Fears of Balkanization in Iraq

Riverbend, the talented Iraqi author of the “Baghdad Burning” blog,
has a very important
new post

up today in which she outlines her fears–and those of all the folks
around her–regarding a possible breakup of her country.

Her bottom line:

    We all lived together before- we can live together in the future. Iraqis
    are proud of their different ethnicities, but in the end, we all identify
    ourselves as “Iraqi”. Every Iraqi’s nightmare is to wake up one morning
    and find Iraq split into several parts based on ethnicity and religion.

Riverbend was writing in reaction to something that Salam of “Dear Raed”
had written, that expressed much the same attitude toward the idea. (Click

here

, then scroll down to the bit that starts, “Have you been noticing…”) His
bottom line:

    Yes I know identity is important but you see my father is Sunni, my mother
    Shia and our neighbors for years Kurds. There are no lines and none should
    exist, the situation in Kirkuk does create lines and make people choose sides.

Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.

I remember back at the end of April when Martin Indyk, who was at the apex
of Washington’s Middle East decision-making for all of the Clinton administration,
suddenly saw that the post-war situation in Iraq was not going as smoothly
as he and many of his friends had hoped. Suddenly running scared by
that, he
told an audience

at Washington’s elitist Brookings Institution April 23 that, “We’re going
to have to play the old imperial game of divide and rule and the stakes could
not be higher.”

Continue reading “Fears of Balkanization in Iraq”

Iraq’s Arab Sunnis reaching out to Kurds, Turkmen?

Alan Sipress has an important piece in today’s WaPo about Sunni leaders in Iraq organizing a pan-Sunni coordinating/advisory council (shura council).
If the Shura Council becomes a fixture in its present form– still not known–then it could substantially affect the future balance in the country.
According to Sipress,

    The shura council includes equal representation from each of the three main currents within the Sunni Muslim community: the politically oriented Muslim Brotherhood, the religious puritans of the Salafi movement and the adherents of the mystical Sufi tradition. Within each group, half the seats are allocated for ethnic Arabs and half are divided between ethnic Kurds and Turkmen. Dozens of other council members are drawn from professionals, intellectuals, tribal leaders and other civic groups.
    The council does not plan to exclude former members of Hussein’s government unless they were involved in criminal activities, [said Mohammed Ahmed Rashid, an activist with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is involved in forming the council.]

Also very significant:

    The council… is demanding that the next Iraqi government be selected by direct election rather than through local caucuses, as U.S. officials prefer.

Sipress also reports that Dan Senor, a spokesman for the never-sharp (except sartorially) L. Paul Bremer as saying that the U.S.-led occupation authority, “was still learning about the Sunni body.”

Iraq’s anti-democratic SOFA

Wright and Chandrasekaran, writing in today’s WaPo, have a piece that outlines Colin’s Powell’s plans for the six-month transition to (the appearance of) Iraqi self-rule.
The plans include an inappropriately early deadline for conclusion of a “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA). Hence the headline here.
(The WaPo story uses yet more from Robin Wright’s Dec. 29 interview with Powell… Truly, a gift that has gone on giving, for many days, for the WaPo editors. Plus, today they are actually finally posting the transcript of the whole interview…. So why didn’t they do that right away for the the rest of us poor slobs instead of parceling out the goodies over five days, huh?)
Anyway, the highlights of this timetable for a highly flawed “transition”:

    Feb. 28: deadline for “agreement”–presumably between the Coalition provisional Authority and its near-puppets of the “Iraqi Governing Council”– on the content of “Transitional Administrative Law”. The TAL will basically set the rules for the Rube-Goldberg-style non-election process that will bring into being the “Iraqi Successor Government” that takes over nominal power in the country on or before June 30…
    Mar. 31: deadline for agreement on the “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA) that will govern the continued presence of US troops in Iraq subsequent to the Rube Goldberg process…
    June 30: after completion of the Rube Goldberg process, the “handover” of power to the non-elected body takes place…

What is notable about this timetable? Two main things:

Continue reading “Iraq’s anti-democratic SOFA”

Powell plans Saigon-style embassy for Baghdad

The WaPo has spent just about all the past week milking the interview that Colin Powell gave them a few days ago for dribs and drabs of new information. (I guess that’s what you do on a “holiday” news week.)
So today’s drib was served up by Robin Wright in a piece titled “U.S. has big plans for legation in Iraq.”
Oops. Make that “embassy”.
Actually, in a direct quotoid used from the Powell massage-a-thon, Powell is reported as himself being a bit fuzzy as whether the new “thing” actually will be an embassy:

    “The real challenge for the new embassy, so to speak, or the new presence will be helping the Iraqi people get ready for their full elections and full constitution the following year,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview this week.

So let’s just go ahead and call it a Legation, okay? As in Vietnam in the days of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”: “After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down the street… Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation…”

Continue reading “Powell plans Saigon-style embassy for Baghdad”

The draft that dares not speak its name

They don’t want to call it a draft but it sure ain’t your father’s “all-volunteer military” any more…
The WaPo ran a big front-page piece today about the various stop-loss programs that have been implemented by the US armed forces. The idea is that people who have already in the past contracted to enter military duty in either the regular forces, the reserves, or the National Guard can have the termination dates of those contracts summarily postponed by the service in question if it feels a pressing need to “stop the loss” from various units.
In the piece, Lee Hockstader writes about Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, a Texan and an Army Reserve interrogator in an intelligence unit who was due to retire from the reserves last May. Hockstader writes:

    “An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is allowed to violate the contract; I am not,” said Costas, 42… He has now been told that he will be home late next June, more than a year after his contractual departure date. “Unfair. I would not say it’s a draft per se, but it’s clearly a breach of contract. I will not reenlist.”

Hockstader writes about a number of other service members who feel similarly violated by the “stop-loss” orders. He (she?) should have talked to Marine’s Girl, whose blog was the first place that I learned about this eery new phenomenon.
MG wrote about stop-loss here and here.
The second of those posts was written Dec 20, a few days after her Marine got back to the US on an unexpected leave. In it, she relayed part of an IM session she and he had just held. He was still held “captive” at that point on an un-named Marines base where he had to go through around two weeks of mandatory “counseling”. In the course of it, his “counselor” had reportedly urged him to give up any emotional entanglements he had back home…
So here’s a portion of the IM session, as posted by MG:

    Me: I’m very glad you are back home. I have to worry about you much less, it is like a huge weight has been lifted from me. I’ve missed you terribly.
    Marine: The thing I needed to tell you is this…my contract was extended during war time, which is a common occurance. It is looking like I am going to have to return to battle whether I want to or not.
    Me: Stop loss got you?
    Marine: My fate, at least for now, is sealed. I have to do my duty…but I refuse to bring anyone else with me. I do not want to continue to drag you along.

That thing about “refusing to continue to drag you along” was what the Counselor From Hell had urged him to say to her…
Once they were able to talk on the phone rather than merely thru cyberspace, plucky, persistent old MG was apparently able to talk a bit more loving sense into him… And later posts on her blog reported that he made it to her place by Christmas Eve and they had a grand ol’ Christmas together…
Anyway, check out the whole blog, and leave her a big hug on one of her Comments pages!
So, back for a last moment to the WaPo story, Hockstader reports that by using stop-loss orders, “the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.”
He (?she) quotes military sociologist Charles Moskos as saying that this widespread use of stop-loss orders, “reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit.”
The stop-loss seems hard on ALL the service members involved. But it seems it has been used disproprotionately against members of the Guard and reserve. This places huge burdens on them and their families– especially since they usually don’t get even the same level of health benefits etc that the regular military get.
Let’s hope all these people and their families start urgently contacting their representatives in Congress. Blatantly involuntary service should be ended NOW. Bring ALL the troops home!

The trials of trying Saddam

There’s a possibility that by October-November 2004 the capture of Saddam Hussein,
which today looks like such a valuable political ‘prize’ for the Bushies,
may look like a difficult political liability. The central question
of who is to control the process of trying and punishing him may have
become so hotly contended by then that many in the administration might wish
that rather than capturing him alive, the forces that stormed his bunker
had somehow allowed him to “be shot while fleeing arrest”.

Hey, they might even come to wish, rather wistfully, that they could simply
have handed him over to the jurisdiction of an “International Criminal Court”
which could take all the decisions around trying the guy–and all the associated
political heat–quite out of their hands!

The “who gets to do it” question around the trying of Saddam Hussein is by
no means as easy or straightforward as it looks…

Continue reading “The trials of trying Saddam”

Sistani calling for UN role

Two great pieces by Juan Cole that pick up on Arab press reports that Ayatollah Sistani is saying that the US-dominated doesn’t have the legitimacy to make the determination that full-scale elections aren’t feasible inside Iraq for now.
But that he might accept a determination from the UN on this matter.
On Saturday Cole cited a report in the Gulf Daily News as saying that Sistani,

    stands by his ruling that Iraq should go to early general elections on a one-person, one-vote basis. According to IGC member Muwaffak al-Rubaie, however, Sistani has indicated that he would back down on one condition. If Kofi Annan appoints a UN commission that concludes that early general elections are impractical because of security concerns, then he would accept some other mechanism for achieving a transitional government.

It is extremely interesting and significant that the Ayatollah is making an appeal for UN help on this issue. This will only add to the pressure that’s already mounting on the Bushies to give the UN a much larger role in the handling the transition to self-government in Iraq than they have been prepared to give to it up until now.
Why does all the really interesting stuff have to happen while I’m traveling elsewhere and have huge problems getting online, getting news etc?
Here in Incheon Airport (Seoul) I’m using a computer in the airline’s lounge that works mainly in Korean script… Plus, whenever I click on “blogspot” links in the JWN link-list, some Korean-language gremlim gets into the process and brings up Korean-language site instead. I can’t even figure out what’s happening there. Oh well. On to Beijing soon enough. Who knows what the internet situation will be like there?

Saddam captured

I was flying west with the night for the past 24 hours, arrived in Incheon Int’l airport, Seoul, S. Korea at 6 a.m. their time to discover that while we flew Saddam was captured.
There’s a fine piece on Juan Cole’s blog already that starts with a lengthy catalogue of Saddam’s acts of brutality and violence. (Sorry I can’t do the link since all the browser instructions on this computer here are in Korean.)
I would describe some of Saddam’s acts im even starker terms than Juan does: “fencing” with the Kurds in the 1970s doesn’t to my mind quite capture it. I would call draining the marshes that the Marsh Arabs lived in for untold generations a clear act of cultural genocide. I would list not only the assassinations but also the mutilations and, perhaps worst of all, the systematic attempt to destroy social trust in Iraqi society by urging children to inform on their parents, relatives on relatives, co-workers on co-workers, etc etc…
But still, Juan’s list was pretty good and extremely sobering. Since I can’t link to it, let me paste it in here:

    I remembered the innocent Jews brutally hung in downtown Baghdad when the Baath came to power in 1968; the fencing with the Shah and the Kurds in the early 1970s; the vicious repression of the Shiites of East Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala in 1977-1980; the internal Baath putsch of 1979, when perhaps a third of the party’s high officials were taken out and shot, so that Saddam could become president; the bloody invasion of Iran in 1980 and the destruction of a whole generation of Iraqi and Iranian young men in the 1980s (at least 500,000 dead, perhaps even more); the Anfal poison gas campaign against the Kurds in 1987-88; Halabja, a city of 70,000 where 5,000 died where they stood, their blood boiling with toxic gases, little children lying in heaps in the street; the rape of Kuwait in 1990-91; the genocide against the Shiites that began in spring of 1991 and continued intermittently thereafter; the destruction of the Marsh Arabs; the assassinations, the black marias, the Fedayee Saddam. Yes, the United States was not innocent in some of this. Perhaps they cooperated in bringing the Baath to power in the first place, as an anti-Communist force. They certainly allied with Saddam against Iran in the 1980s, and authorized the purchase of chemical and biological precursors. But the Baath was an indigenous Iraqi phenomenon, and local forces kept Saddam in place, despite dozens of attempts to overthrow him…

He goes on to write:

    A nightmare has ended. He will be tried, and two nations’ dirty laundry will be exposed, the only basis on which all can go forward towards a new Persian Gulf and a new relationship with the West.
    What is the significance of the capture of Saddam for contemporary Iraqi politics? He was probably already irrelevant.

Well, it would be interesting if we were to see the “two” nations’ dirty laundry all exposed, but somehow I doubt it will happen…
Halabja? Undertaken in almost exactly the same period Bombs-Away Don was visiting Baghdad and giving Saddam a green light to do whatever it might take to contain the Iranians and their Iraqi-Kurdish friends… I’m not sure we’re about to see all that kind of dirty laundry being exposed in any court that is controlled by either the US’s CPA or its creature, the IGC…
You have to know that somewhere in a vault in a Swiss bank or someplace Saddam and his cronies have stored numerous enormous wads of documents that are the records of all their interactions over the years with Bombs-Away Don and others from the Reagan administration; with the Saudis; with the Brits as well as other European governments including of course the Russians and the French; with the Chinese–hey, just to get a “Royal Flush of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council…
And you have to believe that in the case of anything like a decent, recognizable trial process, the defense would have to have access to those records. (Slobo has been trying to do exactly this at the ICTY in The Hague. But he had far less of a record of world-power connivance in his misdeeds to build on than Saddam has.)
Actually, the issue of what to do with Saddam now that the US forces have him is quite a tricky one.

Continue reading “Saddam captured”

Sy Hersh: Big US escalation ahead

Go straight here. This is a Sy Hersh piece in the latest New Yorker in which the very well-informed Hersh tells us that the escalatory, made-in-Israel tactics that we’ve seen the US forces using recently in Iraq are only a foretaste of what is yet to come.:

    The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.
    The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls ‘Manhunts’-a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. ‘Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,’ a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.
    One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers–again, in secret–when full-field operations begin…

Hersh reports that the US planners have found an innovative way to deal with their present huge problems in gaining usable intel on the insurgency: “they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on.”
He reported that one of his many ex-CIA sources had identified one of the key players on the new US-Iraqi intel team as:

    Farouq Hijazi, a Saddam loyalist who served for many years as the director of external operations for the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. He has been in custody since late April. The C.I.A. man said that over the past few months Hijazi ‘has cut a deal,’ and American officials ‘are using him to reactivate the old Iraqi intelligence network.’

On the US side, he says one of the big new players is Stephen Cambone, the Under-Sec of Defense for Intelligence, whose star, Hersh says, has been rising as Doug Feith’s has apparently been dropping.
Cambone is the big sponsor of General William (“Onward Christian Soldiers”) Boykin…
Anyway, the Hersh story has lots of really great details that I can’t go into here. He makes great analogies between the kinds of manhunts being planned for Iraq and the infamous “Operation Pheonix” pursued during the US-Vietnamese war.
The one big point he does not make with sufficient clarity is that–in addition to being incredibly immoral and illegal–the Israelis’ use of these tactics of escalation, massive repression, and colonial-style “pacification” has not ‘worked’, at the strategic level, by forcing the Palestinians to bend to Israel’s will. That was the point I made in this post, that I put up here on Sunday.
(And then, by an amazing coincidence, I used many of the same ideas in a CSM column that’s coming out Thursday.)
Hersh did however quote a former Israeli military-intel officer as telling him:

    ‘Israel has, in many ways, been too successful, and has killed or captured so many mid-ranking facilitators on the operational level in the West Bank that Hamas now consists largely of isolated cells that carry out terrorist attacks against Israel on their own.’ He went on, ‘There is no central control over many of the suicide bombers. We’re trying to tell the Americans that they don’t want to eliminate the center. The key is not to have freelancers out there.’

I believe we absolutely need to say out loud and clear that–in addition to the fact that the Israeli Ur-plan on which the plan as reported would build has not won for Israelis the political goals that they have sought–this scheme as reported by Hersh is immoral and quite illegal. The very idea of employing Saddam’s former Mukhabarat chief in this way is one that ought to stick in the gullet of any decent person, inside the Bush administration or outside it.
In addition the scheme as reported sounds completely cock-a-mamie at a lower-than-strategic level, too.
First, it seems to assume that most of the problems from the current unrest come from reorganizing Baathists rather than from other disaffected sectors of the population. Probably not a correct assumption.
Second, it assumes that this Farouq Hijazi and his former (Ba’thist!) allies will be (1) motivated enough to take the Americans’ dime, and turn on and turn in their former comrades-in-arms, and (2) able to “crack into” the networks of said former comrades-in-arms, even though Hijazi and maybe many of the others have been out of touch with those people for some months now.
And so, in the name of some chimera of a “decisive military victory” over the insurgency, much, much new violence is to visited on Iraqi communities; thousands of suspects no doubt will be arrested and have applied to them the kind of (im-)”moderate physical pressure” that IDF Israeli security services use in order to “turn” prisoners into becoming informants for them; distrust and violence will be sown systematically on a large scale inside Iraqi society…
Turn back from this disastrous course, turn back!

The Iraq poll: information as property?

It has come to my attention that at least some bona fide researchers who sent an email to Oxford Research International to request the “press packet” of materials that I referred to in a couple of posts last week had this request rejected.
Dr. Silvia Iacuzzi of ORI wrote one researcher the following (apparently generic) letter:

    Dear Sir/Madam,
    Thank you for your interest.
    I regret to inform you that further to misuses and wrong quotations, we
    are not releasing any further information regarding the survey in Iraq
    for the time being.
    However, you may want to consult the BBC website
    (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3254028.stm).
    Best regards,
    Silvia Iacuzzi

I would be interested to more about Iacuzzi’s specific charge of “misuses and wrong quotations.” And btw, don’t bother rushing to the BBC story she references, which is the highly inadequate piece of reporting by Barnaby Mason that I referred to in this post.
The more I thought about it, however, the more puzzled and upset I became about the idea that information like that gathered by the researchers of the ORI/Oxford University team– in coordination with researchers from the Universities of Dohuk and Baghdad, in Iraq– should in any way be considered “proprietary”.
To my mind, this kind of information is vital for international peace and security. Decisions taken on the basis of having or not having such information could result in the loss of scores of thousands of lives and all the rest of the human suffering that is associated with war.
If people think– quite rightly, imho– that vital lifesaving information in the pharmaceutical realm should be made available to those AIDS-sufferers and others who need it regardless of so-called “intellectual property” concerns, then why not the information that ORI and its university collaborators have collected?
Another issue. When the 3,244 Iraqi women and men who graciously gave of their time to answer the lengthy list of questions asked by the researchers, were they made fully aware that the answers they gave would be aggregated into a proprietary product over which neither they nor any democratically accountable body would subsequently have any control, but which would be controlled by a private company in far-off Britain?
Or, when these Iraqis graciously gave of their time etc., were they doing so based on some hope–not disabused by the poll-takers–that their voices would be heard, and would be aggregated into a report which would be part of the global discourse on war and peace issues in their country?
If the latter, then I would say that if ORI now seeks to exercize proprietary control over the results of the poll it is guilty of a serious breach of basic research ethics, and also a serious breach of the trust of the Iraqi respondents to its poll– as perhaps too, of that of many of the Iraqi poll-takers themselves, if they were also not fully aware of the terms under which the project was being conducted.
Comments? Further ideas?