the M1 motorway in Notting Hill, West London. Their logo was a picture of a huge blacksmith with a hammer in his hand, and the slogan was “If you don’t hit it, it won’t fall!”
    My problem with your contribution is that you are still detached. Even the popular movements (all from long ago) you mention are treated as phenomena, at arms length. What I want to know is who is organising, what are their names, what are their programmes. To what extent have they roused people and got them ready to “Hit it”?
    In that vacuum, the status quo survives. If it is not hit, it won’t fall.

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