Iraqi round-up

A lot has been happening in the world– including in Iraq– in the past
ten days.  I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last posted.  But
at least now I can  try to give a broad overview, based on what I’ve
been reading and on conversations I had in DC, of how I see things developing.
 Here are the headlines:

Iraq moves front and center of US politics

The internal debate over Iraq policy, inside the US political system, is
now more audible and prominent than it has been at any time since August-October
2002.  Actually, probably since long before then, too, given the paucity
of the debate at that time.  (But d’you remember Sen. Robert Byrd’s great
oratory?)

But once Congress had passed the war-enabling resolution, back in that traumatic
October of 2002 when nearly all the Dems were scared sh**-less by the prospect
of being tarred as “lily-livered pacifists” in the upcoming mid-terms, public
debate on the policy at the level of the national party leaderships became
almost completely silenced.  And especially, of course, once the invasion
had been started.

Since then, “Iraq”, and the tremendous human and financial losses it has
inflicted, has been the silent elephant in the room of  US national political
discourse.  The Dems couldn’t find a voice, or a policy they could visibly
unite around and proclaim as their own.

Well, they still haven’t.  But the rising casualty toll, the revelations
of continuing US war crimes, the failure to achieve anything credible on the
ground in Iraq, the budget crisis in this country to which the Iraq war has
so visibly contributed– all those factors, plus (heh-heh!) the salutary setback
the GOP suffered at the state-level polls earlier this month mean that the
once-silent elephant has started to trumpet its presence very loudly.

Okay, I recognize that in the US political context, talking about an elephant
starting to trumpet loudly could also be interpreted as referring to the Republican
Party, since the elephant is their symbol…. And in one way, that’s appropriate,
since the debate over Iraq policy that’s been going on inside the
Republican party has been at least as significant as the one between it and
the Dems.

And this has led to the really delicious signs of GOP disarray over how
to respond to Congressman Murtha.  Sure, the House Republicans tried
to stomp all over him.  (And the House Democratic leadership didn’t
do very well in defending him, either.)  But while Bush himself then
felt forced to intone talking-points about Murtha being a great patriot etc.,
Cheney was still adopting a very accusatory and weaselly public stance.

Bush administration forced to give some appearance of troop withdrawals

Behind the childish rhetoric of “staying the course”, the administration
has clearly made a decision that it needs to start presenting at least the
appearance of some movement toward drawdown of the troop presence in Iraq.
 I imagine their main motivators for this are (a) a long-overdue (and
still small) amount of budgetary and military-planning “realism”, and (b)
pressure from within the Republican party– especially after the most recent
elections here– to the effect that there needs to be a significant decrease
in the troop deployment before November 2006 if the party is to avoid getting
creamed in the mid-term elections…

In a way, none of this talk about “decreasing troop levels” should come
as a surprise.  As of this time a year ago, remember, the “plan” was
to have a small  increase in US and coalition troop deployment before
January 2005, in order to provide security for the Iraqi elections of that
month…  And then, according to the plan we were told about then,
once the January elections had been successfully held the troop levels could
be decreased fairly rapidly.

Well, the elections were held…. “Successfully”, from one very narrow technical
point of view.  (Though of course, very few Iraqi Sunnis participated
in them, including the hundreds of thousands of them who were simple unable
to participate in them.)  So then, according the US-proclaimed “plan”,
everything should have become much calmer inside Iraq, the country’s physicial
and social infrastructure could quickly get rebuilt, and the US and coalition
forces could rapidly be drawn down.

It didn’t happen that way, did it?  Instead of a period of calm, what
followed the January elections was a period of massive escalation
of inter-Iraqi violence.  With Shiite and other communities around
the country being hit by a long (and still-contibuing) string of atrociously
lethal and often quite indiscriminate violence, the US “plan” for a troop
drawdown in 2005 had to be put on hold.

The cost of maintaining the 150,000-person force inside Iraq over the past
year has been enormous.

The administration kept promising us that, after “just the next milestone”
things would get better in Iraq, and the troop levels could start to be decreased…
 That promise didn’t pan out after the January election.  It didn’t
pan out after the– long delayed– formation of an “Iraqi” transitional government.
 It didn’t pan out after an “agreement” was hastily cobbled together
on the text of a “constitution”.  It didn’t pan out after the constitution
was “adopted” in a “referendum” last month…

Now, the Bushites are promising that after the holding of the December 15
election in Iraq and the subsequent installation of a “permanent” Iraqi government,
the US will be able to start drawing down troops.  Because, they argue,
by then the Iraqis will be able to “stand up” more of their own forces, so
the US can start “standing down.”

I don’t believe a word of  what they say about an Iraqi central government
suddenly, in the aftermath of December 15, being able to craft a nationwide
political accord that will allow the emergence of peaceability and rebuilding
throughout the land.  But I do tend to believe a little of what they
say about intending to reduce the number of US troops in Iraq over the months
ahead.  (But they would do this for US-political reasons– see above–
much more than from any attitude of sober attention to the welfare of the
Iraqi people.)

I do not, however, see the drawdown that these guys are now planning
as being anything like the “rapid, total, and generous” troop withdrawal that
I’ve been advocating for a long time.

Three Iraqi courtiers

In the run-up to the December election in Iraq, three Iraqi pols have been
competing to seek support for their candidacy from the only place where–
they judge– it really counts for much at all: Washington.  In the world’s
imperial capital, we recently saw the arrival of two contenders for the mantle
of power: SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi and that amazing old re-tread,
Ahmad Chalabi.

The other person clearly courting Washington’s support in the election is
another re-tread: Iyad Allawi.  You’ll recall that Allawi was
the person who was so hated back in January that even though he had all the
advantages of incumbency back then, he was roundly defeated at the polls.
 Since then, there have been many revelations about the huge corruption
of his ministers, and he himself has spent a lot of his time in Amman.  If
there is anything like a fair election in December he is unlikely to do even
as well as he did last January.

Regarding Abdul-Mahdi, back in January he was one of the most vocal and
earliest Iraqi pols– apart from Allawi– to say openly that he would
not seek any rapid announcement of a timetable for a US troop withdrawal.
 Making his bid to become a courtier, even back then.  This time,
he was even quoted in the press as having assured Rumsfeld that under him,
Iraq would not object to the permanent basing of US forces in the country.
 (Later, he backtracked and said the issue was “still under study.”)

Of course, while Abdul-Mahdi was in DC last week, SCIRI’s image was also
somewhat marred in the view of the US public by the revelations about their
role in running torture-houses in Baghdad, etc.

The recent “rise” of Abdul-Mahdi’s stock in Washington DC is notable, given
(a) the close links between this party and the mullahs’ regime in Teheran,
and (b) the fact that Ibrahim Jaafari, representing the other main Shiite
religious party, Daawa, has been enjoying the powers of the prime ministership
in Baghdad since April or so…  But Jaafari– who in mid-2004 was described
as the “most popular politician in Iraq”– has clearly bombed since he took
office.  I think he is widely perceived by Iraqis as completely ineffective
in getting anything done at all.  (Actually, I wonder how fair such criticisms
are, given the lack of any national-level state infrastructure through which
he could have achieved anything– and also, the determination of the Kurdish
President, Jalal Talabani, to seize as much executive power as he possibly
could.)

If Allawi’s shtick to the Bushites is that he’s a determined secularist,
and Abdul-Mahdi’s that he is an authentice voice of Shiite Iraqis, then Chalabi’s
is that he can cover both these bases, and more. Including, that he has good
relations with Teheran. Chalabi, who has always had his finger to the political
winds, has also been trying to sell himself as the person whose leadership
of Iraq will enable a speedy withdrawal of US troops from the country.

My gut instinct is that– if the December election is conducted in anything
like a fair way– then neither Chalabi nor Allawi has a snowball’s chance
in hell of coming out the winner.  But Chala is such a slippery individual,
and I’m sure he’s figured out the way the new Iraqi Constitution might enable
him to weasel his way to near the top– well, let’s say, at least to a ministry
that, like the one he now has, gives him control over sizeable budgets.

Free and fair election ahead?

I don’t know, though, what reason anyone has to believe that the upcoming
election will have any integrity at all. The NYT’s Edward Wong has a
great account
today of an inspection visit that a member of the Iraqi Independent eelectroal
Commission made to the city of Baqouba, just 35 miles from Baghdad:

On Tuesday morning, clutching a black satchel, he boarded an
American Black Hawk helicopter inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone.
A second Black Hawk followed, its gunners carefully scanning the palm groves
and pastures below.

After landing at the main American base near Baquba, Mr. Muhammadi dashed
into a convoy of two Bradley fighting vehicles, four Humvees and three armored
sport utility vehicles. Soldiers from the Special Forces and the Third Infantry
Division sat inside, holding automatic rifles and grenade launchers.

How on earth can anyone think of providing for free political campaigning
and the conduct of a free and fair election under such conditions?  Beats
me.

(By the way, the people who run something called the “Next Century Foundation”
have written
something
that seriously criticises thw Gareth Porter piece about fraud in the October
referendumthat I quoted from
here
.  But what is the “Next Century Foundation”?   It seems to be
registered in London, and has huge numbers of peers of the British realm on
its list
of “patrons and trustees”– many of them, for some reason, apparently located
in Qatar…   Very strange.)

Rush toward ethnic cleansing

I should note that all the above developments at the political level (in
Washington and in Iraq) are taking place against a background that ground-level
reality for many Iraqis is an escalation of campaigns of ethnic and sectarian
“cleansing” throughout the country.  In Kirkuk and other contested areas
of the north, the Kurdish Pesh Merga is supporting a large-scale implantation
of new or “returning” Kurdish residents, and the displacement of non-Kurds,
both those who are long-time residents and those moved into these zones in
the past 20 years under Saddam.  In Baghdad, many neighborhoods have
seen an escalation of sectarian “cleansing”, most especially in the aftermath
of the revelations about the SCIRI-run torture-houses ten days ago.

I lived in Beirut when exactly the same kinds of ethnic-religious “purification”
campaigns were being carried out there– particularly in east Beirut, where
whole extensive suburbs that had been almost wholly Shiite were emptied of
their residents by the Maronute Christian militias.  Such campaigns–
like ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or Croatia, or the widepsread “exchange” of
populations that accompanied the partition of India– are always backed up
by the use of violence.  They also cause huge suffering to the people
and families thus displaced, as also to the social fabric of the nation.

Iraq, one of my very well-informed friends in Washington told me, is now
headed unstoppably toward political breakup.  The Kurds have no intention
of subjecting themselves once again to any significant degree of control from
Baghdad.  SCIRI, which is emerging as the most powerful force in the
Shiite community, has decided to pursue the strategy of creating a strong
Shiite “super-region”.  Very significantly, both the Kurds and SCIRI
deploy powerful militias, which have now been relatively fully integrated
into the US plans to rebuild “local” (and only nominally pan-Iraqi) security
forces.

Some people in DC now argue that the only way for an even halfway stable
political order to emerge in Iraq is for the US to support the establishment
(and relative empowerment) of a Sunni “region” to protect the interests of
the Sunnis amidst these developments.  “Relative empowerment” there refers
to the idea that this Sunni super-region would need much better access to
future oil revenues than it could get under the terms of the October constitution.

Indirect evidence that pursuit of a Sunni  “region”, prtected by its
own, Sunni militia may well be on Amb. Zal Khalilzad’s agenda comes from

this
report, by David Ignatius in today’s WaPo, which  talks about the Americans’
creation of a new unit in western Iraq called the “Desert Protection Force.”
 This could well be the germ of the Sunni militia that, under American
auspices, the  US commanders could think of as providing security within
a future Sunni “region” in the radically decentralized Iraq they envision
for the future.

Such plans may look realtively neat and feasible on paper.  But any
radical partition of the country into units of separate sovereignty will involve
considerable additional suffering…. And it may well be that there is
no stable way to split up the country over the long term.  What about
Kirkuk, and Mosul?  What about Baghdad, for goodness’ sake?  Who
“wins” that?  How could it possibly be split.

Baghdad as Sarajevo, anyone?

Clean US exit?  2006?  2008?

I imagine the folks in the Bush administration charged with “planning”
for Iraq may be hoping that something like the partition plan indicated above
might allow them to bring about a significant drawdown of the US troop presence
before the mid-term (US) election of November 2006, with a promise of a further
large (but not complete) drawdown between then and 2008.

I see that Juan Cole, meanwhile, is still hewing to his version of the so-called
Pottery Barn rule:.  Here’s what he
wrote
yesterday

I do believe that if the Americans aren’t very careful about
how they do it, when they withdraw there will be a civil war and possibly
a regional war. What Lebanon should have taught us is that when sectarian
conflicts develop into guerrilla war, and when the central government and
its army are for any reason paralyzed, a conventional war can easily ensue.
As for a statute of limitations on “you broke it, you own it,” whatever it
is it is surely longer than 2 years.

I appreciate his concern for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people.  But
there is so much to disagree about, regarding where that concern leads him!
 In that little quote, I really don’t understand what he means when
he says, “What Lebanon should have taught us is that when sectarian conflicts
develop into guerrilla war, and when the central government and its army
are for any reason paralyzed, a conventional war can easily ensue.”  That
wasn’t what happened in Lebanon at all.  (And I’ve studied that a LOT
more cloesly than Juan.)  In the internal Lebanese conflict, there was
never a definable phase of “guerrilla war” that was followed by one of “conventional
war.”  It was a civil (i.e., internal) war all along; and very early
on it involved the various parties to it establishing their own control over
as much terrain as they could, with the national army quite unable to stop
them…  This is exactly the situation in Iraq today, where the various
parties are striving to establish their own control over as much terrain
as they can, with the US forces quite incapable of stopping them and no “national”
army even in existence there.

So yes, friends, we have a civil war in Iraq.  This is what 32 months
of US occupation has brought the country to.  

So the proposition that the US– of all the potential nations in the world–
is the party uniquely capable of preventing a “slide into” civil war is fallacious
on at least three counts…

(I don’t have time to finish what I wanted to write here.  The family
is all about to arrive, and we’re about to start engaging in the annual American
Bacchanalia called “Thanksgiving”.  It will be great to have my three
kids and their significant others all here for the occasion. I’ll get back
to finishing this whenever I can.  I realize that the people of Iraq
have absolutely nothing to be thankful for at this time…. Except, perhaps,
the intriguing
statement
they were able to wring out of the recent Cairo conference which  called
for the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country, and stressed the legitimacy
of resistance to foreign occupation.)