Author: Helena

British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt has spoken out forcefully in favor of a swift withdrawal of British troops from Iraq:

Sir Richard’s lead in shining a light on the Armed Forces extends to the mission in Iraq. He says with great clarity and honesty that “our presence exacerbates the security problems”. “I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war-fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning.
“History will show that a vacuum was created and into the vacuum malign elements moved. The hope that we might have been able to get out of Iraq in 12, 18, 24 months after the initial start in 2003 has proved fallacious. Now hostile elements have got a hold it has made our life much more difficult in Baghdad and in Basra.
“The original intention was that we put in place a liberal democracy that was an exemplar for the region, was pro-West and might have a beneficial effect on the balance within the Middle East.
“That was the hope. Whether that was a sensible or naïve hope, history will judge. I don’t think we are going to do that. I think we should aim for a lower ambition.”
Sir Richard adds, strongly, that we should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems”. “We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear. “As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited into a country, but we weren’t invited, certainly by those in Iraq at the time. Let’s face it, the military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in.
“That is a fact. I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.”
He contrasts this with the situation in Afghanistan, where we remain at the invitation of President Hamid Karzai’s government.
“There is a clear distinction between our status and position in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which is why I have much more optimism that we can get it right in Afghanistan.”
There is a logistical as well as a moral reason for concentrating on the mission in Afghanistan. Sir Richard talked last month of the Army “running hot”. Our troops are stretched to capacity. We have only one spare battalion. Almost everyone is going to end up serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The whole interview there is worth reading. Ditto these later clarifications to the BBC.

Steve Negus wrote in the FT yesterday about the distinctly rumpish-looking session the Iraqi “parliament” held yesterday to discuss changes in the Constitution that will specify and facilitate the devolution of many powers to “regions”. (Hat-tip to Juan for that.)
Negus wrote that there were “approximately 140” MPs present. Az-zaman apparently wrote that there were 138. 138 is the minimum needed to form a majority (and therefore also a quorum? info on quorum requirements, please?) in the 275-member body. Negus wrote that all the legislators present at yesterday’s session voted for a law that would,

allow Iraq’s 18 governorates to hold referendums on whether to amalgamate into federal regions similar to the Kurdistan self-rule zone in the north, which has its own regional government and security forces.

He notes that,

Shia and Sunni leaders agreed last month to delay the law’s implementation for at least 18 months, postponing the creation of any new autonomous regions until 2008.

However, it’s not clear to me what will be gained from this delay, except yet more bloodshed, given the extreme bad faith with which the proponents of radical devolution (also sometimes misnamed “federalism”) in Iraq have been acting. Including in the way they rushed to convene this session.
Beyond that, given the horrendous situation through which most Iraqi communities are now living, I wonder what the meaning and true impact of this “legislative act” really is. Will it make any difference to the lives of Iraqis? My understanding, from poll data and other sources, is that the vast majority of non-Kurdish Iraqis, including probably a majority within the Shiite community, want to keep Iraq as a unitary state (but that if the Kurds want to grab a lot of powers to their region, at least the non-Kurdish parts of the state should stick together.)
In the period of mayhem and civil conflict that almost certainly lies ahead (given the trend line under US occupation so far), what difference will this “legislation” make? And indeed, what is the relevance of this whole, Green Zone-bound Iraqi “parliament” at all, at this stage?
What relevance it has at this stage derives, I believe, almost solely from international factors. Most evidently, from the support it gets from the US occupying force, which has been able to shoe-horn the present, parliament-derived Iraqi “government” into a degree of international “legitimacy”. (This is similar to the way the US has been working, regarding Somalia, to shore up the international “legitimacy” and recognition of the warlord-dominated, Baidoa-based government, rather than that of the Mogadishu-based Islamic Courts regime, which seems to have considerably more popular support than Baidoa.) In times of civil turmoil, “recognition” by external governments is an important political asset that can be parlayed into further political/diplomatic support, military support, the ability to conclude lucrative contracts (as the Kurds have been doing with the oil supplies in their region), etc etc.
So much for the longheld American idea that the legitimacy of a government derives from the consent of the governed, eh?
So in the present circumstance, regarding the present Iraqi parliament and government, it seems clear that 138 MPs are on board this dangerous “legislative” campaign to split the country. But if 138 (or 140) is the greatest number the splittists can muster, then I think that is fairly pathetic. At the very least, it means that any procedures they enact in the field of devolution will have poor popular support. Either these procedures will die on the vine, or they will be highly contested and yet another cause for internal discord. Either way, they do not point the way, in Iraq’s ethnic-Arab areas, to any orderly progression toward a robust and popular supported devolution of powers. All that this “legislation” really does is give more legislative support and “legitimacy” to the Kurds’ own, already-existing march toward very robust autonomy.
I imagine some quite considerable amounts of money passed hands to ensure the convening of this session.

I’ve now had the chance to start reading the latest, very disturbing Lancet study of the mortality rate inside Iraq since the US invasion. The researchers, who were from the very well-regarded Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, conducted a face-to-face household survey of a near-proportional national sample of 40-household clusters: 1,849 households comprising 12,801 people.
Extrapolating from this sample, they calculated that with 95% certainty, the number of “excess deaths” suffered in Iraq between March 19, 2003 and the end of June 2006, over what would have occurred had the pre-war mortality rate been sustained, was between 393,000 and 942,000, with the best estimate being around 655,000.
These are shocking figures, by any measure. These researchers used the same methodology used during their earlier study, two years ago, which at that time found around 100,000 excess deaths.
In the interviews, the household heads or their spouses were asked about all the births and deaths in the household in the period between January 2002 and June 2006, with the cause of death (if known), and the production of death certificates where possible. They later divided the reported deaths up into four time periods of roughly 13-14 months each: (I) January ’02 – March 18, ’03; (II) March 19 ’03 – April ’04; (III) May ’04 – May ’05; and (IV) June ’05 – June ’06. If you go to the bottom of p.4 of the Lancet study, you will see that the crude mortality rates reported during these four time periods were as follows:

Period I (pre-war)– 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people/year
Period II– 7.5 ….
Period III– 10.9 …
Period IV– 19.8 …

So you can clearly see not only that the numbers are large but also that they have been growing steeply throughout every year the US has stayed in Iraq.
That is an extremely important finding. It corrobrates what has been evident to all of us who follow the daily news reports.
So where are the arguments of those who, one year ago, or two, or three, were claiming that the US “owes it to the Iraqi people” to stay in Iraq to “help fix the mess we inadvertently made there” (the so-called “Pottery Barn rule)…. ??
As I’ve been arguing here all along, yes, the US does owe the Iraqi people a lot. But maintaining our military and political presence in the country is not the way to make their lives better.
I would go further on this issue with my old friend and colleague Juan Cole, who has made this argument numerous times– as well as the related argument that “the US cannot leave Iraq now because of all the mayhem and killing that would follow such a pullout.” But at least today Juan had the grace to write this:

I once warned that a precipitate US withdrawal could result in a million dead a la Cambodia or Afghanistan. Little did I know that the conditions created by the US invasion and occupation have all along been driving toward that number anyway!

All I can say, Juan, you had no excuse not to know. So now, do you have the further courage needed to say, “Well yes, maybe for the sake of the Iraqi people the US military should pull out of the country in the fastest way possible”?
As for the reactions of US pols to the publication of the study’s results, here’s what Reuters reported that the much-respected (!) public-health researcher and social scientist George W. Bush said today:

“I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top U.S. commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials.”
Casey, at a separate Pentagon briefing, said he had not seen the study but the 650,000 number “seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don’t give it that much credibility at all.”
Bush said, “I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me.” But he called the study’s methodology “pretty well discredited.” [Like he would know what a credible methodology would look like? What a sad, sick joke. ~HC] Last December, Bush estimated 30,000 Iraqis had died in the war.

That would probably have been based on the Iraqi Body Count, which today is reporting that “between 43,800 and 48,700” Iraqis have verifiably been killed from direct violence since the invasion. But the IBC’s methodology is notably not an epidemiological approach; and indeed it relies on extremely tight reporting criteria. Namely, that to be counted at all, any death or group of deaths must have been reported in two separate public media and must have been directly attributable to physical violence.
But given the huge difficulty of newsgathering in Iraq, and of news distribution, this methodology has been becoming more and more useless as a way of counting exactly how many Iraqis have lost their lives due to the mayhem in their country since March 2006.
Personally, I want to be conservative in my use of the latest Lancet figures. So I think I’ll tend to “use” them by saying something like “almost certainly, more than 400,000 Iraqis have lost their lives because of the US invasion and occupation of their country.”
Should we, though, “blame” the US occupation for all these deaths? Yes, we should, since under the Geneva Conventions an occupying army assumes direct responsibility for the welfare of the population that comes under its control. So even though many Iraqis have been killed since March 2003 by other Iraqis (and the study makes clear that that proportion has been increasing), it still remains the case that the breakdown of the political system and of public order that allowed those killings to proliferate is directly attributable to the policies pursued by the occupation forces, and the occupation administration therefore has to bear responsibility for them. Which is what the Geneva Conventions say.
One quick comparison here: If the US had suffered the same rate of “excess deaths” that Iraqis have suffered since March 2003– if the latter were 400,000 excess deaths– then the US would have suffered 4.43 million excess deaths since March 2003. Imagine how traumatized we would all feel.
To my Iraqi friends: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have done all I can over the past four years to, first, prevent the invasion of your country from happening, and then to work for the speedy and total pullout of our occupation troops. I guess that, like the whole of the US peace movement, I will just have to redouble my efforts.