Author: Helena

Saddam trial: Iran’s opening bid

So now, Teheran has started making a big push to have its many, very serious grievances against Saddam put onto the docket of the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST).
The report linked to there came from Iran’s Mehr News Agency. It quoted Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki as saying on Wednesday that his ministry would be presenting a formal complaint to the IST concerning Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian personnel during the eight-year war that followed Saddam’s September 1980 invasion of Iran.
Mottaki claimed that,

    “During the war, Saddam used chemical weapons against Iran 200 times, which left 100,000 people chemically disabled,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki said here on Wednesday.
    … “The Islamic Republic was the main victim of chemical weapons. It is evident that Saddam carried out all the atrocities against Iran with the help of Western companies and countries,” he added.

Mottaki was speaking to reporters after he’d paid a visit to one of the two Teheran hospitals that still today, 20 years after the event, are needed to provide specialized treatment to CW-affected Iranians. The report continued:

    “Western countries and companies that supplied Saddam with chemicals share the responsibility for this crime,” Mottaki said.
    “Saddam acquired chemicals from more than 400 Western companies, including 25 American, 15 German, 10 British, 3 Dutch, 3 Swiss, and 2 French companies.”
    Iran is deeply concerned about the influence of its archenemy, the United States, on the trial of Saddam, he added.
    “We are concerned about the way the court is trying these war criminals, and America’s pressure on the court (to ignore Iran’s demand).
    “Iran is closely observing the trial,” he said.

We should all understand that Iran’s claims about the Saddam regime’s large-scale use of CW against Iranians in the 1980s have been well authenticated by numerous well-informed sources, even if the “100,000” casualties may (or may not) be an exaggeration. For example, check this May 1984 report by SIPRI; or this November 1986 report from the CIA (as posted today on a Pentagon website); or this January 2003 article by an Armed Forces Press Service reporter, also posted on a Pentagon website.
Use of chemical weapons is a war crime. And do I need to note here that many hundreds as many Iranians died from Saddam’s use of CW as died in that outrageous and repressive (but actually, fairly “small”) incident in Dujail for which Saddam is now being tried?
Mottaki’s request to have Iran’s massive charges concerning the Saddam regime’s CW use heard by the court is significant– as its timing. Inasmuch as he is trying to have Iran accepted as complainant in the trial, he is probably trying to wrest some control of its proceedings away from the US authorities who have dominated it thus far (and who can confidently be expected to be extremely reluctant to have the details of Saddam’s 1980s dealings with US and other western chemical companies be aired in open court.) But at the same time, Mottaki is notably not challenging either the legitimacy of the court or even the details of the (largely US-designed) “statute” that guides its work.
For example, the Iranians could also have brought a fairly strong case against Saddam on the grounds that he initiated a quite unwarranted invasion of their country in 1980. But so far they haven’t sought to do that. Indeed, to do that would require a change in the court’s Statute, which gives it the right to try only war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and a very structly limited kind of “crime of aggression”– namely, aggression against a fellow Arab country, which Iran isn’t but which Kuwait is.
The timing of Mottaki’s announcement is significant for at least two reasons. First, it comes as Iraq is in quite a degree of post-election political turmoil– and at a time when Saddam’s trial has become a more important issue within internal Iraqi politics than ever before. Asserting Iran’s interest in the trial at this time therefore has many ramifications in terms of the increase Iran seeks in the already large amount of influence that it wields over Iraq’s politics.
And second, this announcement comes as the western powers are increasing their efforts to contain and roll back an Iranian nuclear program that may or may not be intended to produce an Iranian nuclear arsenal. At such a time, to remind the western powers that Iran is the only state in modern times to have actually suffered large-scale CW attacks from a belligerent neighbor is a not-subtle way of reminding them that Iran may indeed have a better “rationale” for acquiring a nuclear deterrent than any of the existing nuclear-weapons states has, since none of them has suffered such an attack on their personnel since WW-1. (Indeed, in that press conference linked to above, Mottaki segued effortlessly from talking about the Iranian CW casualties to talking about the nuclear issue.)
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Mottaki’s announcement will actually be followed up by Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad making the formal request to the court…

Politics inside the UIA (south)

Reidar Vissar is a Norwegian historian whose knowledge of southern Iraq I have admired in the past. Today he has a fascinating new text on his website, in which he analyzes the results as released so far of the elections, as viewed primarily in the south. His work makes a good, much more detailed complement to the post I put up here on Tuesday with some gleanings of info about the politics within the UIA list.
His first big comment is that there, as elsewhere, Allawi’s more secular list has lost out big-time to the UIA. (I wonder to what extent Allawi’s better showing last January and poorer showing this time are due to the well-known advantages of incumbency? To a large extent, I expect.)
Vissar looks in detail at Basra and two other provinces and writes this:

    the UIA looks set to walk away with 13 of 16 seats in Basra, 10 (possibly 11) of 12 in Dhi Qar, and 6 out of 7 in Maysan. Allawi’s list will probably get 2 seats in Basra and 1 in each of the two neighbouring governorates, whereas an independent Sadrist grouping (list 631) will compete fiercely with the UIA for the last seat in Dhi Qar. Finally, the Iraqi Accord Front, a mostly Sunni party with Islamist leanings, seems certain to get one seat in Basra, where the poor performance of Allawi’s allies may indicate that Sunnis who boycotted in January now have voted largely along sectarian lines. (The more secular Sunni alternative, list 667, could only muster around 1,000 voters across the three southern governorates).

He then turns his attention to the balances inside the UIA:

    It is often assumed that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is the leading force within the UIA. A closer look at the affiliations of the representatives likely to represent Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar shows just how misleading this interpretation is for the south. Only 2 out of the 29 UIA candidates whose seats seem secure have a clear association with SCIRI, and an additional two from the institutionally independent Badr Brigades can be considered as being close to SCIRI. That means that more than 80% of UIA deputies from the south will have other, non-SCIRI, loyalties. Of these, 7 are Sadrists loyal to the radical Islamist Muqtada al-Sadr, 6 are members of the Fadila Party (a competing Sadrist party whose spiritual guiding light is the cleric Muhammad al-Yaqubi) 5 belong to a breakaway faction of the Daawa Party, 3 are from the mother branch of that organisation (also the party of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the current prime minister), and then there are 4 Islamist independents.

So that would give us:

    SCIRI + pro-SCIRI: 4
    Sadrists (both flavors): 13
    Daawa + breakaway: 8 (don’t know if the breakaway might have swung to Sadr or elsewhere, though?)

Vissar goes on to assess the effects of this outcome on the plans the SCIRI leaders have declared, to try to create a Shiite “super-region” out of 9 or so of Iraq’s existing provinces (governorates.) He notes that elsewhere in the UIA there is support for other outcomes– principally, either keeping the powers of the central state strong, or the establishment of a ‘small’, south-concentrated region of three governorates, rather than SCIRI’s favored super-region.
His conclusion is:

    despite the indications of an overwhelming UIA election victory in the south, the tripartite model of an ethnically divided Iraq federation may still get competition from older federal designs. These include the non-sectarian “administrative” federation of 5–7 medium-sized entities (with which the small-sized 3-governorate southern region plan would harmonise) as well as the long-established scheme for a bi-national Arab–Kurdish union. The election results also have implications for Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim and SCIRI: they may yet find themselves facing some quite unexpected obstacles in their struggle for supremacy over the Islamist political scene among Iraq’s Shiites.

I think that in order to get a more definitive picture of the politics within the UIA and their ramifications, we still need to get a breakdown of the votes and UIA candidates in other regions– especially Baghdad!– that is as detailed as the one Vissar provides here for the south. But if his figures and analysis are more or less accurate (given that the final results are not yet in), and the patterns he describes in the three southern provinces are representative of what has happened in other strongly UIA parts of the country, then I think his conclusions are sound.
Thanks so much for sending me that link, Reidar! (Nice site you have there, too.)
Does anyone out there have the kind of additional information we need?

“The times that try men’s souls”

Sen. Robert Byrd is the eloquent elder statesman whose speeches in the run-up to the present war offered potent warnings as to the dangers and unpredictability of war.
Now, the Senator is once again at the forefront of the fight for the American conscience– or, if you like, the American soul. Yesterday, he had this to say about the recent revelations that the President has for several year’s now specifically allowed US security agencies to spy on the US public without even complying with legislation that requires them to get a warrant to do this from an existing, specially constituted court.
Byrd’s remarks were under the potent title, No President is above the Law. They included the following:

    We know that Vice President Dick Cheney has asked for exemptions for the CIA from the language contained in the McCain torture amendment banning cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. Thank God his pleas have been rejected by this Congress.
    Now comes the stomach-churning revelation through an executive order, that President Bush has circumvented both the Congress and the courts. He has usurped the Third Branch of government – the branch charged with protecting the civil liberties of our people – by directing the National Security Agency to intercept and eavesdrop on the phone conversations and e-mails of American citizens without a warrant, which is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. He has stiff-armed the People’s Branch of government. He has rationalized the use of domestic, civilian surveillance with a flimsy claim that he has such authority because we are at war. The executive order, which has been acknowledged by the President, is an end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which makes it unlawful for any official to monitor the communications of an individual on American soil without the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
    What is the President thinking?

Continue reading ““The times that try men’s souls””

This day in history (Rumsfeld-Saddam)

Susan (NC)– who also posts on Today in Iraq as ‘Dancewater’– put a great post up there last night reminding us that December 20, 2005 is the 22nd anniversary of the famous Rumsfeld-Saddam handshake in Baghdad that sealed the rapid improvement in US-Iraq relations of those months.
Susan also linked to this recent article by Norman Solomon, in which Solomon noted the following:

    Christmas came 11 days early for Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when the news broke that American forces had pulled Saddam Hussein from a spidery hole. During interviews about the capture, on CBS and ABC, the Pentagon’s top man was upbeat. And he didn’t have to deal with a question that Lesley Stahl or Peter Jennings could have logically chosen to ask: “Secretary Rumsfeld, you met with Saddam almost exactly 20 years ago and shook his hand. What kind of guy was he?”
    Now, Saddam Hussein has gone on trial, but such questions remain unasked by mainstream U.S. journalists.…
    As it happens, the initial trial of Saddam and co-defendants is focusing on grisly crimes that occurred the year before Rumsfeld gripped his hand. “The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and blood under it,” the New York Times reported Tuesday. And: “At one point, Mr. Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their 77-year-old father.”

Continue reading “This day in history (Rumsfeld-Saddam)”

Post-election prospects, Iraq

Can the Dec. 15 election in Iraq help lead to some form of intra-Iraqi accommodation, and thus to significant progress toward US troop withdrawal and national independence?
Most (but not all) indications so far seem discouraging on this score. The conduct of the election has been hotly contested by, among others, the mainly-Sunni “Iraqi Accordance Front” (IAF) and also the more secular list headed by longtime US ally Iyad Allawi. Of these two contestations, that from the IAF is the one with the greatest potential to prevent the reaching of a national accommodation.
We probably don’t know the true dimensions of the complaint from the IAF yet. AP’s Jason Straziuso reports from Baghdad that the IAF officials have so far “concentrated their protests on results from Baghdad province, the biggest electoral district.” Early returns indicated that the “result” in Baghdad province was that the big Shiite list, the UIA, had won about 59% of the vote, the IAF around 19%, and Allawi’s list around 14%.
But we haven’t even heard any estimates yet of the “result” in the other provinces where Sunnis are present in large numbers and where the IAF might also rightly expect to win a lot of votes. And so far, as Straziuso reports, the IAF hasn’t started to focus on their complaints from those provinces.
Given the total lockdown the country experienced for the days around the election itself, and the very substantial lockdown that the US and their allied forces maintain, in general, in and around most of the country’s heavily Sunni cities, it must be extremely difficult for the IAF’s national leadership even to communicate with its representatives in those areas, let alone to gather any systematic details about the nature of complaints from the many voting precincts in those cities.
According to Straziuso, the IAF warned of, “grave repercussions on security and political stability” if the mistakes claimed (in Baghdad) so far were not corrected. He quoted Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the front, as saying, “we will demand that the elections be held again in Baghdad. … If this demand is not met, then we will resort to other measures.”
However, Moqtada Sadr, the activist, generally anti-US Shiite cleric who is both on the UIA list and an advocate of strong links with the Sunnis, has reportedly lauded the results of the elections as released so far. This Dec. 19 edition of IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor” summarizes a report from Al-Sabah that said this:

    The young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said the participation of Sunni Arabs in the elections enhanced the political process. He added that the wide participation of Iraqis in the recent election reflected the vitality of the Iraqi people. Sadr said the people will decide the government’s future. He emphasized that he supports any list that will better serve the people and any government that works for Iraq’s independence. The electoral victory is a victory for Iraq, Sadr added.

The way I read this, it seems likely that Sadr feels that his people did well in the elections– perhaps especially in and around Baghdad, where he has a strong base of support. A particularly strong result for the UIA list in Baghdad would presumably give Sadr a lot more bargaining power in the crucial post-election bargaining for power that is going on right now inside the UIA coalition. (It’s a strange feature of the electoral system that has been cobbled together in Iraq over the past 18 months that people vote for a list without the order of the actual candidates who are part of that list having been agreed and advertised in advance.)
I’ve been trying to read today’s Al-Hayat in Arabic to figure out what might be happening inside the UIA right now. But I don’t really have time to do a good job… (Help, Salah, Shirin, anyone?) Anyway, toward the end of this article there , it says,

    … sources close to the UIA confirmed that disagreements had broken out between its principal parties over the position of prime minister. And the sources, which preferred not to be named, told al-Hayat that, “The sharp disagreements over the premiership between the Daawa Party led by Ibrahim Jaafari and SCIRI, led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, have not yet been resolved.”
    And they added that SCIRI rejected this [unclear what], referring to “its bigger mass following and its larger number of seats and that if it hadn’t been for SCIRI the UIA would only gotten half as many votes”. And they noted that, “the other disagreements center on the terms offered by the representatives of Moqtada al-Sadr in the list and which are represented by the need not to deny positions [i.e. jobs] of soveriegnty and ministerial [responsibility] and the participation of all the winning lists regardless of their ministerial weight, in the formation of a government of national salvation.”
    And the sources confirmed that, according to the contacts that the American administration in Iraq, as represented by its ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the [contest over the] premiership is reserved between Adel Abdul-Mahdi [of SCIRI] and Iyad Allawi and that Zad [i.e. Khalilzad] doesn’t support the candidacy of Ibrahim Jaafari, and he prefers to save the security-related ministries for parties that don’t have militias…

We could also note that Jaafari’s (out-going) administration has really been hobbled in recent days by the (US-imposed) decision it took the day after lat week’s election, to increase fuel prices by around 2,000%…
Anyway, there is clearly a lot of politics going on inside the UIA there… SCIRI head Hakim has been quoted in Hayat and elsewhere as saying some pretty triumphalist things about how the UIA has now definitievly won the election so they can go ahead and intensify their “de-Baathification” campaign. That would seem to be a big obstacle to Moqtada Sadr’s aim of finding a good entente with the Sunnis…
Any further contributions that commenters can make to providing good sources, links, and translations about the current politics inside the UIA (or even just improving my rapid little piece of translation there) would be really great. Thanks, friends!

Who’s running the Iraqi elections?

From AP’s Jason Straziuso in Baghdad, this morning, writing about the official complaints that have been filed about the conduct of last Thursday’s election:

    U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said there had been 20 “red” — or serious — complaints as of Monday that could affect the outcome.
    “Final results will not be announced until those red complaints are looked at,” he said.

But I thought we were being told that responsibility for running the elections was in the hands of the all-Iraqi “Independent Election Commission”?
This is, of course, the same picture that prevails across the entire gamut of governance responsibilities inside US-and-UK-occupied Iraq. In the conduct of the elections. In the conduct of the Saddam trial. In the conduct of “security” and military policy. In the allocation of budgets… The occupying power is in fact— and indeed, still also under international law– in charge. But this occupying power (the US) likes to make it appear that it’s the Iraqi collaborators who are calling the shots…
Just until things get tough, and then Big Brother Khalilzad steps in immediately to call the shots.

Iraq as Bush’s ‘strongest card’ (?)

So here’s how bad the political situation at home has become for the Bush administration at this point, less than a year into his second term: He even has to peddle the situation in Iraq as being the strongest achievement of his presidency to date…
Yes, the guy truly is in dire political straits.
Tonight, he went on national t.v. to give a major public address about Iraq for the fifth time since November 30. And Dick Cheney even left his bunker for long enough to go and visit the Baghdad Green Zone. The intensity of these guys’ present public focus on events in Iraq is completely unprecedented.
Remember, we don’t even know yet what kind of a government will emerge from Thursday’s elections.
(If the votes were gathered in a generally fair way, and fairly counted, then the new government is most likely to be very hostile to any lengthy presence of US troops in their country. What will the Bushies do then? Maybe we can get a hint of an answer from Palestine, where the US and now the EU have already said that they won’t support any elected body in which anti-imperialist, anti-US parties dominate.)
So the timing of the current Bush/Cheney attempt at a “victory lap” may well be dictated by the need to for them to strut their stuff before the potentially challenging results of the recent election come in. But it is also, I’m sure, dictated by their need to claim some kind of victory– any kind of a victory!– somewhere in the world, given the sudden new plummet in their political sway at home. They couldn’t get the Patriot Act renewed. They couldn’t (despite Cheney’s best urgings) get a strong pro-torture provision preserved in the legislation. They couldn’t stave off the prosecutors and judges– and in texas, too!– from going after Tom De Lay. They couldn’t ram Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court through the Senate before Christmas, as they wanted. They haven’t been able to stop Patrick Fiztgerald’s investigation from getting very close indeed to Karl Rove ….
Failure, threat, and weakness, wherever they look.
Except– in Iraq! Where they have all those great pictures of Iraqis walking along showing off their ink-stained fingers!
(The Bushies ignore, of course, that the violence also escalated badly again there today.)
Well, if the January elections are anything to go by, then this time once again it’ll take the Iraqi Election Commission a long time to count the votes; then it’ll take even longer to get the elected parliament seated; then there’ll be many weeks of haggling over who gets to be President; and ditto, for Prime Minister… So we may not see any kind of government emerging from this election for another 2-3 months. Plenty of time for Amb. Khalialzad and Gen. Casey to continue all kinds of anti-democratic machinations, back up by the military, the Special Forces, and other means of violence… So it may be quite a time yet before we see any clearly presented, anti-US political movement emerging from the elections– even if there are many signs that this movement is waiting in the wings.
And in the meantime, the Prez will continue to try to strut his stuff as the hero of “democracy” and “liberation” in Iraq.
But in in the rarefied hot-house of intra-elite politics in Washington, it’s not even really about Iraq any more. (And it most likely never was.) It’s about power in Washington: who’s got it, and who’s losing it. George W. Bush has been losing it big time. In other circumstances, that would be the kind of circumstance that could prompt a president to launch some kind of a “wag the dog” military adventure. But not today. Been there, done that…

Christmas in our Quaker meeting

Quakers generally hold that every day is as holy as any other, every place is as sacred as any other, and every person equally as much a child of God as any other. So we don’t have a “liturgical year” with Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, etc. But we US Quakers do live here in our surrounding culture, with the kids and all of us subjected strongly to the winds of the surrounding culture. And since it’s good to build our community with special gatherings when we can, our Quaker Meeting (church) here in Charlottesville usually has one just before “the time known as Christmas” when our kids tell us some about the things they’ve been learning and lead us in some singing.
This year’s children’s performance was today.
We have the most amazing kids in our children’s program. Ever since 9/11, new families with young children have been coming to our Quaker meeting– looking, I think, for a congregation dedicated to peace, understanding, and nonviolence in which they can raise their kids. And we also have many families who’ve been Quakers for a long time, who have kids of various ages.
Today, at 10 a.m., the under-12s all came into the middle of the square room in which we hold our twice-weekly worship sessions. They were wearing a variety of costumes and had an excited air. Julian Waters, aged about 5, started out by reading some of the account of the Christmas story from one of the Gospels. He was very serious about it. When he got to a place talking about the birth of the “Prince of Peace”, he looked up and– still following his stage directions– asked loudly, “Why are we celebrating Christmas if we’re at war?”
One of the adult friends (Quakers) then led the kids in singing John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches”, which is a lovely song about the “Christmas truce” in the World War 1 trenches, in 1915. (John, who’s a great folk musician, is also a member of our Quaker Meeting, but he wasn’t there today.)
The kids have been studying ‘comparative religions’ in their Sunday school. So most of the half-hour program that followed consisted of various quotations about peace and brotherly love taken from a wide variety of different religions. These were interspersed with other songs, including “This is my song“, which is sung to the haunting “Finlandia” melody, by Sibelius.
Oh and I forgot to mention: at the beginning, a bunch of the adults welcomed the kids in by singing a Sufi chanted version of “La illahi- illallah”, which is very meditative.
In our Meeting we have some really great parents and Sunday school teachers, and we all work hard to raise caring and self-confident kids who have a strong commitment to nonviolence. Lots of us adults were sniffling as we watched our kids this morning– and thinking, too, of the violence of the culture in which we’re trying to raise them.
Talking of our responsibilities as parents… that reminded me about the great job my daughter Lorna Quandt (then 17) and her friends did back in March 2003, when they organized a walkout from Charlottesville High School to protest the launching of the war. You can still read about it, here. I was so proud of her and her friends that day. Later, the Principal gave all those who had participated a couple of extra detentions. (Or was it an “in-school suspension”? I forget.) Anyway, a non-trivial punishment. But that was okay. They knew they would get some punishment– but thought it was important to make their feelings known, all the same.
250 kids walked out of the high school that day. That was around 25% of the entire student body.
Now, we really need to start planning a good public action for March 18, 2006…

George Bush and “victory”

I’ve been thinking a lot about George W. Bush today. Can’t help it. Here’s what I’ve been thinking…
He and his administration have been making a big deal about the record so far regarding yesterday’s election in Iraq. Claiming it as their own “victory”. (See, for example, the exultant– if somewhat patronizing– text of the remarks he made to some visiting Iraqi-exile “just plain voters” who visited the White House yesterday.) And I can’t really decide how I feel about this claimed “victory”. Here are the two main points on which I’m anguishing:

    (1) I am very happy that the Iraqi people get the chance to vote for their government. I hope that this vote proves to be a meaningful one– though I fear that two big factors may strip it of its value: (a) the centrifugal nature of the draft constitution, and the clear intention of most Kurds to indeed, flee from the Iraqi political center, which together may mean that the “national government” is a meaningless body; and (b) we know that a strong majority of Iraqis want to see the US occupation end: but will the body elected yesterday actually be able to pursue that goal on behalf of the electors?
    (2) I believe the central goal for the “peace and human equality” movement here in the US and elsewhere around the world now has to be the speedy and total withdrawal of the US forces from Iraq. But is this likelier to happen if we can allow George W. Bush to claim one or more political “victories” in Iraq? Is it indeed possible that him claiming this “victory” right now is a way for him to politically cover his rear end as he prepares to– in effect– “cut and run” from a situation that, as his political handlers now believe, has become increasingly politically costly for him and for his party.

There is actually a third big concern I have about yesterday’s election which causes me no anguish to think through, at all. That is: were the Iraqi voters indeed able to express their preferences freely, and to have it fairly represented in the final outcome of the election– or did the US and its allies, or other parties, end up beng able to “rig” the election and thus steal it from the Iraqi voters? If that latter thing happened, then of course the election was not a “victory” for anything valuable, at all.
But the other two issues are tough ones to think through. I don’t want to punish George W. Bush if his clear intention is to do what I consider to be the “right thing”– i.e., to withdraw from Iraq. But I really don’t want him, at the end of the day, to be able to say that his whole invasion and subsequent lengthy occupation of Iraq has been “successful”.
That risks having two consequences I consider very worrying: (a) his cohorts in the right wing of the Republican Party might be able to use the claims about that victory to stanch the erosion of support they have been suffering among US public opinion, and to lay the basis for further political victories here in 2006 and 2008; and (b) Bush himself, or the other US president (of either party) who follows him, might be tempted to try to do a “regime-change invasion” some place else, over the years ahead…
Then again, I really do want the much-battered and much-abused Iraqi people to find a way of achieving stable self-governance. If having “successful” elections there right now helps to bring this about– both by paving the way for a total US withdrawal, as noted above, and by providing the basis for a working national governance structure– then I reckon I would have to be totally for the success of those elections, regardless of whether this strengthens George Bush here in the US or not…