I went to a talk that Juan Cole gave at the Middle East Institute here in Washington DC, this morning. The talk was along the lines that there are currently three simultaneous civil wars underway inside Iraq– and that the US has very little to do with any of them.
The first one he identified was the intra-Shia struggle for control of Basra. He noted, of course, the great strategic role that Basra plays within the whole country– as chokepoint for a large proportion of the imports going into it and, crucially, of the oil exports going out of it.
The second was the Sunni-Shia struggle for control over Baghdad. Here, his assessment seemed to be that the main effect of this year’s US military “surge” had been to disarm and weaken the Sunnis in Baghdad and the surrounding areas and thereby to hand a large victory– at least at the demographic level– to the Shiites there. (I have a few questions about this analysis, but it’s not bad as a first approximation perhaps.)
The third is the looming confrontation between Kurds and all others over control of Kirkuk, its surrounding province, and other areas of north-central Iraq including Mosul.
Now, I’ll confess I had to leave the session after the first couple of questions had been asked and answered. So maybe Juan covered the following points after I left. But my main queries about what he said had to do with his contention that the US has “little or no role” in these three intra-Iraqi tussles for power.
Indeed, in the main body of his presentation, he presented considerable counter-evidence to that thesis– including when he talked about the effects of the surge in Baghdad and in his repeated references to the large amount of support the US has given to SCIRI/IISC/Badr ever since 2003.
At a broader level, too, it is evident that none of these conflicts would have assumed anything like their current very violent and destructive form if there had been a functioning, national-level administration within the country– either a functioning national government, or a military occupation regime that took seriously its responsibilities under international law to provide effective administration of the country.
Note that I am absolutely not claiming that under Saddam Hussein there was no inter-group violence within the country. There certainly was; and during a number of specific periods it took on an extremely atrocious form. But we could note that from about 2000 onwards, there was very little lethal inter-group conflict inside the country. All potential parties to that had perhaps become worn out by the combination of the effects of past bouts of atrocious violence and the horrendous, grinding-down effects of many years of tough (and, actually, also mega-lethal) sanctions.
The US invasion and (mis-)occupation of the country reignited all the old inter-group hatreds and probably created some new ones as well. It gave a virtual carte blanche to vindictive groups like SCIRI and other Shiite factions and the Kurdish factions. (Remember the terrible mishandling of the “trial” and execution of Saddam Hussein, almost exactly one year ago today?) And most importantly, the US occupation completely failed to do anything effective to ensure the orderly administration of the country, leaving private groups bent on revenge for past sufferings free to roam the country at will.
So maybe Juan is correct at some technical, or “surface”, level to say that the US has very little connection on a day-to-day basis with the inter-group violence that is now, still, roiling Iraq. But none of us should take that to mean that the US– its government and its citizens– don’t still bear a massive, ongoing responsibility for the suffering there.
We do. Under international law and under general notions of responsibility and morality.
Trying to find a way to make up for the harm we have inflicted needs to start with a clear declaration that the US intends to get out of the country completely, and at the earliest possible opportunity. Then let’s work with the other nations of the world– including, certainly, Iraq and all of its neighbors– to find a way to design our withdrawal that will optimize the chances for stability in Iraq and the region as we leave. Under these circumstances, I am worried that too many people, listening to Juan’s analysis, might just shrug and say, “Well, we’re not really part of that violence there; we’re not responsible for what’s going on there any more… And besides, the Iraqis just have all these ‘primitive’ and ancient hatreds. Let them pursue them however they want. Whether we go or stay won’t make any difference.”
But it does. And so will the manner in which we leave. Wish I’d had the time to discuss some of these questions more with Juan while he was here.
22 thoughts on “Cole’s “three wars inside Iraq” analysis”
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Helena – About a month ago I heard Juan give what sounds as if it might be the same talk (it was organized almost entirely around a slide show).
My impression was that he wasn’t downplaying the US responsibility for the sad state of Iraq, but rather that current US tactics — the “Surge” to create space for national reconciliation, “Concerned Citizens,” etc. — bore little relation to the needs of the actual situation in the three areas of Iraq.
First of all what’s “intra-Shia”? Is it the right neck name invented by media and analysis’s like Cole?
For some whatever they like to name the struggle in Basra the richest city in Iraq where heavy weight oil wells around there, attracting some this group or other to take the control of the city.
Its clearly naive things for some like Cole to ignore the facts that this struggle in Basra is mainly between a group(‘s) related and supported from outside neighbour and Basrawies/Iraqis defending their city and refusing any power that come to invading the city in the dark of the chaos to control its richness.
It might be useful to pick your attention of those 300,000 Southern Iraqi (its not easy number can be ignored unless deliberately) from Sheiks, Academics and engineers doctors and others singing paper which mainly related to Basra struggle refusing and alarmed by the foreigners forces and mangling in southern Iraq.
Identified intra-Shia struggle to control of Basra without taking in full context the Britt’s occupying forces and their allied their with US occupied forces, is a matter of theocracy and faking the truth by some like Cole, as if Iraqi have all the freedom to expressing their desire with stable and honest mediator which not in Iraq case at all.
The theory Divide and Roll still keep give birth in Iraq and taking place whatever analysis talking and reading Iraq case, sadly they reading and talking from their comfort offices with Western mindset foyer
I think that based on Prof. Cole’s writings in general, the idea of “having no role” may be not that the US has had no *effect* on those conflicts, but rather that there has been no ability to have an influence in the direction the US chooses. The bull in the china shop may have an effect on the contents, but doesn’t have a role in the decor.
Whether an administration that behaved more rationally and was less anti-intellectual *could* play an effective role is a separate question, I think.
H,
What do you make of this tragic situation?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7140724.stm
Helena, when you say “maybe Juan is correct at some technical or surface level…” I wonder what you’re basing that on. For instance, have you looked at the question of US support for SIIC in the South as a factor in the emerging polarization of the Shiite tribes in that region and decided that element of US policy is not significant? Have you considered the arguments of Dhari and others on the divisive effects of ongoing US policy and decided you can refute them? Or you saying these factors are not “day to day” but rather week to week or month to month, but what difference would that make? Or as it unfortunately seems to me, have you just sidelined those issues, and that “maybe” or yours just means “to me it is irrelevant what the current US military policy is” because it is bound to be benign?
intra-Shia struggle to control of Basra without taking in full context the Brits’ occupying forces
Salah…I thought the Brits have pretty much left Basra.
Salah…I thought the Brits have pretty much left Basra.
They handover the security as said, but they are their Truesdell, just near the Basra Airport and camps near the oil wells and who knows where are they and those SIS hid?
Cheek with your angles Truesdell. Where are they.
Badger, sorry that I wasn’t clear enough… In response to your question:
Or…have you just sidelined those issues, and that “maybe” or yours just means “to me it is irrelevant what the current US military policy is” because it is bound to be benign?
Absolutely not!
When I wrote, maybe Juan is correct at some technical, or “surface”, level to say that the US has very little connection on a day-to-day basis with the inter-group violence that is now, still, roiling Iraq what I meant was only that it is not the US soldiers in person who are gunning down or ripping throats of most of the Iraqis who these days are having such things done to them– bit, as I had hoped to make clear elsewhere in the article, the US occupation authorities set in train and exacerbated all those processes by decisions it made fr at least the first four years of the occupation, and possibly right through to today, so it can’t possibly claim innocence.
This is broadly analogous to the role the IDF played in the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982, but perhaps not quite as extremely blatant as that role (which was of course strongly criticized by the kahan Commission.)… But many Israelis and pro-Israelis to this day still claim that the S&S massacres were “just a case of Arabs killing Arabs so why should Israel be blamed for it at all?”….
On this issue of whether or not the US bears any blame for Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence since “the Iraqis have all these ancient hostilities they can’t resolve,” I remember a telling comment (back at the height of the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence in the spring of 2006) by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Haass was clearly worried about the spread of anti-US opinions around the world (recorded in polls by orgs like Pew) and disturbed by the way America’s international reputation had crashed and burned due to the unfolding disaster in Iraq. I believe he spoke at a press conference organized by CFR and his words were something to this effect: “at the end of America’s stay in Iraq…” people in the world must not perceive that the US bears the blame for what went wrong. By implication, he was saying the blame needed to be shifted to some unnamed entity… Iran? Aliens from Mars?
Haass had this unsettled look on his face and he was practically pleading with opinion makers and policy makers to find some way to divert blame from the US in order to turn down the heat on America’s reputation. It almost seemed he was asking for someone to devise an alternate narrative for what went wrong in Iraq because at the end of the day America’s reputation as a “beacon of light for humankind” can not be lost.
…fear and trembling at the moment when the empire becomes overstretched…
Much better for folks like Haass that Iraq’s story gets spun so people believe it is a violent place because “the Iraqis have all these ancient hostilities they can’t resolve.” It obviously can’t be true that (I write this with a thick layer of sarcasm) US policy making under the neocon’s influence would ever intend to stir up Sunni-Shia or Arab-Kurd-Persian fighting as a way to reposition the pieces on the chessboard and relieve the kingdom of David from pressure building inside its domain.
Helena, your quick advice on how to view the hyperlinks on your weblog did not work on my Mac … I guess I need to find time to take one of the online courses. It is hard to believe the process is so difficult that one must pay with a Visa card for instruction. I must be spoiled in the academic world where our institutions have webpages pre-designed for weblinks and downloads, etc.
Sd:
There is a great little HTML reference site and on this page you can see exactly how to turn text into a hyperlink using HTML code.
If the information on that page is not clear, here are the steps:
1. Type the following inside of a pair of these brackets > . Where the spaces are is important.
A HREF =”http://addressofwebpage.com”
5. Type the text you want to turn into a hyperlink.
6. Type /A inside two brackets.
If you do it correctly, then voila! You have created a hyperlink.
Arabs killing Arabs
Oh yah you are right, but unfortunately this not applicable to Iraq as Iraqis living for 4000 years together the only who are responsible of Iraqis massacres is those invaders of their land.
May be very useful Helena and other friends here to know this fact that for that last 1000 years Iraq were invaded 10 times by different Empires and powers in each single invasion Iraqi massacred by the invaders.
“Arabs killing Arabs” why some do not telling the truth who killing the Arab Iraqis? Did you biased or you afraid of the facts and the truth? Or your believe inline with those killing Iraqis?
Juan Cole’s analyses have never been particularly impressive when it comes to Iraq. In this one he misses, among other things, the nationalist vs. separatist element as well as the nationalist vs. willing-to-accept-outside-domination-in-order-to-obtain-and -keep-power element, which is often referred to as “puppet”.
It’s not that I discount Juan Cole completely when it comes to Iraq. He does have a lot of good information. Unfortunately, he also has a few VERY strong biases that get in his way, and there is also something missing. He seems to approach Iraq from a distinctly American point of view. He just doesn’t “get” Iraq. It might help if he had ever been there – or it might not.
It might help if he had ever been there – or it might not
You know the guy “Don Imus“ who made a racially comment on airwaves, after eight months he is back again, but what interesting in his recent comment is the last bit when he said:
“Other than that, not much has changed. Dick Cheney is still a war criminal, Hillary Clinton is still Satan and I’m back on the radio.”
So people who were supporting the war in Iraq with believe in all the lies of unjustified and inhuman unforgivable war in Iraq they choose to ride US administration’s war ship for some reason or another.
Then after they claimed they are now changed their position about the war in Iraq! the fact is they are very similar to Don Imus’s change except they did not fired, they are like lizard they changed their color.
So Juan Cole one of these guys, with doubt he changed much when speck about Iraq and Iraqis without biased view, as Don Imus said still Dick Cheney is still a war criminal, Hillary Clinton is still Satan and Juan Cole continue analyzing Iraq war there is no change in his talk if he were their on the ground in Iraq or not.
War fatigue, as I was told by an American friend, has hit the publishing world in the West, so can we imagine what is happening to the Iraqi individual?
People in Iraq want peace, stability, jobs, paved streets, no concrete walls, no human corpses floating on the River Tigris, electricity, clean water and to never ever have another Saddam Hussain in the presidential palace.
http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10173652.html
Thanks Shirin!
To see if it actually works, Arabic readers may find this Al-Ayyam article of interest. Al-Ayyam is the main daily circulation newspaper in Aden, Yemen, and the article refers to the mass attendance at the funeral procession of the four October 14 Radfani martyrs … something I referred to in an earlier thread Helena posted 2-3 days ago.
The weblink also has a few photos so even non-Arabic readers can get some idea of the popular civil disobedience protest movement that has been ongoing in Yemen for 2+ months. Occasionally the text of articles on the Al-Ayyam website appear in white color against a white background, so it is impossible to read the body of the article unless one highlights the white background areas by using the mouse to click/drag to the bottom of the article. Often I will cut and paste the text onto a blank file, and there change the color of the text.
Well done, Sd! The link worked perfectly.
Just one suggestion – use less text for the link. Just one to a few words will do fine.
Yes, this was unintentional. I did not realize the text following the link’s coded closure (A/) must appear on a separate line. Otherwise everything gets painted with the same color brush.
Actually, no, Sd, it does not need to be on a separate line. But if you typed A/, that was incorrect. It should be /A, and it needs to go between pointy brackets (this kind >).
But the link works, which is good.
I realize we’ve gotten onto the “wrong” topic here, but SD I’m glad you’re starting to get the hang of the hyperlinking… (with Shirin’s and my help.)
Pretty amazing and sad about that disappearing text there. I found that hitting Ctrl-A revealed all the text– but it also painted all the photos blue.
Ctrl-A –
means select
_ In Browsers all page or “text+Image”,which highlights all page
_In MS Doc or Notepad select all text which highlits all the text.
In case to copy, paste, cut any text or page, highlighted your selection and use the following short cut commands:
Ctrl-C _ Copy
Ctrl-V _ Paste
Ctrl-X _ Cut
to the deafs: read this
More than 85% of the residents of Basra believe British troops have had a negative effect on the Iraqi province since 2003, an opinion poll suggests.
Basra residents blame UK troops
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7144437.stm
FEITH AND BREMER: TRUTH IN COMMISSION, LIE IN OMMISSION
per the WashPost,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121001815.html
Speaking before AEI, the defunct Cold War think-tank
bought by the neocons at 5 cents to the dollar, Doug
Feith, ex-UnderSecDef tells us that he was denied
implementation of his plan for quick US withdrawal
form Iraq by Bremer, Bush’s Proconsul to Iraq. Bremer
tells us that Bush demanded that he be Proconsul for a
long occupation, so blame Bush not him. In fact, both
are telling the truth by commission and are liars by
omission. Feith served the neocon goals per the
proposal to make Israel dominant in the Middle East by
Perle et al. How harebrained the proposal was is made
clear by the repudiation of it by the very Israeli PM
Netanyahu that had commissioned it. But who cares what
Israel thinks….The real issue is what the neocons
want to do to prove that under all their estrogenic
flight&fear tendencies lie the souls of real “mensch.”
They were going to shove their plan down Israel’s
throat until it cries out: alright already, you are
all real mensch, so stop this World War IV already!
Unfortunately, pompous naivete and the egos of which
Greek tragedies are made caused the not so bright
mediocrities (despite their genetic linkage to some of
the world’s brightest inbred people) to step on their
own tongues; they– as History would have it over and
over again– were played for fools by the Anglo-Saxons
running the oil industry. While the neocons thought
that Iraq was the beginning of cutting the arms and
legs off of Islam so that Israel could dominate the
Middle East (thus forcing Israel to instead say: wow,
you guys are really mensch, given how you got America
to do your bidding against the “Islamofascist” voices
you hear in your heads) through a blitzkrieg that
would make both Hitler and Sharon gawk in wonder at
how we “dumb Goyim” could be pushed into yet another
sequel to the Crusades, Rumsfeld and Cheney had other
plans. Their goal was to repeat the reptilian
Churchill’s bit about the sun never sets on….as OPEC
eclipses. It looked like a “slam dunk” until it turned
out that a lot more Muslims than the 19 that drove
airliners into buildings were ready to die blowing
American troops to bits, even if not for Saddam, at
least for Allah.
Because Feith is demonstrably (just read the
transcript of his AEI speech and the proofs of his
book, amongst his many jaw-dropping signs of
“brilliance”) everything that Gen. Franks said about
him (himself not a paragon of brilliance), he and his
neocon fellow “cabal-ists-in-mediocrity, really
believed that “Rummy” was their guy and Cheney a
reliable stooge. This is not the first time that the
oily oil men went along with this cast of characters,
only to drop them off and do their own thing. While
Iraq was supposed to atomize en route to Iran, assumed
Feith, a good first step would be to make sure that,
not only would it be denied WMDs known not to exist,
but he would make sure that it never ever again would
have an army with which to threaten Israel. This would
be the showplace of the neocon Jabotinskyite “iron
wall.” Then would come Iran and Syria, and Egypt
pushed into chaos in the name of “democracy.” The
Saudis would not be far behind and the Palestinians
would have nowhere to go but in Jordan. And so, “the
kid” was given the honor of writing the memo that blew
Bremer’s mind– just as it did Garnder’s, his
predecessor. Rumsfeld– informed AFTER THE FACT– was
reminded that his presidential prospects in 2004
depended on his NOT reneging on it, so he endorsed it.
At the same time, the oily oilers also saw in the
demise of the Iraqi army a chance for occupation of
the oil fields, run by compliant Iraqi-Americans and
their anything goes stooge, Chalabi. Alas for them,
Saddam’s minions had emptied the Iraqi kiddie and were
able to buy themselves an insurgency before Saddam got
caught. It was all preplanned by Saddam himself, per
Malcolm Nance, the brilliant insurgency intel expert
in his TERRORISTS OF IRAQ. But no one in the neocon
circle-jerk ever figured that Bush would be led by the
oilers. As Bush created a Shia Iraqi Government that
he thought would comply with the anti-OPEC demands of
the oily oilers, the neocons were yelling “foul.” So
Bush cut them out of his second term, seeking to
convince Iran and the Shia masters of Baghdad that oil
generosity would make the US very friendly. Alas,
nationalist Sadr got in the way. Maliki yes-ed Bush
all day, but never allowed Bush’s PSA scheme to become
law.
Another interesting twist was the neocon attempt to
reassure the oilers that they don’t need fear the UN
declaration that America’s oil grab is a war crime by
attacking the UN for its oil-for-food operation as
corrupt. They didn’t realize that the USA oilers were
in that oily corruption to their necks as a way of
manipulation world market oil prices. So again the
neocons got burned, left only to insist that America
can run on love and so doesn’t need Arab oil.
At the same time, Sharon was using World Zionist
conclaves in Israel to tell the neocons: you are
Americans, stick to your own politics, stop being the
schmucks who screw things up here for us. Out of
influence in both the US and Israel, the neocons began
to fragment by 2005. Those who had thought that McCain
was their man attacked Bush and those who insisted on
sticking with Bush so as not to be deemed authors of
defeat called for victory with GW. Bremer simply said:
it wasn’t my fault, I WAS ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS!
Feith was kept in the closet for fear that his utter
nakedness might prove embarrassing (even more than
Bush’s). Everyone was looking for both a scapegoat and
for a knight. With all presidential prospects up in
smoke, Rumsfeld-Cheney went into damage control. But
what’s there left to control once you are politically
six feet under?
Hiding behind pear-shaped military “experts,” the
neocons continued to argue that victory is still
possible. However, they insisted, Bush-Rice were
making such a mess of the world that there seemed
little credibility in the fruit-shaped advocates of
someone else’s mom and dad fighting in Iraq while
their children see the national debt skyrocket at
their generation’s expense.
Feith is now allowed to defend himself now because
there’s no greater damage he could do to the neocons
than the neocons have done to themselves already. As
for Bremer, he wrote a credible “ain’t my fault, I too
was ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS” book, so why not let Feith
go and prove that he is indeed one of the chosen
[neocon] people.
For a while, working corruption and fraud from the
shadows, the neocons literally got away with murder.
But now, instead of “mensch,” they are considered
utter “putzes” by Israelis left to right. Worst still,
by desperately grasping for them as he sought to avert
defeat through escalation, Bush showed that neither he
nor them are capable of learning, repeating a
neocon-bis-strategy as of 2006, cheered on and
represented by Sen. Lieberman, a neocon Rep-Dem
hybrid.
This time, all insist that the Petraeus surge “is
working,” though Petraeus refuses to say so for he
knows that distributing cash in Anbar to buy himself
the best Sheiks money can buy, as Saddam had done
after his defeat in order to start an insurgency, can
easily turn into a new insurgency against Petraeus
once the cash runs out or the Shia regime in Baghdad
cuts them off.
The recent Iran nuclear NIE that the intel agencies
made public is the oilers’ way of saying: better
expensive oil than no oil at all. They are ready to
set a date certain for US withdrawal– for AFTER a new
President faces the consequences. And so we have come
full circle from where Feith on behalf of the neocons
and Bremer on behalf of the oilers made a mess of the
American “unipolar moment” that is so bad that almost
any dumb thing– including this diatribe– could be a
truth of commission but a lie of omission. When things
get into the realm of “dumb,” no one’s right, no one’s
wrong. Alas, hundreds of thousands of Arabs whose only
desire was freedom from Saddam and thousands of
Americans whose only wish was to keep America safe
after 9/11 have been wasted with no one left to
replace them who would want to do anything that might
make the whole thing worth while. From Bush down, the
rule is: lie, lie, lie and repeat that it’s “THEIR”
fault [Democrats] until people get so sick of it that
all they want is to forget the word “terror,” wishing
only for a reliable oil flow to fill-er-up their SUVs
at whatever the price.
Sorry to say but this will be a sad Holyday Season for
us all
Daniel E. Teodoru