Author: Helena

As I noted earlier, these are fateful days in Iraq. Condi Rice, fresh from the embarrassment of the reception she got from the good people of Blackburn, Lancashire, flew to Baghdad with her friend Jack Straw to try a hands-on approach to subverting the results of last December’s election.
But what they are trying to sell to Iraqi politicians is, it seems to me, notably unsellable. Their basic pitch (in public) is, “If you Iraqis want to get rid of the occupation forces then you need to hurry up and form a government.” But Rice (and Straw, for what it’s worth) are still also apparently determined that Ibrahim Jaafari, the person duly nominated to the PM post by the largest bloc in the parliament, is “unacceptable” to the occupation forces. So they have been wheedling and doing goodness only knows what else to try to get as many Iraqi politicians as possible to come out publicly against the Jaafari nomination…
In recent days they won two breathlessly reported tactical victories, winning public statements from two political figures within the victorious UIA alliance who called for Jaafari to step down. The two are Qasim Daoud, the head of the small Movement of Iraqi Democrats (hat-tip to Reidar Visser, there) and Jalaleddine al-Saghir of SCIRI.
But here’s the thing. In insecurity-plagued, traumatized circumstances like those in which the Shiite (and most other) Iraqis are currently living, what would persuade any individual to go against the opinion that is still sustained by a majority of members of the community with which which he/she most closely identifies? I suppose it could be a judgment that working with (rather than against) the Americans at this point would be “good” for the general interest of the person’s community of identification– or, an expectation of professional, financial, or other forms of personal advancement…
But if the Americans are also, at the same time, saying that they want this Iraqi government formed so that the occupation forces can get out, then it strikes me it is going to be hard for them to attract any Iraqis– but most especially, any Shiite Iraqis– to their anti-Jaafari scheme for any but the basest of personal motives.
Everyone knows the Americans are currently the declining power inside Iraq… So why would any Iraqis seek to hitch their wagon to them? Unless it’s for the sake of that secret bank account in Switzerland, promises of Green Cards for all members of the extended family, etc etc…
While Rice and Straw were having their “newsmaking” sleepover visit to the Green Zone Sunday/Monday, they met a bunch of Iraqi pols, of course. Including, they held a notably frosty meeting with Jaafari himself. One person they didn’t meet with, but with whom they were evidently extremely eager to communicate while there, was Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
This AFP report from Baghdad notes that,

Both envoys praised Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader for much of the country’s majority Shiite community, for his aid in building a new Iraq, suggesting he could help break the political deadlock.
“Without the remarkable spiritual guidance shown by his eminence, the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, this country for all its problems it now faces would not have in its hands the potential for a better future,” said Straw.

This slavering praise of Sistani came after President Bush early last week tried to send a letter and accompanying verbal message to Sistani– but, as that AP story from March 31 there noted, the letter sat “unread and untranslated” in Sistani’s office.
The unnamed Sistani aide quoted in that AP report,

said the person who delivered the Bush letter – he would not identify the messenger by name or nationality – said it carried Bush’s thanks to al-Sistani for calling for calm among his followers in preventing the outbreak of civil war after a Shiite shrine was bombed late last month.
The messenger also was said to have explained that the letter reinforced the American position that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari should not be given a second term. Al-Sistani has not publicly taken sides in the dispute, but rather has called for Shiite unity.
The United States was known to object to al-Jaafari’s second term but has never said so outright and in public.
But on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad carried a similar letter from Bush to a meeting with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shiite political organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. [As noted here.]
The al-Sistani aide said Shiite displeasure with U.S. involvement was so deep that dignitaries in the holy city of Najaf refused to meet Khalilzad on Wednesday during ceremonies commemorating the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The Afghan-born Khalilzad is a Sunni Muslim…

… So all in all, the occupying governments’ attempts at using “diplomatic strongarming” to get the Jaafari nomination withdrawn seem to have failed. What will they try next?

Last weekend, Czar George tried to deliver a direct personal veto to Iraq’s dominant parliamentary bloc, the UIA, regarding its still-extant nomination of Daawa Party head Ibrahim Jaafari to be (remain as) Prime Minister. That apparently backfired.
Now, the US-backed plotters have managed to persuade a number of UIA personalities to come out publicly to back the call that Jaafari step down. That link takes you to an NYT article by Kirk Semple and Thom Shanker, in which they report that a UIA member identified as Kassim Daoud had told them he and a number of other UIA parliamentarians now want Jaafari to step down.
They wrote that Daoud,

said a sense of responsibility to end the gridlock [!!] had compelled him to speak out.
“We all hope that he will respond because we know that he is a statesman and he will take the country’s best interest into consideration,” Mr. Daoud, who would be a possible candidate for the post, said Saturday in a brief telephone interview.

A Jaafari aide, Jawad al-Maliki, said Jaafari had no intention of doing that.
This Reuters piece describes Daoud as “a senior member of the independent group within the Alliance”. Whatever that means. (Any more info about him would of course be very useful. Please send it in as a comment!)
This AFP piece also has a quote from Daoud along similar lines. The AFP reporter adds that,

Saad Jawad Qandil, member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the key parties in the Shiite alliance, also confirmed that a number of alliance members were asking for Jaafari’s withdrawal.
“There have been numerous calls from the members of the Iraqi Alliance, on an individual basis without being the view of the entire bloc, to change the current candidate of the alliance, Jaafari, to resolve the ongoing political crisis,” Qandil told AFP.

This is interesting and significant. Because although the main US-backed candidate for PM is SCIRI pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi, in recent days– until now– SCIRI spokesmen have been rejecting US intervention and expressing continued (if perhaps not terribly fervent) support for Jaafari.
As I noted in my March 29 post here, the US claim that there is an “impasse” in the Iraqi government-formation process is quite disingenuous, since it has been US meddling that has caused the impasse so far.
Also of note: that Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yacoubi has now openly entered the Iraqi political fray. Ed Wong of the NYT wrote in today’s paper that in his Friday sermon yesterday that Yacoubi– who is the head of the pro-Sadrist Fadilah Party– called for the Bush administration to replace Zal Khalilzad as US Ambassador in Iraq…
Wong wrote that Yacoubi said,

that if the Bush administration “wants to protect itself from more failure and collapse, it should change its ambassador in Iraq, honestly and seriously build strong national military forces able to secure the country, and end the claims to occupation that are the main source of the evolution of terrorism.”

Fateful days in Iraq, indeed.

Jill Carroll was freed today in Baghdad! She’s reported to be in good shape. Fabulous news!
Now let’s all work for the reease of everyone else illegally deprived of their liberty in the sad, sad country that Iraq has become.

I just read a stunning post by Riverbend, written yesterday. Read it and weep for Iraq.

… Monday afternoon, I took a bit of time out from the US-Iraq women’s
conference I was at to sit in a wifi zone in the hotel there and write up this JWN
post about the conference.  It seems that while I was away, the
differences of opinion that I had noted there between the Iraqi
invitees– and principally, the difference between those who stayed in
Iraq throughout the whole sanctions era and those who lived as exiles
in those years– became much more pointed… to the extent that
participants in this “peace” gathering had been standing up, yelling
at each other, and threatening to walk out.

I guess the organizers and a couple of the US invitees intervened to
try to calm things down.  When I got back there, the Benedictine US nun
Sr. Joan Chittester, one of the organizers, was saying some pacific
things about “well, now you’ve seen how democracy works.  Everyone
has to at least stay and listen to everyone else’s point of view.”

That evening, there were a lot of inter-religious peacemakery things
organized.  I’m not entirely sure about the cultural context of
having people watch two women performing a classical Indian dance…
The dance was fairly pretty to watch, but personally I was extremely
hungry at that point (7:30 p.m.) having been up since 6 a.m.

Then yesterday morning we were back in the conference room again. 
For that session, which was billed as lasting from 9 a.m. through 1
p.m.–with no break anywhere along the way!  can you imagine?–
the moderator was Kate Snow, another rising female star at ABC News who
co-anchors the weekend edition of their morning show and was previously
their White House correspondent.

Snow is another smart young network-groomed woman, like Elizabeth Vargas
yesterday.  But completely out of her depth in this context, since
it didn’t take long before the (purely rhetorical) sparks began to fly
there.  This session had been billed as having six Iraqi women
speakers talking about “Fostering people-to-people dialogue: Changing attitudes
and misperceptions”.

The third of the speakers was Dr.
Katrin Michael,  a Christian woman from the north of Iraq
who had joined the Kurdish opposition in 1982; fled the country in 1988
after having survived a chemical weapons attack (date and details of
which, uncertain); ended up in Algeria; barely escaped the
fundamentalist violence there; ended up as a resettled refugee in
Washington DC in 1997…  Where she still lives.  Nowadays,
she does research there on Iraqi women’s issues.

Her presentation was stridently “exilist”.  She ended up
making a loud appeal for Americans to join in fighting against the
“terrorists” in Iraq, and said “we Iraqis are in the front line against
the terrorists”.  (She didn’t note that there had been no jihadist
militants in Iraq prior to the US invasion of 2003, whereas now,
evidently, there are… ) 

She declared loudly a number of times that “I have forgiven”  the
people who had harmed her earlier.  But honestly, the general
tenor of her very accusatory presentation indicated strongly to me that
there are plenty of people whom she has not even come close to
forgiving.  Again and again, at one point, she said “I am a
victim; I am a victim; I am a victim!”  (I felt like saying to
her, “Katrin, my dear, I heard you the first time.  You are a
victim.  But you know what?  At this point, everyone in Iraq
is feeling very hurt, wounded, and fearful.  Everyont there is a
victim.  And you’re living there in Washington DC… “)

Michael, Lamia Talebani
(who spoke a little later) and
Judge Zakia Hakki (who spoke Monday– and again yesterday) were the most ardent representatives of what I
call the Iraqi  “exilist” viewpoint, that is, the view of those
who (1) had spent the 1990s in exile, (2) had been among those most strongly
advocating the use of US power to overtthrow the Saddamist regime, and
who (3) until today remain supportive of  the 2003 invasion even if
criticial of some of the details of  subsequent US actions in
Iraq.  (Hakki did voice some such criticisms; so did
Talebani.  They have both lived for at least part of the time
since 2003 inside Iraq.  Katrin Michael, who has not spent time in Iraq since 200,3 did not voice any such
criticisms .)

But before I  describe the argument, let me give a quick digest of
what all the speakers on the main panel said.

Continue reading “US-Iraqi women’s conference– Part 2”

The US ambassador in Baghdad, Zal Khalilzad, has been working feverishly around the clock (but notably not behind the scenes) to try to make sure that his favored candidate (SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi) gets the premiership of the National Assembly that was elected– let me see– 104 days ago. The UIA bloc, of which SCIRI is a part, is the biggest bloc in the Assembly. But in an internal deliberation in early February the UIA’s parliamentarians determined that its candidate for PM would not be Abdul-Mahdi but would continue to be Ibrahim Ja’afari of the Daawa Party…
Today, the NYT tells us that Khalilzad has escalated his campaign against Ja’afari by telling senior politicians in the UIA that Czar George W. Bush himself, sitting in his distant imperial capital, has now issued a ukaz (edict, fatwa, diktat… ) to the effect that:

Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister…

The NYT’s Ed Wong reported that Redha Jowad Taki, described as a UIA parliamentarian and an aide to SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim, was one of those who accompanied Hakim to a meeting with Khalilzad last Saturday in which the US viceroy reportedly “told” Hakim,

to pass on a “personal message from President Bush” to the interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari… Mr. Khalilzad said Mr. Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister… It was the first “clear and direct message” from the Americans on a specific candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.
…American officials in Baghdad did not dispute the Shiite politicians’ account of the conversation, though they would not discuss the details of the meeting.

I note here– yet again!– that Wong routinely, throughout this piece, describes Hakim as “the head of the main Shiite political bloc”, though in the February vote the UIA showed that not to be the case.
Referring to Hakim as “the head of the UIA, or “the most powerful politician in Iraq” actually obfuscates the whole story. A casual reader of stories making such designations would be left asking, “If Hakim is indeed ‘the head’ of the UIA bloc, and ‘the most powerful Shiite politician in Iraq’, then why on earth is Ibrahim Ja’afari still the UIA’s candidate for PM?”
I note too that there are many Orwellian undertones to the whole story of the US intervention in this whole, extremely lengthy and high-stakes government-formation process in Iraq… In addition to the mere fact of the intervention, that is…
One is that, as I noted in this recent post, Zal and his cohorts keep talking about the need for government that pursues a vision of a “unified” Iraq– but they are hard at work blocking the pol who has the most credibility as a proponent of Iraqi national unity–Moqtada Sadr– from having any influence in the government. (Sadr still has a US ‘arrest warrant’ out against him. He has thrown his considerable political weight behind Ja’afari, who is not a forecful political figure in his own right.)
Another Orwellian undertone is that Zal and his cohorts fulminate in public against the activities of the ‘sectarian militias’– while at the same time they are working hard to bring into the seat of government power SCIRI, which runs the biggest, best-embedded, and most violent of these militias…
These things are not spelled out nearly enough in the MSM. (To say the least!)
At a broader level, though, I am impressed that despite 104 days of the US using all the levers of power at its control in Iraq– US blandishments, promises, bribes, military operations, black operations, etc etc– the UIA has stayed quite steadfast in refusing to allow Czar George and his viceroy to determine who will be the next PM.
In fact, if Zal now has to resort unequivocally to saying– in a meeting with Hakim and his (presumably, all-SCIRI) aides– that Czar George himself doesn’t want Ja’afari in power, then this kind of direct, open intervention is already a mark of how weak and desperate his and the Bush administration’s position has become!
(Bizarre, and to me a sign of weakness, too, that Zal would be seeking to ‘pass on’ this message to Ja’afari through Hakim himself… Actually, extremely bizarre indeed.)
I hope Ja’afari and Sadr both have very good personal-security details.
Also, of course that meeting was Saturday. Sunday the US military attacked (apparently) a Sadrist office/husseiniyah, and after that no UIA pols at all have been prepared to meet with Zal. And notably, it was after Sunday that Hakim’s person, Taki, started talking to the press and spilling the beans about Czar George’s ukaz– presumably as a way of trying to distance SCIRI from any complicity in the anti-Ja’afai campaign. (One can just imagine the conversation: “Ed, I have to tell you that Mr. Hakim was deeply shocked– shocked!– to hear the content of the message the Americans were asking him to transmit”… )
As this piece by Knight-Ridder’s Nancy Youssef and Warren Stroebel tells us, on Tuesday evening,

Salim al-Maliki, the minister of transportation and a member of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance [can anyone tell us from which party? — HC], said al-Jaafari was still the slate’s candidate.
“We do not accept interference by the United States or any other foreign body because it is an internal decision of United Iraqi Alliance,” al-Maliki said.

Youssef and Stroebel also report there that the US has sent a message to Ayatollah Sistani asking his help in “getting us out of this impasse,” as an unnamed official in Washington was quoted as saying.
What “impasse”? The “impasse” in the government-formation process in Iraq that has existed so far — a fact of Iraqi political life that is now absolutely, indubitably harming the interests of the Iraqi people–is completely a creation of the US’s anti-Jaafari blocking tactics.
These journos refer to “leading Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim”…
But they also, sensibly, wrote this:

Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University in Washington, called the reported attempts to pressure al-Jafaari to resign “heavy-handed.”
“They have to know that Sistani does not want to be seen as interfering in the political process,” she said. “You’re guaranteed to get the result that you don’t want.”