Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Robert McNamara, the man who as US Defense Secretary in the 1960s was the architect of the US escalation in Vietnam, has until now been reticent in criticizing George DUH-bya’s war on Iraq. This silence was all the more surprising because of the lengths the 87-year-old McNamara has gone to over the past decade to understand, excoriate, and apologize for the misdeeds he and his colleagues committed in Vietnam.
Now, he has spoken. Doug Saunders, a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, called McNamara recently at his office in Washington DC and asked him to apply the lessons he learned about Vietnam to the present situation in Iraq.
(I found this story thru a comment “Munguza” left on Yankeedoodle’s “Today in Iraq” blog). Here’s how Saunders described McNamara’s response to his question:

“We’re misusing our influence,” he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. “It’s just wrong what we’re doing. It’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong, it’s economically wrong.”

Continue reading “McNamara speaks, finally, on Iraq”

Edward Wong of the NYT has a generally pretty thin piece in Sunday’s paper, from Najaf, detailing how he failed to catch the ear of anyone particularly close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
It’s heavy on the “color”– donkey carts, etc., etc.– and fairly light on the news content. The most interesting little tidbit came from near the end, where he wrote:

Two weeks ago, a major battle for [Sistani’s] ear was joined, when it fell to Mr. Pachachi, of the Governing Council, to lead a delegation to discuss the issue of direct elections. Mr. Rubaie [also of the IGC], who accompanied the delegation, said the ayatollah sat on the floor of his home opposite them, wearing his customary black turban and black robes. Mr. Pachachi tried explaining that there was not enough time to organize direct elections by the June 30 deadline. He produced a letter from Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, saying as much.
“That didn’t cut the ice with him,” Mr. Rubaie said. “He had already been convinced that elections were possible.”
That had come about, Mr. Rubaie said, because the ayatollah had absorbed the opinions of Iraqi census experts, the minister of trade and a senior United Nations envoy acting unofficially, all of whom had made it known to the cleric that direct elections were feasible.

Continue reading “Sistani, Annan, the letter”

Sorry I haven’t been writing for a while… No, I was not at Davos (*chuckle*)… I was locked in a very intense drafting process in Washngton DC, with a couple of dear Quaker colleagues, for the past couple of days… I hope I can announce the results of that session here, soon…
Meanwhile, Iraq’s people have carried on making history, as I started to write about in my previous post here, written Tuesday.
Since Tuesday, I have tried to keep up-to-date with, at least, the WaPo and the NYT. Oh, I also spent a couple of great hours with Sir Brian Urquhart, the former Under-Secretary-general of the UN, but that’s another story.
So here are what I’ve noted as the seven most significant developments of the past few days:
(1) Sistani and his colleagues have been cleverly continuing to modulate, build, and orchestrate their political movement… Anthony Shadid, writing from Karbala in today’s WaPo, notes that Sistani aide Abdel-Madhi Salami: “urged his followers Friday to refrain from the kind of mass protests witnessed in Iraq’s two largest cities this month until a U.N. team determines whether nationwide elections are feasible.”
Shadid wrote that this suggested that Sistani feared the large-scale protests seen earlier in the week could get out of hand if continued. A more plausible (and not totally contradictory) analysis might be that Sistani and his people want to keep the popular movement disciplined in order to maximize its effectiveness. (Gandhi did the same, remember.)
Also, I’m sure that the Grand Ayatollah realizes that the show of popular force his people put on last Monday has already had a big effect, so it’s a good idea to keep that kind of a big “demonstration” in reserve, for when it’s next needed.
You could call this a civilian-mass-organizing version of the theory of “shock and awe”…. That is, an exemplary show of force that “persuades” the opponent to change his plan drastically in the way you want him to.

Continue reading “Sistani, Clausewitz, the world”

Friends, mark your calendars. Iraq’s people are these days, finally, becoming the subjects of their own history. It now seems clear that in the process they will strike fateful blows not only to the ridiculous “Rube Goldberg election plan” proclaimed by Washington and its quasi-puppets of the IGC in November but also, beyond that, to George W. Bush’s entire concept for a US-dominated Iraq that would lead the rest of the Middle East into a relationship of long-term servitude to US commercial interests.
Such are my conclusions after reading a wide range of reporting of yesterday’s 100,000-strong, Sistani-led demonstrations in the heart of Baghdad.
Anthony Shadid’s account in the WaPo has been by far the best reporting that I’ve seen so far. What he makes clear are four key aspects of the demonstrations:

(1) The impressive organization behind them. They were announced thru the speaker systems of mosques around the city only one day before, yet they succeeded in bringing out those kinds of numbers, and from Shi-ite groups spanning many different trends.
(2) The discipline of organizers and participants. I guess that if, as a Shi-ite religious organization you have succeeded in surviving 30 years of Saddamist rule including numerous anti-Shi-ite pogroms and other genocidal campaigns, then you know a thing or two about the need for strong internal discipline…

Continue reading “Iraqis making history”

Okay, let’s say that Country X is running a military occupation over the entirety of Country Y. (You can read my lengthy thoughts on military occupations in general if you go here.) And that everyone concerned–including, at the rhetorical level, the rulers of occupying country X– says that their goal is to restore independence and legitimate indigenous government to country Y–
How do you do that?
Easy, if the country you’re talking about is Kuwait, 1990. Kuwait’s “legitimate” (though deeply undemocratic) rulers had escaped from their country en masse at the time of the Iraqi invasion, and set up a skeleton administration in exile… They had powerful friends, the Americans, who spearheaded the military operation aimed at the restoration of the status quo ante.
But what if Country Y has no leadership that is generally recognized as legitimate that is both (a) in existence, and (b) able to call in powerful foreign armies to effect its restoration?
What if we’re talking about, say, Namibia in the 1980s, East Timor in the 1990s– or Iraq, today?
Why then, the answer is Dial ‘911’ for the United Nations!
But can the UN indeed do the trick, and under what circumstances?

Continue reading “Transition from occupation to independence and democracy: a UN role?”

Daniel O’Huiginn of Cambridge, UK has posted an interesting piece of analysis about the whole issue of federalism in Iraq, and how it is viewed in particular by the Iraqi Kurds. His piece is on a notice-board run by the UK-based Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq. (Now being re-named, I believe.)
One of the good things about Dan’s piece is the footnotes, many of which contain substantial quotes on the subject as translated from the Arabic press. (He doesn’t, alas, say by whom, which would have been helpful.)
He makes pretty clear that the main division is between those Iraqis–mainly non-Kurds–who’d like a federalism based on the country’s existing governorates (provinces), and those who want a more clearly ethnic basis to the federalism.
Iraq has 18 governorates. (See map here.)There’s a Kurdish majority in three of them. But many Kurds don’t live in those three governorates. So I guess many Kurds fear that the effect of a governorate-based form of federalism would be to split and dilute Kurdish influence.
In his piece, Dan notes that one of the main documents the two main Kurdish leaders refer to in pleading their case is the series of resolutions adopted at December 2002 conference of Iraqi (then-)opposition figures, held in London.

Continue reading “Federalism and Iraq’s Kurds”

Huge kudos to Juan Cole for this blog post today that covers Tuesday’s very important demonstrations in Iraq Tuesday protesting the IGC’s summary imposition of religious laws over all areas of personal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc).
Under the latest IGC ruling Iraq, which until now has had real legal equality for women (and a high degree of actual equality for women in workplaces and schools), will join other Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel that allow the local religious institutions to impose their own forms of inequality over vast areas of women’s lives.
Shame! Shame! (And of course, under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, quite an illegal thing for anyone running an occupation administration to do.)

“Navy wife”, commenting on Yankeedoodle’s Today in Iraq blog, recommended this story from today’s Boston Globe.
In it, reporter Anne Barnard writes about how Vassil Yanco, an Iraqi-born American and employee of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Institute sought to bring democracy to the Iraqi town of Rutbah (pop.7,000) in the course of a two-hour drop-by appearance:

To reach Rutbah, Yanco… and two Iraqi colleagues drove to the US base at Asad.
The next day, they flew 90 minutes in a Black Hawk helicopter to Forward Operating Base Byers. The team wanted Rutbah to hold a 100-member public caucus that would choose a new local council and two delegates to the provincial council. They knew little about local politics in the town of 7,000, known as a smugglers’ hub…
Yanco’s team traveled to Rutbah’s youth center, nearly an hour’s drive from the base, in a convoy of a dozen Humvees backed up by tanks. The last leg was a winding, off-road jaunt to avoid roadside bombs.
About three dozen city administrators sat on worn sofas in the town’s youth center. The three-member city council — largely inactive since November, when a bomb went off at the mayor’s office where they met — sat in back and asked no questions.

Continue reading “Democratization as instant coffee, part deux”

Steven Weisman
writes
in today’s NYT that un-named “administration officials” say the
Bush administration now plans to revise the plan for a handover to
self-rule in Iraq that was agreed on just last November 15.  The revision
is reportedly aimed at “responding to” the firm insistence that Ayatollah
Sistani announced Sunday that any Iraqi self-rule government be the result
of–wait for this shocking revelation!– a fully democratic process.

So does this mean that Baghdad fashion maven Jerry Bremer and his Washington
handlers are now prepared to move away from “the Rube Goldberg process”–
the incredibly unwieldy and undemocratic mechanism agreed back in November
whereby undemocratic “caucuses” and other such gatherings would generate
a new Iraqi leadership?

No, it does not.   As Weisman reports it:

The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make
the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental
way.

So I guess we could call the proposed new system “Rube Goldberg, II”.  That
will make it at least the fourth* of the “strategic” plans the administration
has adopted for the handover since the US forces took Baghdad last April.
 (And the pace at which the administration is falling back from one
plan to the next seems to be speeding up.)

And I have a sneaking suspicion that Sistani, who doesn’t seem to be anyone’s
fool, is not necessarily going to have the wool pulled over his eyes on this
one?

Weisman also reports another aspect of Sistani’s Sunday declaration
that I had not seen reported elsewhere, and that likewise came as a big
shock to Bremer and his backers:

Continue reading “DoD suits scrabbling yet again to find a workable plan”

The NYT magazine has a longish piece by Peter Maass today that demonstrates extremely convincingly why the US is NOT destined to win the counter-insurgency/pacification campaign in Iraq.
(You’ll have to take my word on this, since for now my browser won’t bring the article up.)
The piece is called “Professor Nagls’s war”. In it, Maass provides a generally sympathetic, even laudatory, description of the life, thinking, and current work of a U.S. Army major called John Nagl. Nagl’s “normal” job is as a professor of strategy at West Point. But currently, he’s deployed as the operations officer with an 800-soldier battalion near Fallujah in the infamous “Sunni Triangle” of Iraq.
I guess Maass (or the Army?) picked Nagl to be profiled because he has some credentials as an expert in the theory of counter-insurgency warfare. He did a Ph.D. at Oxford University on the subject, no less. The book that resulted from his thesis studies “Counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.”
Nagl himself is presented as having an engaging humility about those credentials:

Continue reading “How NOT to win in Iraq”