Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

The 24-member group of (mostly) blunderers who were appointed by the occupying forces to be the “Iraqi Governing Council” have been engaging in just-about-impossible contortions and ructions in their attempt to pull together an Interim Basic Law–that is, a sort of transitional constitution for their country–before the end-of-Feb deadline announced by Ayatollah Paul Bremer in November.
This effort has three major problems:

1. It’s illegal.
2. It’s quite pointless and diversionary.
3. It’s unnecessarily divisive in a country that, God knows, has enough other internal divisions to deal with, too.

Need me to run thru the arguments quickly here?
Illegal? This is under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which are quite clear on the fact that an occupying power cannot change the basic structure of governance in the territories it occupies. The IGC holds its “mandate” (such as it is) only from the occupying power. Certainly not from the people of Iraq. From that point of view, you could view it as exercising the same kind of mandate as, say, the Judenraat Councils appointed by the Nazis to run the Jewish ghettoes…

Continue reading “Bremer’s constitutional follies”

Okay, I know I just criticized Juan Cole for his reading (or, non-reading) of the Brahimi report. But his blog is, in general, just the most amazing resource for everyone around the world who is interested in, and cares deeply about, Iraq. I was so happy that he won the 2003 Koufax Award for “Best expert blog”. (I hope that the rest of you all voted for him there, as I did.)
Today, in addition to his post about the Brahimi report, he had two interesting posts that were up to his usual standard of careful, well-informed analysis. In this one he cites a statement that Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued on Monday, in which Sistani spelled out yet again his view that, “the UN should play a central role in the transfer of power to the Iraqis.”
In this post, he wrote about a statement from another Iraqi Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi, the leader of the Organization of Islamic Action, which Cole describes as “a mostly Karbala-based party”. Notable in Mudarrisi’s statement was a strongly worded warning that any undue delay in holding direct elections in Iraq would be,

“a time bomb that could explode at any minute… Without elections, our national institutions will remain shaken, unrecognized and distrusted by the people.”

The contrast between (the reported versions of) these two statements–both issued on the day the Brahimi report was being unveiled in New York–seems significant to me.

Continue reading “Cole on Sistani and Mudarrisi”

Y’all know that I admire Juan Cole a lot. However, I wish he had read the Brahimi Report on Iraq some before he made the sweeping judgment that, “This way of proceeding seems to me unlikely to be fruitful.”
The reasoning Juan provides for this judgment is to note that Annan reportedly plans to send Lakhdar Brahimi back to Iraq to consult with “leading political figures” there over how to proceed– and then, to completely and quite unjustifiably conflate that latter category with the Iraqi Governing Council!
No other reading of the Brahimi report that I have seen–including my own–supports that conflation. (Tsk, tsk, Juan!) Instead, what the report talks about is the urgent need for consultation “among the Iraqi stakeholders”, in order to reach agreement on all the many modalities of the transition process including the elections that will be a central part of it. Elsewhere, it mentions that such stakeholders include a broad spectrum of community leaders in Iraq, of which the IGC is only one among many.
The report itself is definitely worth reading. It presents what seems to me to be a realistic appraisal of the current situation in Iraq, as well as of the prospects for holding the nationwide elections there that at this point–thankfully!– just about everyone agrees need to be part of any workable and credible transition back to viable Iraqi national sovereignty.
Significantly, the seven-person team that global media star Brahimi headed was one that included both people with solid experience of analyzing current Iraqi affairs and people with solid experience of organizing elections during troubled political transitions. A serious and well-chosen team.
Its expertise shines out throughout the whole report. Paragraph 50, “Recommendations”, is obviously central.

Continue reading “Brahimi report: a realistic way forward”

Can you hear it? Clunk, clunk, clunk. That’s the sound of the Bushies’ latest hastily-cobbled-together “plan” for post-Saddam Iraq falling apart, one major portion at a time.
The latest part of the Pentagon’s (shockingly misnamed) “plan” to collapse is the part known as a “Status of Forces Agreement”, or SOFA.
In this report in today’s NYT, Dexter Filkins tells us that:

Iraq’s interim leaders said Sunday that they could not negotiate a formal agreement with the American military on maintaining troops in Iraq, and that the task must await the next sovereign Iraqi government.

Interesting, huh? I wonder what it feels like for all those ignorant, manipulative, and cynical neo-cons (is there any other kind?) when they see all their treasured plans falling apart one by one by one.
I wrote about the importance of the SOFA issue twice back in January, here and here. In the second of those posts, I recalled an earlier SOFA-type agreement in the Middle East that had been concluded with a “successor regime” that notably was not regarded as politically legitimate by its own people, and that as a result collapsed catastrophically. That was the security agreement that Sharon’s government concluded with Amin Gemayyel’s government, in Lebanon.
In that earlier case, the very fact that Gemayyel had been willing to conclude such an agreement with Israel contributed to the general sense of the illegitimacy of his government. Evidently the IGC in Iraq, many of whose members have a highly realistic appraisal of their own lack of domestic legitimacy, was eager to avoid a similar fate.
For example, in Filkin’s piece, he writes:

Continue reading “Pentagon’s Iraqi SOFA collapses”

Ah, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” bunch of snake-oil salesmen! I read with delight a report I found via Yankeedoodle of Today in Iraq, that Ahmed Chalabi and his nefarious Iraqi National Congress will be having the information they supplied to the US prior to last year’s war specifically examined by W’s new Commission on the Intel (whatever it’s called.)
The good, well-reported Knight-Ridder story that Yankee sent me to says:

Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chair and vice chair of the Senate intelligence committee, announced Thursday that they are expanding a probe into prewar intelligence to include the use of information from the INC.

It’s a good story, in general. Read it. Thanks, Yankee!
By the way, Yankee also has two other great features on his blog. One is the listing that he works hard at, in which he tries to get something up on his blog about every US soldier killed in Iraq, presented to readers state-by-state. Since I’m a Virginia home-girl, I’m going to try to copy all the listings he makes for Virginia soldiers. Maybe I could start a special area of the blog to gather them all together on.
Here’s one from his latest post:
Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.
And here’s another little feature that he introduced onto his blog just three days ago:
86-43-04. Pass it on.

Okay, I know that because I’m traveling, I’m hopelessly behind the curve of the US news cycle. But I just read Juan Cole’s elegantly argued response to Bush’s really lame ‘Meet the Press’ appearance Sunday, and wanted to get the link up here.
I’m thinking that a smart Dem– and particularly one with a strong record of military service*– should be able to take on this sad little president we have right now, and WIN.
* Okay, I’m a Quaker and I oppose all wars and military ventures. But I respect that Kerry, despite being a member of the upper class who could easily–like W– have found a way to evade active service in Vietnam times, did not take the easy way out… Plus, the journals he wrote during and after that service, as revealed in Douglas Brinkley’s new book on him, show him to have been an unusually astute and esnsitive observer of the coarsening effects that the military life was having on everyone involved in it.
Today, by the way, is the Democratic primary back home in Virginia. I cast an absentee ballot for Dean before leaving home, and don’t regret doing so. Dean has played a magnificent role by pushing the whole party to confront Bush openly on the war issue.

On Thursday, Juan Cole had a really interesting post that highlighted an aspect of the David Kelly affair in the U.K. that I had earlier been too dainty to write about in public.
Namely, what seems to have been the late Dr. Kelly’s long-time affair with Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American, a Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force who was assigned to Kelly as his interpreter when he was the chief bio-weapons inspector for UNSCOM in Iraq.
I’ve been wondering two things:
(1) Are there dots that need to be connected between the David Kelly affair in London and some of the recent words of David Kay in the U.S.?
What Kay was saying was that, in his estimation, one of the reasons the CIA had become so flabby and ineffective–my words, not his– in its gathering of decent, fresh intel on Iraq by the late 1990s was that earlier in the decade it had become easily addicted to all the pickings it got from UNSCOM.
We all know from Scott Ritter’s work and other sources that UNSCOM had been deeply penetrated by the CIA. But was Mai Pederson perhaps part of that operation? Who knows?
(2) It seems that a lot of people in public life and the media world had known about Kelly’s relationship with Pederson, whom I have seen described in print somewhere as “a flirty divorcee”. (That’s a sort of code-word for a “loose woman”, and it is probably a terrible libel against her. But many journos use it to tell you, nudge-nudge, that the two people in question have “that” kind of a relationship…)
So here’s my second question…

Continue reading “Kay and Kelly, connecting the dots?”

I was so intrigued by Juan Cole’s (highly indirect) reference to the possibility
of Grand Ayatollah Sistani having adopted Gandhianism that I immediately
blogged
about it. Then I picked up the phone to speak to someone who, I was
confident, could give me further insight on this important topic. To
my happy surprise, my esteemed friend
Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina
picked up the phone on the first ring.

I was surprised, because Sachedina travels a lot away from our common home-town,
Charlottesville, Virginia. Why, just last month, he made his third
visit to Iraq since the downfall of Saddam. (I felt foolish that
I had not called him earlier to say “al-hamdu lillah ala salaamtak” after
his safe return, and to ask him what he had learned on his trip.)

Sachedina, you see, is someone who knows his way around the world of Mesopotamian
Shi-ism pretty well. Born an “overseas Indian” in Tanzania in 1942,
he returned with his family to India after Tanzanian independence. He got
his first degree in India, then in 1967 he traveled to Mashhad, Iran, where
he spent four years getting a degree in Persian language and literature and
Islamic jurisprudence. While in Iran he made a broad network of friends
and colleagues in religious circles: those friends included people who are
now high up in the Iraqi and Iranian Shi-i institutional hierarchies.

“So Aziz, do you think Ayatollah Sistani has been directly influenced by
Gandhianism at all?”

Sachedina replied carefully. He said that in his contacts with Sistani,
the Ayatollah had mentioned a number of non-traditional sources for his thinking,
including what Sachedina described as “psychological tracts.” “But Gandhi’s
works? No, I don’t think so. He doesn’t believe in religious
pluralism, you have to understand that. He sees himself as speaking
for all Muslims, certainly– Sunni as well as Shi-i. But Gandhi? No,
I don’t think so… If his followers have been using Gandhian-style
tactics, then that would be more tactical than spiritual, I think.”

Sachedina and the Ayatollah go back a long way…

Continue reading “Sachedina on Sistani, etc.”

Two great pieces on Juan Cole today. The first quotes an un-named “European peace worker in Iraq” as having said:

“I

Here’s a question. Various news reports recently have spelled out that Bremer and the Bushies are now prepared to change just about any aspect of the infamous “Rube Goldberg” scheme to hold anti-democratic political “caucuses” in Iraq within the next few months– any aspect, that is, apart from the timing. Administration people across the board all seem quite adamant that the June 30 date for some kind of a political-transition “event” in Iraq is sacrosanct…
But why should everyone else in the world kowtow to that demand?
You should realize, folks, that you’re reading the words of a person who has argued here quite consistently that what the US should do is pull its troops out now, immediately, this instant, if not yesterday… I have no patience at all with people who bring forth some version of a “white man’s burden” argument that the US at least “owes it” to the poor benighted Iraqi people to stick around and do what it can to bring peace and security to their benighted country…

Continue reading “Controlling the timetable”