Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

The Bushites, who dominate every single rung on the ladder of violence-escalation in Iraq, have recently been systematically choosing escalation over de-escalation… And escalation is what they have got. Only a small portion of this news is even getting heard in the US.
We heard a little about the incident on Haifa Street in Baghdad on Sunday, when Iraqis crowded jubilantly around a burning US Bradley Fighting Vehicle and then were strafed by US helicopters shooting down at them from the sky. Many Iraqi civilians were killed, and many more injured. One of the injured was Salam’s friend Ghaith, who went to the scene as a photog to get some pix. Salam urges us to go look at some of the pix Ghaith was able to shoot, anyway, regardless of his injuries.
If you go that gallery of Getty Images photos, you can scroll down for more and more great images, and click on each one for an enlargement.
More violence? Today AP is reporting that a car-bomb exploded near a Baghdad police station, killing at least 59 people. Also:

Saboteurs blew up a junction where multiple oil pipelines cross the Tigris River in northern Iraq on Tuesday, setting off a chain reaction in power generation systems that left the entire country without power, officials said.

It goes without saying that in this escalation of violence in Iraq as in all others, nearly all the pain and harm is inflicted on Iraqis–and disproportionately on Iraqi civilians.
A proportion of this violence is inflicted by the Americans and their allies, and a proportion by the anti-US forces. Since the means of killing at the disposal of the Americans are so much more powerful and lethal than those at the disposal of the “insurgents”, it is almost certainly the case that a large majority of the harm suffered by civilians has been inflicted by the Americans. (Najaf; Falluja; Tel Afar; etc, etc.)
What is quite clear is that as the dominant (even if not monopolistic) military power in the country, the US has an unequalled capability to set the tone, and to ratchet down the level of violence. And indeed, since it is still the “occupying power” under international law, the US has a fixed responsibility to do this…

Continue reading “Iraq on fire”

Okay, one more time, I want to restate my views on what’s really needed in Iraq. These views are based on my 30 years as a Middle East analyst, my experiences in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, and my more recent work looking at how protracted and violent conflicts in Africa and elsewhere have been successfully terminated.
In the US (and some international) discourse, some people say you need to put emphasis on security in Iraq, so that you can get around to economic reconstruction. Some say you need to put the emphasis on economic reconstruction, so you can get around to security.
And so they duke it out between themselves! Security first! No, economic reconstruction first! You’re wrong! No, you are!
Are they listening to Iraqis? Not very much.
I think people engaged in those kinds of arguments are missing the essential element: the need many, many Iraqis have articulated and continue to articulate to see real movement to the building of an accountable democratic order.
It’s the politics, stupid!
I’ve heard echoes, certainly, of a similar missing-the-point debate between “security firsters” and “economy firsters” with regard to the Palestinian question. There, the almost wilful desire of the Likud government (and many previous Israeli governments) not to hear the clear demand of the Palestinians for some real political progress is quite easy to understand.
But why the deafness of the US government and the vast majority of US commentators to the similar demands now being voiced by Iraqis?

Continue reading “Political progress: the missing element in Iraq”

My Sept. 9 column in the CSM on the need for a US de-escalation in Iraq and more focus on the election process there is now up on their website: here.
It looks more or less as good as I’d hoped it would, though God knows the discipline of keeping under 850 words is sometimes really wearing.
(That’s why I really like doing things for Boston Review. One of my pieces there ran 14,000 words, and I think they said it was the longest article they’d ever run.)
I wish the mainstream media had more information about the election-prep process in Iraq. It really is what people should be focusing on!
Anyway, do post any comments you have about the piece up here. (And if they’re nice comments, send them as a Letter to the Editor to the CSM, too… My editors there say they always get plenty of anti-Helena rants in their mailbag.)
Also, alert reader and web-surfer BQ found my latest Hayat piece up on Hayat’s English-language website. That’s here. So you can put away your Hans Wehr Arabic-language dictionaries and read it in English now.
As for me, I’ll be pulling out my Hans Wehr soon and heading to Beirut for two months, God willing. Bill the spouse is coming, too. We each have plans of some degree of vagueness for what we want to do there. If conditions in Baghdad allow it, I plan to head on over there. Who knows?
We’ll leave Charlottesville at the beginning of October. I need to crash on my book about Africa before then. I’m into Chapter 10 already. Woohoo!

It is a somber moment. It happened today: according to AP, 999 US service members have now died in Iraq, along with three civilian employees of the military. Total: 1,002 families bereaved by the violence of a war that was totally unnecessary.
And of course, there are also the far, far larger number of families bereaved inside Iraq, and the smaller numbers of families bereaved in all the “coalition” and other countries involved in the Cheney-Halliburton adventure in Iraq.
One big question: Why doesn’t John Kerry make exactly this same point, about the unnecessary–indeed, fraudulent–nature of the whole Iraq war project?
I saw him on ABC News tonight. He expressed appropriate sympathy with the families. Then he went on to say something quite anodyne like “We will carry on fighting for what they fought for.” For Bush’s version of manifest destiny and fat contracts for Cheney’s chums: that’s what you want to fight for, John Kerry?? Shame on you.
Anyway, I don’t want to expend energy lamenting John Kerry’s tin ear on the war. I wanted to write a bit about the cyclical structure of the violence in Iraq these days, and the responsibility of the US to participate in–indeed, to lead–a major turn toward de-escalation…

Continue reading “The first 1,000”

It must have been a fascinating week for politics in Iraq… Wish I were there! I guess everyone’s still dealing with the fallout from Sistani’s dramatic return last week, and tryng to figure out the new parameters of the political game.
That was kind of an embarrassing step-back by Allawi on Tuesday or so when he said, “Oops, sorry, I can’t make a deal over Sadr City because the Americans won’t let me.”
Well, those weren’t exactly his words. But that sure as heck was the gist of the thing. Anyway, Allawi’s been continuing to try to project himself as a master political manipulator, out there fine-tuning deals with tribal leaders here or there…. Let’s see what comes of it all, eh?
Which reminds me: there’s been a noticeable change of style with Negropontra in charge there now in place of Bremer, hasn’t there? You never hear of Negropontra making those kind of showy public gestures that Bremer used to make. Of course, that’s not to say that he’s not just as active–perhaps even more so!–behind the scenes. But he’s smart enough not to grandstand publicly while doing it.
And then– Chalabi’s back in the game, too. Whoa. This Iraqi politics business moves extraordinarily fast. How did that happen, I wonder? Was it that, (1) Sistani insisted Chala be let back into the game, or (2) that Chala bought his way back in? A bit of both, I suspect.
Anyway, since Juan Cole’s been paying quite a lot of attention elsewhere this week, I thought I’d run quickly through the three available issues of the Institute on War and Peace Reporting’s Iraqi Press Monitor to glean some more info about what’s been happening there this week that you might not have read about elsewhere.
Mainly to bring myself up to speed, since I’ve been writing about South Africa all week. But also, to share with y’all. Here it is, then:

Continue reading “A week of politics in Iraq”

Faiza Jarrar, the wise and talented author of A family in Baghdad, had another great English-language post up yesterday. It looked like she wrote it last Friday–which was SUCH a tense and momentous day in Iraq. I can only imagine how she felt as she wrote.
Anyway, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here are two of the parts I found most interesting.
First, her writing about what Najaf and its extensive cemeteries mean to her:

Najaf city became a sacred symbol to Muslims, especially Shi’aa, where they bury their dead.Graveyards in Najaf are vast, endless cities, as if without boundaries…as if they are real cities, but its residents are in another world, having different customs…differing from the cities of ordinary people. On its walls there are writings: Peace be upon you, people of – NO GOD BUT THE ONE GOD, you are the former, we are the latter…When I read it I feel spiritually calm, shy from the dead, and feel sad for the fate of all humanity. Every year we go, my sisters and I, to visit my parent’s graves…we take fruits and pastries to distribute among the poor, asking them to read Al-Fatihaa Verse (The first verse in Quran) for the souls of our dead…we sit by the graves, lighting candles, reading the Holy Quran, remembering our loved ones, and we cry for their separation from us… and when we get back to Baghdad…I keep thinking all the way: How petty life is, how a human should live in all honesty and truthfulness, because he will surly die, so die an honest, well-remembered person, better than dying a villain who harmed people and stole their rights, or spilled their blood without justification… And I remember the words of Imam Ali (Peace be upon him): Death is the best preacher…meaning- that remembering death schools the soul, and purifies it from greed and follies.And also his words: Work for your life as if you will live forever, and work for your after-life as if you will die tomorrow…

Continue reading “More greats from Faiza”

On a Comments board here last week, one commenter referred to an interview Sayyid Iyad Moussawi (or, in French, Ayad Moussawi) gave to Le Monde‘s Baghdad correspondent, last Thursday (8/26).
Well now, a JWN reader has taken up my invitation to translate the whole interview. Here it is. Big thanks to the friend who sent it!
The interview is now a little outdated, given the torrent of events sparked by Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s bold, peaceful initiative. But it provides a glimpse into the thinking of someone well placed in Sistani’s entourage. Cécile Hennion, the interviewer, describes Moussawi as:

the head of the Constitutional and Political Union of the Seyyeds (the descendants of the Prophet) and the Tribal Chiefs in Iraq; he is also a member of the Marjaya (the hightest Shiites authority) and close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. Put under house arrest and arrested several times under Saddam Hussein’s regime, he never left Iraq. He was also among the clerics who negotiated the Najaf truce in June.

The things I found most interesting in the interview were the harshness of the criticism Moussawi expressed about the Allawi government, and the way he described what I’d call the “intentional nonviolence” of the march that Sistani planned to make. First, on the Allawi government:

Continue reading “Interview with Iyad Moussawi, translated”

The major media are usually drawn to war and violence like a moth to light. Bang-bang-bang!!! That will get you on the front page! Anyway, war is just so much more, well, exciting, and graphic…
All the better news to see, therefore, that Monday WaPo has an intriguing piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that leads with this:

Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Sunday that he had held private meetings with representatives of insurgent groups from the restive cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra to persuade them to accept a government amnesty offer.

Allawi described the meetings as designed,

to split the insurgency by luring lower-ranking members away from harder-core elements. Although he said he has not reached agreement with any of the groups, he insisted that some of the representatives are “changing horses . . . and taking the amnesty seriously.”

As Chandra notes, these meetings,

represent the most significant effort yet to address the insurgency [in western Iraq] through political rather than military means.

Is peace about to break out in Iraq? Well, it’s far too early to conclude that yet. There is still a lot of violence and killing in various different parts of the country.
But still, it is notable that the dramatic initiative that Ayatollah Sistani undertook last week has cleared some space in which some political rather than only military interactions have started to happen.
Hallalujah!
As Chandra notes, Allawi’s meetings with the emissaries from Fallujah, etc., have not been the only acts of political bridge-building in recent days:

Continue reading “Outbreak of politics in Iraq?”

Hey, folks, Salam/Pax has been blogging from Baghdad since August 9! This is great news for all of us who relied on his wry, Baghdad-based view of world in the months leading up to and immediately after the US/UK invasion.
(Big kudos to faithful JWN lurker Marjolein for telling me of S’s return.)
Salam says he’s just going to be back in Baghdad for 5 weeks this time. He’s been down in Najaf and doing some t.v. documentaries for the BBC with the Mahdi Army, on which he has some good observations.
It also seems his father is a minister in the Allawist government. Which gives Salam a unique perspective:

Continue reading “Salam/Pax is back!”

The latest reports from Najaf show a point in Iraq’s history that seems to be a real turning-point. The Greek word for that is “crisis”. It seems the situation still could go either way; and no doubt about it, the stakes are very high.
From here, it could go radically either toward fitna (widespread breakdown) or toward peace.
Sistani, currently sitting on the edge of Najaf, has called for both the Sadrists and the occupation forces to stop fighting and also to evacuate the city. According to Al-Jazeera:

Minutes before al-Sistani’s arrival, interim Prime Minister Iyyad Allawi said he had ordered his forces to observe a 24-hour ceasefire in Najaf to allow the negotiations to take place.
He also offered an amnesty deal to besieged al-Mahdi Army fighters and safe passage for their leader al-Sadr.

That’s good news. Until now, the Americans have all been pretending that Allawi and his henchmen have been “calling the shots” around Najaf. It would be nice if the US forces participated in the ceasefire and the broader Sistani peace plan, too.
More than nice!
Another Jazeera story notes that while the US forces were still maintaining their potentially offensive posture around the Sadrists in the shrine, it was the UK command that provided the air cover for the Sistani trip to Najaf. There’s doubtless much more of a story to be teased out there. (Including the whole story of who it was who persuaded Sistani that he “needed” to be whisked off to London 18 days ago, in the first place.)
Sistani’s plan also calls for the “Iraqi security forces” to take over security in Najaf. Those forces are a real wild card. They’ve suffered a lot of attrition from (generally, pro-Sadrist) defections, and now seem in many respects to be acting like a lot of deracinated, war-crazed goons. For evidence, see reports like this one (Reuters, 9:30 EST), that:

At least 10 supporters of Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric were shot dead in Najaf Thursday when gunmen opened fire at police who were trying to control the crowd, prompting the police to return fire, witnesses said.

Or, the many reports of the forced-attendance “press conference” the local police chief held late Wednesday. Chris Allbritton wrote that “he”–presumably the police chief?– told the forcibly rounded-up journos that:

The Shrine would be stormed tonight…, and we would be allowed to get on a bus and go visit it tomorrow to see the damage the Mahdi Army had done to it. The Sistani protesters in Kufa were really Mahdi guys and they had to be killed.

Since I’m working so intensively these days on the early-1990s transition to democracy in South Africa, I have to quickly note some possible parallels.
One is the real danger of so-called “third force” activities…

Continue reading “Transition time in Najaf and all Iraq?”