Author: Helena

Ever since I read this piece by Dexter Filkins in today’s NYT, I’ve been casting around for more information about Sistani’s current positions.
It led with this:

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the nation’s most powerful Shiite leader, is growing increasingly concerned that nationwide elections could be delayed, his aides said, and has even threatened to withdraw his support for the elections unless changes are made to increase the representation of Shiites, according to one Iraqi source close to him.

That source was almost certainly Hamid Khaffaf, described as “one of Ayatollah Sistani’s top aides” and cited in the very next para.
The AP carried a story tonight in which reporter Denis Gray wrote:

Hamed al-Khafaf, an aide to al-Sistani, told The Associated Press that the poor security situation should not be taken as a pretext to postpone the vote.
Asked if al-Sistani is worried that the elections might be delayed, al-Khafaf said, “what we say is we stress that the elections should take place on time and be supervised by the United Nations.”
Al-Khafaf said al-Sistani wants the elections “to be held in a way that Iraqi people will be represented with all the sects and ethnic groups.” But he denied that the cleric might withdraw his support for the election if his concerns are not addressed.

So it seems it’s unclear whether Sistani is actually threatening a possible pullout from the upcoming election process at this point, or not.
Sistani’s support for the election process is a completely necessary (but not on its own, sufficient) condition for the elections to be held successfully in January, and afterwards to be judged fair enough by enough Iraqis that the body elected is judged by them to be legitimate.
Those will be, of course, highly nuanced and subjective judgments. But they are the only ones that will matter. Given his proven track record of popular influence so far, Sistani has the power to withold (though probably not, on his own, to confer) legitimacy on the whole election process.
Americans concerned about how to support a legitimate election process in Iraq–a step which is a totally necessary component of any policy that avoids complete chaos and disaster for the American forces there–should be paying a lot more attention to Ayatollah Sistani and a lot less to parsing the preening, strutting pronunciamentos of US-annointed stooge Iyad Allawi.
(Hey, ever wonder where Allawi learned to preen and strut like that?)
Anyway, Filkins is probably the guy with–so far– the best info from Sistani’s man, Khaffaf:

Continue reading “Sistani and the prospect for Iraqi elections”

Jessica Mathews, the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has a generally excellent op-ed in today’s WaPo. It’s titled “Match Iraq Policy to Reality”.
This op-ed, allied to previous work that Mathews and other Carnegie staff members including their “Arab Reform Bulletin” team have done, indicate to me that this small but venerable organization is probably nowadays the sanest and most constructive of the DC think-tanks when it comes to looking at Middle East issues. (Brookings’ Mideast programs having been taken over by Martin “divide and rule” Indyk; AEI still continuing in its role as incubator of the neocons; etc.)
Here is Mathews’ opening argument:

What was an emerging opposition [in Iraq] is now a full-fledged insurgency. The United States is still without a political strategy that recognizes this reality. As a result, the military is forced into a stop-go-stop hesitancy in which soldiers’ lives are being wasted and security continues to worsen.
The sobering truth is that a path to a not-awful ending in Iraq is extremely hard to see, and there may not, in fact, be one. The United States cannot use its full power to achieve security without causing so many Iraqi casualties that it would defeat our purpose. We do not have enough additional troops to send to achieve order through an overwhelming presence. Iraqi security forces are nowhere near up to the task and will not be for a long time. Thus the paradox: While achieving a degree of security is the overwhelming priority, a change of political course is the most important step.

Attentive JWN readers will probably understand why I think Mathews is so percipient–namely, that she seems largely to agree with my own conclusions.
She continues:

What is needed is a policy that takes deadly seriously what Iraqis believe about why the war began and what the United States intends. These beliefs — that the United States came only to get its hands on Iraq’s oil, to benefit Israel’s security, and to establish a puppet government and a permanent military presence through which it could control Iraq and the rest of the region — are wrong. But beliefs passionately held are as important as facts, because they powerfully affect behavior. What we see as a tragic series of American missteps, Iraqis interpret — with reason when seen through their eyes — as evidence of evil intent.

I actually disagree with her when she says flat-out that all of those Iraqi beliefs are “wrong”. I generally try to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their “true” motivations, and perhaps I’m prepared to do that regarding whether the “real intention” of the Bush administration in invading Iraq was, “to get its hands on Iraq’s oil, to benefit Israel’s security, [or] to establish a puppet government”.
However, on the establishment of “a permanent military presence through which it could control Iraq and the rest of the region”, I judge that there is quite enough evidence to support the conclusion that that war goal was indeed one that motivated the decision to invade. For example, look at the haste with which, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Bushies, (1) uprooted the longstanding US military presence in Saudi Arabia and moved to sever all remaining operational reliance on those bases, and (2) set about building those 14 “enduring” military bases inside Iraq…
Indeed, is there are other possible explanation for the construction of bases described in those terms??
(And of course, to provide political protection for any longterm basing agreement in Iraq– a country with a long history of deeply held anti-imperial sentiment and policy– the Bushies would then, necessarily, have to aspire to put and keep in place a compliant puppet government, as well… )
Anyway, that’s a relatively small quibble with Mathews’ broader argument… It’s just that she is prepared to give the Bushies that much more benefit of the doubt regarding their motives than I am…
Her argument continues thus:

Continue reading “Good sense from Jessica Mathews”

It’s here. If you haven’t read it yet, go straight there.

One way that people prepare themselves–and any onlookers–for their own use of violence against other people is by calling the intended victims by names designed to dehumanize and marginalize them, thus making it more “okay”–or even laudable–to kill them.
Most recently we saw how the men of violence beheading Americans in Iraq referred to Americans as “dogs”. And from the American side, meanwhile, I’ve recently been seeing a number of instances where US field commanders refer to whole communities of Iraqis as “cancers” (that have to be cut out by violence.)
It happened again in this piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran on the front page of today’s WaPo:

“Fallujah has become a cancer,” declared [Marine Capt. Jeff] Stevenson, echoing a metaphor used by several senior U.S. commanders in Iraq.

And later on, this additional dehumanizing metaphor, again used for Fallujah:

“We need to take out that rat’s nest,” said one senior Marine officer in Fallujah, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his views contradict those of his commanders. “The longer we wait, the stronger they get.”

The “cancer” analogy is one I’ve definitely heard before–from Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, speaking in August 2002 about Palestinian nationalists.
One notable thing about all these dehumanizing metaphors–as with the term “inyenzi” (cockroaches) that Hutu-power extremists used, to refer to Tutsis in the run-up to the genocide in Rwanda–is that in all these cases, it is actually a virtuous or at least a “hygienic” act to “clear out” and exterminate the said objects and rid the world of them. (And yes, this is the view that many Arabs have of dogs, too.)
I have a suggestion. How about everyone involved in what is essentially a politically struggle for control–whether in Iraq or Palestine– moves towards not dehumanizing their enemies in this way, but gets back to referring to them simply as “my opponent”, or “a person whom I deeply disagree with”, or whatever? Metaphors of “unclean objects” are usually designed to break the bonds of shared humanity that link each person on this earth to each other, and to make it “okay” for one person to “wipe out” another…
Actually, have you noticed the extent to which homecleaning/hygienic metaphors have already become absorbed into the discourse of modern warfare? I just wrote, “wipe out”… Then, there are “mopping up” operations, some of which, alas, may lead to “ethnic cleansing”… So you can just see what referring to people as “rats”, or “cockroaches”, or “dogs”, or “cancers” can lead to…

The WaPo‘s Steve Fainaru, embedded with some US military in northern Iraq, has a telling story deep in today’s paper that recreates some of the details of the battle in which, just last week, US forces recaptured control of the Iraqi city of Tall Afar (popn. 250,000-plus) from the “insurgents” who had previously controlled it.
Like this: he tells us that during the battle, US forces turned off basic services, including water and electricity for “at least three days”.
An action like that constitutes a clear collective punishment of the city’s people and is quite possibly a war crime.
I can tell you from my own experience in war-time Beirut, most people can survive a cutoff of electricity, somehow, for some time. But a cutoff of water kills people. Especially as existing supplies become increasingly degraded and disease-ridden.
In Fainaru’s latest piece, we can also learn this startling fact: Of the 600 members of the “new” Iraqi police force who were deployed in the city at the start of the battle, 517 either deserted or defected to the insurgents. Plus: “The Iraqis who switched sides included the police chief and his deputy, both of whom were detained by U.S. forces.”
Right underneath Fainaru’s piece, there on p.A32, there’s a small box in which Robin Wright cites puppet-PM Allawi as saying the insurgents are fighting a “last stand” in his country, and “We are winning.”
H’mmm.
Actually, Fainaru’s piece is full of little vignettes and snippets that indicate the shocking degree to which–18 long months into the US war against Iraq–the US military still lack much basic understanding of the political/social context in which they are fighting….

Continue reading “What happened in Tall Afar”