Real politics starting inside Iraq?

It is possible, just possible, that the coming weeks will see the emergence
of real internal politics inside Iraq. That is, the kind of politics
marked by realistic discussion and tough negotiating among leaders of the
country’s different major factions. That’s not to say the violence will
completely go away. But if the discussions/negotiations are serious
enough, they might be able to win out over the tendency to violence, and the
country might yet be able to hold the fair, nationwide elections that everyone–everyone!–says
they want to see before the end of January 2005.

That consensus around the need for elections is a great starting point.

I guess the precedent I’m thinking most about is that of South Africa’s
early-1990s transition from brutal minority rule to a true, one-person-one-vote
system. That transition was also marked by continuing violence that
in some areas was considerable, and indeed almost threatened the country’s
ability to hold the elections in late April of 1994. A small portion
of the bowing-out minority community (the Boer-dominated “White” community)
tried to mount a rearguard action against the move to democracy, and was
able to enlist the help of pro-Buthelezi collaborators inside the Zulu community
in order to keep the violence stoked. But that didn’t work. What
predominated in the end was the very long-drawn-out process of negotiating
the “ground-rules” for how the country’s democracy would work.

Those negotiations achieved their declared aim–which in the context of
South Africa’s extremely troubled history of inter-group relations was in
itself an enormous accomplishment. But beyond that, the negotiating
process itself established some basis of trust between communities and people
where previously there had been no trust at all. And it also helped
the very underdeveloped system of political parties within the previously
unfranchised portion of the citizenry to become better formed and more stable
by virtue of the participation of these parties in the negotiation itself.

In Iraq, it was this extremely important process of internal, inter-group negotiation
over the basics of how Iraqis would live and work together in the future that
that arrogant and silly man Paul Bremer tried to completely short-circuit
earlier this year when he summarily forced the 24 members of Iraq’s quasi-puppet
Interim Governing Council to sign onto something called the “Transitional
Administrative Law”. (For my analyses at the time, read
this

and this
and this
.)

So why am I thinking now that possibly–just possibly–we might be seeing
the start of the kind of real politics inside Iraq that might–just might–signal
the possibility of the country escaping from the present tempest of violence
in which it seems mired?

Continue reading “Real politics starting inside Iraq?”

This just in!

Using its wellknown and amazingly strong capacity for effective diplomacy, the Bush administration has been able to announce that after long, very complex negotiations with “Iraq” it has been able to reach agreement with “Iraq” over who gets to command the military there after June 30th.
That wellknown “national leader” Iyad Allawi fought tooth and nail for the very best possible deal for the people he represents…
Who are?
Oops, I forgot that part. Allawi was of course actually appointed by the IGC, which was appointed by the Americans. Prior to that (and most probably, until today), he was on the payroll of the CIA.
Why on earth should the Bushies expect anyone else to take any of this so-called “news” about an American creation reaching agreement with the U.S. government seriously?

Kurds doing okay

Am I the only person remarking on this– but aren’t the Kurds doing pretty well in the current government-forming process?
They have two of the top five jobs. In addition, they have the Foreign Affairs portfolio, and the Public Works portfolio (a.k.a. the huge patronage possibilities portfolio). I am really, really glad that after decades of getting screwed by Saddam and his neighbors, these Kurds look as though they may be well positioned to look out for their own interests in the months ahead.
It ain’t ever easy being a minority. But over the past 13 years, the Kurds have been able to set their society on its feet–with the help of the Western air umbrella–and in particular, they’ve been able to create a fairly stable-looking system of political representation. (After a small but bloody intra-Kurdish civil war along the way there in the mid-1990s.)
They’re lucky. The crystallization of differing political interests into well-formed political parties is far less well advanced in the Sunni Arab or especially the Shi’a Arab community. That means that if–as I surely hope–the country moves into a situation of increasing and mainly democratic self-rule, the country’s non-Kurds may continue to be at a relative disadvantage compared with their Kurdish compatriots.

Continue reading “Kurds doing okay”

Transitional justice and Iraq

I’ve just been reading a really intriguing report about the attitudes of Iraqis towards reconciliation and ‘justice’ that has been published by a body called the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), in New York.
The report is called Iraqi Voices. It’s 74 pages in that PDF version, and quite a lengthy read. The data in it are a little old, since they all date from last July and August. Also, the ICTJ did not use a totally “scientific” social-science methodology in their investigation (and as a result, their findings are presented in narrative rather than quantitative form, which is fine by me.)
What they had done to get their data was conduct fairly detailed interviews with 38 “opinion leaders” around the country and then hold smallish focus-group discussions among a total of some 340 Iraqis from different background. Their sampling was not “representative” at all. For example, of the 38 “opinion leaders”, only six were from the south, while 20 were from the much more sparsely populated “north” of the country.
But still, I find the report really interesting. I don’t know that attitudes on these important issues have necessarily changed very much inside Iraq in the past ten months. (What does anyone else think?) And honestly, that method of taking an unrepresentative but broad sampling from throughout a society, and doing some individual interviews and some small-group discussions, is almost exactly what I did in Mozambique last year, and it was incredibly revelatory and productive for me.

Continue reading “Transitional justice and Iraq”

Après nous, le deluge?

It strikes me that things are getting bad very rapidly for the U.S. in the Gulf. We have political mayhem in Baghdad, with the IGC quasi-puppets flexing their political muscles, Lakhdar Brahimi’s mission in chaos, and no word at all from Sistani in the past two weeks. We have a once-again dangerously deteriorating situation in Najaf and Kufa. We have the Saudis running round like the Keystone cops at Khobar and, almost certainly, the world oil market about to get into a tizzy over that. We had the big bomb in Karachi…
It feels like it’s too late and too dire now to sit around enjoying the schadenfreudies.
I’ve been really disappointed with the U.N. in recent weeks, and most particularly with Lakhdar’s apparent willingness to let himself get rolled by Paul Bremer. But if the UN, with all its weight of international legitimacy, etc., can’t help to midwife a half-way acceptable transition in Iraq, who can? Sometimes I wonder if the folks calling the shots in Washington still really, deep-down, want the UN to fail.
“Apres nous, le deluge”? Is that what’s happening here?

Back to the era of coups in Iraq?

Time was, back in the 1960s, that Baghdad was plagued by successive coups d’etat. Was that another one we saw there today, with Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer and his pals on the IGC launching a “pre-emptive strike” on Lakhdar Brahimi’s ability to do the job that he thought had been entrusted to him, namely, taking a lead role in assembling Iraq’s new “transitional” leadership?
Sure looked like a bit of a coup to me.
Bremer and the pals may think they’ve “pulled a fast one” on Brahimi by “naming” Iyad Allawi as the interim PM. But I’m sure that by doing that they will also have conisderably complicated the present Iraq-related diplomacy at the Security Council.
Brahimi, certainly, came across fairly miffed in his reaction to the IGC’s “news”. And I’m sure that Kofi Annan and several weighty members of the security Council will be miffed, as well.
And that matters. After all, what use would it be to Allawi to be the “Prime Minister” of a government that is still considered–like the existing IGC–to be totally a creation of the US occupation forces? If he can’t be “Prime Minister” under an arrangement that includes a strong new U.N. resolution that significantly dilutes US control in Iraq, then I wonder why on earth he would consider the job to be worth having at all?
Ah well, people can be funny, I guess… Especially when there’s the scent of all those billions of dollars of US “reconstruction aid” that might be attached to the job… Certainly, in the photo accompanying the Al-Jazeera story on the topic, Allawi already looks as if he’s laughing all the way to the bank…

Helping the torture victims heal

How many people have been victim to the practice of torture inside the
United States’ global gulag, and what do they need in order to heal?

Answer to that first question: an assessment urgently needs to be carried
out.

Answer to the second question: let’s start with–

Definition of torture given in Article 1 of the UN’s 1985 Convention Against
Torture, which was ratified by the US Congress in 1994:

    For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which
    severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted
    on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information
    or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
    or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or
    a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
    such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with
    the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting
    in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only
    from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Okay, what do victims/survivors of torture need, if they and the communities
of which they are a part are to heal the many wounds inflicted through this
experience?

The veterans in the western world in terms of working with victims/survivors
of torture at rehabilitation are undoubtedly the good people at the Copenhagen-based
International Rehabilitation
Council for Torture Victims

(IRCT), who have been doing this work since 1974 and has been running
a specialized Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (
RCT

) was in Copenhagen since 1982. (Check out their very impressive
English-language website for more details of their work.)

Continue reading “Helping the torture victims heal”

Redemption, anyone?

Thank God for the checks-and-balances system of government here in the US. The US Congress may have been totally supine for far too long in 2001-2003 in the face of the administration’s intemperate rush toward war. But now, finally, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal seems to have forced many veteran leaders in the U.S. Senate to start questioning the Bushies’ assertions–and more importantly, their policies– regarding at least this one crucial aspect of the so-called “Global War on Terror”.
Who knows how far this process will go before it ends?
I’ve been cruising round the web a little bit this afternoon looking for transcripts of the many important hearingsthat have been held on Iraq in both houses of Congress. It would be kinda nice, since we taxpayers pay the huge salaries of both the congressional representatives and the administration personnel involved in these hearings, if the transcripts of the whole sessions could be made available in timely fashion, at no cost, and in a well-organized way to the US public…
But no. I looked at the websites for the Armed Services Committees at both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives websites. No luck. Then I went to “Defenselink”, the central website for the DOD. There, they had the texts of the prepared statements made by the various DOD luminaries who have been called to testify in recent weeks. But they notably didn’t have transcripts for the all-important Q&A period afterwards.
I did find one possibly fruitful source…

Continue reading “Redemption, anyone?”

Not in Kansas any more

Well, I’m not in Kansas any more! (I’ve just been waiting till
I could write that. It’s not that I don’t like Kansas– actually,
my two-day visit there has been really wonderful. But still, I couldn’t
resist using a version of that iconic line from “The Wizard of Oz”. Phil
Schrodt, my co-host last night and a 16-year resident of Lawrence, Kansas, told
me that most Kansans actually have a very ambivalent relationship with that
work. “It’s such a tired cliché,” he said. “On the other
hand, often it’s the only thing outsiders even know about Kansas.” Ooops,
sorry Phil!)

Yeah, so anyway, I’m now in a plane flying somewhere over the heartland,
to Pittsburgh, on my way home for Mother’s Day. Will my son Tarek, who
arrived back at our place in Charlottesville from his home in Boston, have
the customary Mother’s Day burned-toast breakfast ready for me as I enter
the house? Let’s hope not. It’ll be about 2:45 p.m. by then…
Ways too late for the burned-toast breakfast.

So the rest of the University of Kansas conference that I was at was as
engaging as the earlier parts that I wrote about yesterday.

I guess in yesterday’s post I had reported on about the first two-thirds
of Saturday-morning sessions on “The Iraq war and the presidential election”
. Notable utterances in the rest of that session included the following:

Continue reading “Not in Kansas any more”

From Kansas, contd.

So I’m still at this conference on Iraq at the University of Kansas. I
want to put down a few more notes about what’s been going on here. I’ll
start with a few notes from what I heard John Cary, the faculty member
from the Fort Leavenworth Army Command and General Staff College say here
yesterday, that I found interesting.

He said the current level of troop deployment in Iraq is quite unsustainable.
He dismissed the idea that NATO might have any role in augmenting the force
levels. He said that maintaining “credibility” alone is not a goal
worth fighting and dying. And, asked a question about possible liberal
bias in the media, he said that in his view “the truth” lies halfway between
“the US administration fact of the day” and “the sensationalism of the Washington
Post”.

(Well, I don’t agree with his evaluation of exactly where “the truth” lies.
But it was interesting to see the broad level of daylight between his
view and that of “the US administration fact of the day”.)

Today (Saturday) at the conference, the emphasis has been on the domestic
dimensions, here in the US, of the whole Iraq war issue. Notable firstly
about this session was the willingness of more than 80 good citizens of Kansas
to turn out at 8:30 on a beautiful Saturday morning to come and take part
in the discussion here. These people– maybe 60 percent of them looking
like retirees– have been really motivated to give up their time to come
and take part.

We started off with an address by George Mason University professor James
Pfiffner
on W’s decision to go to war. Jim, who revealed that
he himself spent a year in the forces in Vietnam, started off reciting two
long lists of names of people in the Bush administration: the first, of officials
who have had no combat experience, but were all “gung-ho” for the
war, and the second, of officials who have had combat experience but
were much more cautious regarding the decision to move towards war.

Continue reading “From Kansas, contd.”