Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

From a piece by Dexter Filkins in today’s NYT:

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.
In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in….

Sounds familiar?? Well, it is:

American officials … acknowledge that they have studied closely the Israeli experience in urban fighting. Ahead of the war, Israeli defense experts briefed American commanders on their experience in guerrilla and urban warfare.

Filkins cites Brig. Gen. Michael A. Vane, who is deputy chief of staff for doctrine concepts and strategy at the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, as having recently written: “[W]e recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons learned from their counterterrorist operations in urban areas.”
Well, jolly good for General Vane. Maybe… But totally bad for everyone else concerned.
D’you think the folks in the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command haven’t heard yet about the fact that these tough-guy tactics haven’t actually ‘worked’ for Israel? That is, more than three years after the IDF instituted practices of massive over-reaction, strangulatingly tight movement controls, proactive assassinations, and all those other tools from the old playbook of colonial “pacification” campaigns — they still haven’t succeeded in forcing the Palestinians to bow to their will.
As none other than the IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon himself recently admitted publicly. As I noted here on October 29, Ya’alon had told Israeli journalists the day before that the comprehensive travel restrictions and curfews his forces had imposed on Palestinians were actually harming Israel’s overall security.
“It increases hatred for Israel and strengthens the terror organizations,” Ya’alon was reported as saying. Also: “In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest.”
See also the very similar criticisms that four retired heads of Israel’s “Shin Bet” security agency have voiced recently about the policies that the Sharon government (and before it, let’s not forget, the Sharon-plus-Labor government) has mandated toward the Palestinians. You can read a full, English-language version of the interview with the four SB heads here.
So here’s my simple question. I do believe I’ve asked it on JWN before now; but it seems it still needs repeating: If these exact same types of policy have evidently not ‘worked’ at pacifying the Palestinians, why do some people in the US military think they can possibly work against the Iraqis?

Continue reading “Like, this approach has “worked” for Israel??”

Today’s WaPo has a significant story from Defense Correspondent Vernon Loeb, in which he quotes an anonymous “senior army official” as telling him,

Four Army divisions — 40 percent of the active-duty force — will not be fully combat-ready for up to six months next year, leaving the nation with relatively few ready troops in the event of a major conflict in North Korea or elsewhere…

Loeb explains that:

The four divisions — the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 1st Armored and the 4th Infantry — are to return from Iraq next spring, to be replaced by three others, with a fourth rotating into Afghanistan. That would leave only two active-duty divisions available to fight in other parts of the world.
Briefing reporters at the Pentagon, the official said the four returning divisions will be rated either C-3 or C-4, the Army’s two lowest readiness categories, for 120 to 180 days after they return as vehicles and helicopters are overhauled and troops are rested and retrained…
This dip in readiness could have political consequences for President Bush, who sharply criticized the Clinton administration during the 2000 campaign for allowing two Army divisions to fall to the lowest readiness category in 1999 because of peacekeeping obligations in the Balkans.
“Obviously, this is much worse in terms of the numbers,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has called for increasing the size of the Army.

The WaPo helpfully placed the link to that piece on the front-page of its website today right next to a link to a piece in tomorrow’s “Outlook” section that reproduces the answers Loeb got to a question he asked five or six US commanders in different parts of Iraq, about how exactly they back up their constantly iterated claims that they are “winning” there.
In the lead to this piece, the editors note that these claims continued to be made, “even as attacks against U.S. forces increased across the country and a series of high-profile bombings and helicopter shoot-downs helped create the impression in the world media that the insurgents were gaining ground… ”
So then, they give the answers to this question to you “from the horses’ [i.e., these commanders’] mouths”:

Continue reading “US Army readiness down, effectiveness claimed (from WaPo)”

I want to recapitulate that part of the findings of the Oxford Research International poll that I cited yesterday, here and here, that concerned the attitudes of Iraqis toward the continued presence of the US/UK forces in their country.
I also want to experiment with composing off-line and then uploading the text into the blog. Why not? (I’ve had bad problems with trying to do it before now; but I’m planning a different approach today.Update: Still problematic. *sigh*)
So anyway, as I wrote yesterday, the question of whether Iraqis consider the presence of the occupation-power forces to be helpful or detrimental to their sense of security and wellbing is an important piece of information.
Yesterday, I wrote that I was glad that ORI had provided the evidence for that. But the issue is not quite simple, since no version of the question, “How do you view the impact that the US/UK forces have on your sense of security and wellbeing?” was directly put to the respondents.
What we had, instead, was the respondents revealing some aspect of their views on this issue slightly indirectly, in their answers to two of the other questions that were posed:
First, when asked to describe the degree of trust that they had in a long list of institutions in the country, one of the institutions was “The US and UK occupation forces”. That question revealed that 78.8% of respondents had “Not very much” or “None at all”, while 21.2% said they had “A great deal” (7.6%) or “Quite a lot” (13.6%).
Second, (although I think in the way the questionnaires were administered, this came prior to the other question), people were asked to provide their own, singular response to the Question, “What would be the worst thing that could happen to you in the next 12 months?” Presumably, the kinds of answers that people actually gave to that were aggregated somewhat. But it is still notable that in response to a free-form question like that, 15% of respondents answered with (some version of) “Occupation forces will not leave Iraq”, while 0.6% answered with some version of “American forces leaving Iraq”. A wide range of other types of answer were also, of course, given there.
So, we have a ratio of 15.0 to 0.6, that is 25 to 1, of people thinking US forces staying to US forces leaving is the one worst scenario they can imagine. This is, of course, highly suggestive of the way all of opinion might break down on the issue. And it certainly accords with the general trend of the responses in the “trust/distrust” section, except that there the ratio of “lots of trust” answers to “little or no trust” answers was 3.7 to 1, not 25 to 1.
In addition, in the question regarding the “one worst thing”, I note that 84.4% did not express themselves one way or the other on the question of the staying or leaving of the US/UK forces. So obviously we cannot say flat-out that the 25-to-1 ratio represents the whole of Iraqi opinion. What we can say is that the evidence strongly suggests that Iraqis would prefer to see the withdrawal of the occupation forces and to face whatever followed that in their own way, rather than to have the occupation forces stick around. And despite the generally low levels of social trust revealed in some of the data, the strength of the belief expressed that some indigenous form of democracy could work for them was impressive, and would back up the supposition that they see a way to resolve their internal problems among themselves, rather than relying on the US/UK forces to solve them for them.
That’s great! Bring the troops home!
I note, too, that new data from polling inside the USA that was carried out by the Program on International Public Attitudes at the University of Maryland, also accords with this view. In releasing the resukts of the new poll, PIPA Director Steve Kull said, “A very strong 71% said the UN should “take the lead to work with Iraqis to write a new constitution and build a new democratic government”–up from 64% in June
and 50% in April. Just 26%, in the current poll, say the US should take the lead.”
By the way, yesterday I noted that I felt a little intimidated by all the copyright notices attached to the portions of the report that ORI had sent me. But to make things as easy as possible for you, I suggest you click here to send them an email and request your own copy.

I just finished writing the last post, which highlighted the recent survey of Iraqi opinion carried out by Oxford Research International, when the good folks there at ORI emailed me over a bundle of docs summarizing their methods and findings.
These docs all carry imposing copyright symbols. If they hadn’t, I could have posted them on my website and just linked to ’em from here. (I feel very ambivalent about all issues of intellectual “property”.) I also note that the survey was carried out jointly between the (for-profit) ORI and the Sociology Dept at Oxford University. Shouldn’t a publicly-funded university make its findings freely available to the public?
As it is, I’ve decided to make “fair use” of what ORI sent to me, and shall summarize what I think are the most significant findings. For background on the survey (timing [Oct-Nov], sample-size [3,244], etc) you’ll have to read my last post, Iraq’s Battle of the Ayatollahs.
So, findings, running rapidly down the summary that ORI sent me:
On contentment:

People in Iraq are not particularly unhappy with their lives (average score [I think this is the score for happiness, not unhappiness? HC] 5.7 on a scale of 1-10). Historically, life satisfaction in 71 countries around the world stood at an average mean score of 6.8, with some countries scoring as low as 3.7 (Moldova) and 4.0 (Ukraine). Neighbouring Turkey scored 6.3, South Africa and South Korea 6.0

Continue reading “Oxford survey on Iraqi opinion, contd.”

Ayatollah Sistani says he wants the commission that decides on his country’s new constitution to be elected. Ayatollah Bremer says he wants the commission that decides on Sistani’s country’s new constitution to be sorta-kinda-well– not exactly elected.
Who will decide between these two views?
Unlike Ayatollah Tom Friedman, I happen to think it should be the Iraqi people who decide. Which makes the results of a recent survey on Iraqi opinion released by a group called Oxford Research International particularly relevant.
The survey sampled the views of 3,244 Iraqis picked out by random sampling, who were interviewed in their homes in October and early November. They were asked to rate their confidence in 11 different organizations including the Interim Governing Council, the rebuilding Iraqi Army, the UN, etc etc.
Of the eleven different bodies, Ayatollah Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority won the laurels for “most distrusted”: some 57% of those questioned said they had zero trust in the CPA and 22% said they had “very little” trust in it (for a total distrust index of 79%). A resounding eight percent said they had “a great deal” of trust in the CPA.
As for the (slightly general) category of religious leaders, they reportedly won the laurels for “most trusted”. 42% of respondents said they had a great deal of trust in the RLs, and another 28% expressed “quite a lot” of trust in them (for a total trust index of 70%). Around 11% said they had “no trust at all” in the RLs.

Continue reading “Iraq’s Battle of the Ayatollahs”

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has finally given his official response to the extremely undemocratic, born-in-Washington plan for a political ‘transition’ in Iraq that was announced November 15.
The word from Sistani’s home in the holy city of Najaf: No go.
This world exclusive was apparently won by Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the WaPo, whose editors rightly put their story on the front page today. Seems one or both of them had submitted written questions to Sistani’s “liaison office” in London, from which the asnwers were then sent back to them– in Iraq, where they’re both working from these days.
The missive from London came in both English and Arabic, they report. They cite what is apparently the English text sent to them. However, over on Juan Cole’s website today, he has done his own translation of what is apparently the Arabic version of the same text. Since I would judge the Arabic version coming out of Najaf/London to be authoritative, and since I respect Juan as an experienced and careful translator who captures the nuance of Arabic when he renders it into his native English, I’ll give you his version here:

“First of all, the preparation of the Iraqi State (Basic) Law for the transitional period is being accomplished by the Interim Governing Council with the Occupation Authority. This process lacks legitimacy. Rather the [Basic Law] must be presented to the [elected] representatives of the Iraqi people for their approval.
“Second, the instrumentality envisaged in this plan for the election of the members of the transitional legislature does not guarantee the formation of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to another process that would so guarantee, that is, to elections. In this way, the parliament would spring from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a just manner and would prevent any diminution of Islamic law.” He added, “Perhaps it would be possible to hold the elections on the basis of the ration cards and some other supplementary information.”

This is not the first time Sistani has expressed his firm opinion that Iraqis need elections for any constitutional convention they may be having. Back in late June, as you could read here on JWN, he already stated this.
Why did the White House, Paul Bremer, and the Interim Governing Council think they could finesse the issue with him this time round?
Even this time around, some of the IGC people contacted by Shadid and Chandrasekaran were saying they hoped they could get Sistani to back down. “We need to get him to change his mind,” they quote one IGC member as saying– a person, that is, so lacking in self-confidence in his position that he spoke only on the condition of anonymity. (I really do like it when reporters explicitly say that, as these two do, rather than using phoney-balone talk like “on deep background” which is only paraded to show readers how terribly well-connected the reporter in question is, Bob Woodward-style.)
Sistani’s suggestion that someone organizing an election could use the “Oil for Food” ration lists as a starting point is an eminently sensible one. It is, however, one that the many previous exiles among the IGC cohorts really hate– mainly, one supposes, because their families are not registered on them. But those lists do provide an excellent and fairly recent base-line, and could be updated with a quick household re-survey that could be carried out within two or three months–if the CPA and the IGC really wanted to get the best-available head-count for a speedy election.
As to why people in the supposedly “modern”, hi-tech US military administration now running Iraq should have to worry about the views of someone as supposedly “old-fashioned” or “medieval” as Sistani– well… He actually is acting just as smartly as one might expect from a person who is heir to a great, long tradition of civilization and whose institutions came through the successive periods of Turkish (Sunni) foreign rule, British (Anglican) foreign rule,and local (Baathist) totalitarianism much bloodied but still more or less intact.
How smart is Sistani? Well, just imagine the glee with which he and all of Iraq’s other Shi-ites must be watching the still-unfolding conflict north of Baghdad, between the Sunnis and the occupation forces. Sistani has certainly not given his many followers any go-ahead to join the anti-occupation campaign. He doesn’t have to. He can stymie Bremer’s designs simply by sitting in Najaf and issuing his fatwas and other declarations to the worldwide media.
And mean-time, in that area north of Baghdad, both the US troops and the Shi-ites former oppressors from the Sunni community are getting badly bloodied.
At some point, Sistani might follow the lead given by his Shi-ite co-believers in Lebanon’s Hizbollah (Party of God) movement: In a time of great national stress he might agree graciously to extend his leadership to the whole of the Iraqi people and not just to the 60-plus percent who are Shi-ite.
I should imagine that that all the people in the CPA are running around like headless chickens at the thought that the old fox of Najaf can, with a single stroke of his pen, stymie all their hastily-assembled plans for a carefully orchestrated and oh-so-carefully-timed political “transition” in Iraq. Carefully timed, that is, for it to look good in the US media come November 4, 2004.
We might give this Rovean scheme a working name of something like an “October surprise”. But the Shi-ites of this part of the world have, of course, been down this road a number of times… and not just in 1984…
I was in Beirut in late 1980, and I clearly remember Ayatollah Khomeini’s emissary Mohammed Saleh telling me that Khomeini was quite aware of US election timetables, and quite determined to exploit them for his own purposes… Which on that occasion were directed mainly toward “punishing” poor old Jimmy Carter for the failed hostage-rescue attempt he had made earlier that year… So even though Khomeini’s negotiations with Carter for the release of the hostages were actually just about finished by the end of 1980, Khomeini and his “student” supporters were determined not to release the hostages to Carter, but rather to wait until incoming Pres. R. Reagan was in office. Which was just what happened. Minutes after Reagan took the oath of office the planes carrying the hostages home took off from Teheran airport.
Well, the impact of that was mainly symbolic. (And the whole world got Ronald Reagan as a result. Thanks a lot, guys– I don’t think!)
But my main point is that the people in, around, and from the Shi-ite institutions there in Najaf and Kerbala certainly all share their experiences with each other just as much as any group of Yalies sitting around and yakking with each other 30-40 years after graduation. And these guys in the Shi-ite religious hierarchies have many, many experiences of dealing with and manipulating US (and Israeli) electoral concerns for their own ends, that I’m sure they discuss, share, and reflect on frequently.
And in the US, meanwhile, how much do the people running the country’s policy today known about or understand the Iraqi, Iranian, or other political dynamics in the Middle East? Almost nothing!
I could write hundreds of pages about the systematic destruction over the 20-plus years I’ve lived in the US of the professional cadres in the US government that previously had some working familiarity with the affairs of the Middle East… All done in the name of rooting out those insidious alleged moles called the “State Department Arabists.” Robert Kaplan, the smarmily superficial author who is much beloved by politicians of all stripes in DC, even wrote a whole book to damn and undermine “The Arabists.”
Of course, that campaign was egged on all the time by Israelis of nearly all political stripes. Those Arabists, you see, continued to try to point out that israel’s aggressive policies against its neighbors, and the fact of continuing, strong US support for Israel despite the aggressive and frequently flat-out illegal nature of its policies (as in the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan), were causing grave problems for the US itself throughout the non-Israeli Middle East.
When the post-mortem on the whole tragic fiasco of US policy toward Iraq finally gets undertaken, let’s make sure that that part of the back-story that concerns the campaign against executive branch Arabists doesn’t get left out.
In the mean-time, though, we should all be watching the internal politics of Iraq very carefully.
President Sistani in 2004? It’s probably unlikely, since my sense of him is that he prefers to operate behind the scenes. But who knows?
And if Sistani or his protege were to emerge as the person chosen by the Iraqi people in their first fully democratic elections, what then? Well, good luck to them all, I say–Iraq, its people, and its leaders.
Iraq is, after all, their country.
(This latter fact seems to have eluded Li’l Tommy Friedman, who was writing an immense amount of jingoistic, manifest-destiny drivel in today’s NYT: “This war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan… It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot…” Jesus, Tom, give us a break from this nonsense, won’t you?)

Les Gelb, the former President of New York’s almost terminally inbred (and very powerful) “Council on Foreign Relations”, has an op-ed piece in the NYT today arguing that the US should– unilaterally!– work toward the speedy splitting of Iraq into three separate states.
Gelb gets to publish this almost lunatic–and extremely dangerous–idea right there in the NYT because he is the former editor of its op-ed pages. He used to be quite smart and generally fairly ethical. Can’t think what’s been eating at his brain to bring him to this.
I see that Juan Cole has a good post on his blog pointing out some of the many flaws in Gelb’s argument. But actually, I think Gelb’s argument is, at several levels, far worse than Juan makes it out to be.
For several reasons.
The first and most serious one is that the US has no right simply to split up Iraq into three states or make any other such serious changes in the country’s administration. No right whatsoever.
The Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross is the body which, under a series of international treaties, is the international depository for the body of “laws of war” called “international humanitarian law” (IHL). Therefore, the ICRC’s commentaries on various aspects of IHL– including the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, etc.– are considered authoritative. In a useful factsheet on the rights and duties of an occupying power, the ICRC notes:

The Occupying Power cannot change the status of the territory it occupies. Though it becomes the de facto administrator of that territory, the Occupying Power must maintain and preserve the economic and social structures and respect the customs. It can amend the laws and regulations in force in the territory only to the extent needed to enable it to meet its obligations under the Fourth Convention, and to maintain orderly government and ensure its own security.

Actually, this set of limitations applies to many of the far-reaching changes the occupying powers (that is, the US-led coalition) have tried to institute in Iraq, including the sweeping steps toward economic privatization, etc. And it would most certainly apply to any attempt by the US-dominated coalition to split the country into three states.
(There are reasons, remember, for the strict limits the Geneva Conventions place on what an occupying power may do with the territory and the people over which it runs an occupation. The conventions were codified in this form in 1949, when the recent depradations that the Nazi armies had wrought all over the lands of Europe that they had occupied were still a recent and vivid memory.)
A second deep problem with Gelb’s proposal becomes clear if you read three-fourths of the way down his text. The three separate states he proposes splitting Iraq into would be, from north to south: a Kurdish state, a Sunni Arab state, and a Shi-ite Arab state. And–

The general idea is to strengthen the Kurds and Shiites and weaken the Sunnis, then wait and see whether to stop at autonomy or encourage statehood.
The first step would be to make the north and south into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines. Give the Kurds and Shiites the bulk of the billions of dollars voted by Congress for reconstruction…

Of course, Gelb is so “smart” that he recognizes–to a certain extent– that Iraq does have a certain degree of inter-group mixing, especially in the central area (but also, which he pays little heed to, in the north as well). So the idea of drawing new boundaries “as closely as possible along ethnic lines” is by no means as clearcut or as easily do-able as it sounds.
And Gelb quite realistically foresees the possibility that if his chosen scenario of systematically weakening the Sunnis is enacted,

without power and money, the Sunnis may cause trouble.
For example, they might punish the substantial minorities left in the center, particularly the large Kurdish and Shiite populations in Baghdad. These minorities must have the time and the wherewithal to organize and make their deals, or go either north or south. This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the United States would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.

This is where his proposal gets truly sick. Having asserted that the US has some right simply to carve occupied Iraq up into three states as it pleases, he proposes that the US should then actually facilitate and pay for the massive degree of ethnic cleansing that would most likely ensue.
For example, there are around two million or more Shi-ites in Baghdad. US forces would cooperate in uprooting them from homes there that in many or most cases their families have lived in for generations?
You gotta be kidding.
Gelb bases his whole argument about carving up Iraq on a deeply flawed analogy with the events of the past 15 years in the territory now called the “former” Yugoslavia. There, for 45 years after WW2 there had been a Titoist federation of states; but from 1990 onward Yugoslavia started to fall apart. The Slovenes got their independence; then the Croatians and Bosnians wanted theirs; then the Macedonians; then even the Kosovars (though they didn’t even have a fully-fledged “state” in the Tito-ist scheme.) The west more or less went along with– or in some cases, even encouraged–that breakup.
My first reaction to Gelb’s use of this analogy: after everything else the Iraqis have gone through in the past 25 years, Les Gelb now wants to inflict on them some nightmare scenario out of the Balkan wars of ethnic cleansing?? Like, what happened in FY was such a great precedent for anyone else to follow??
My second reaction was that this is a totally crap analogy anyway because, despite eveything else that was going on in FY at the time in terms of external machinations, international arms salemen hovering around, geopolitics, etc., etc., still, the main impetus for those states to secede from the federation came from the peoples (or a noisy subset of the peoples) of those states themselves. It certainly was not imposed on them by any arrogant outside power.
And, as Juan Cole makes abundantly clear in his post, the desire for outright secession among the sub-groups of Iraqis is miniscule or nonexistent. I recall, too, that Riverbend had a good piece recently about general good relations and intermixing among the different sub-groups in Iraq…
Gelb’s proposal is worse than merely being ill-informed, illegitimate under international law, and highly unethical. It is also extremely inflammatory. Schemes by imperial powers to split up various of the Middle Eastern countries are nothing new in the history of the region, and a fear of such schemes runs deep in the psyches of many Arabs and Muslims…
So okay, Ms. Wise-ass Helena, how would I deal with the evident diversity of Iraq’s national population and try to ensure that no community’s vital needs and interests get swamped in the future?
Well, the country already has 18 governorates, a very fine number within which numerous different kinds of the country’s sub-groups can all feel adequately represented. South Africa has nine provinces; and Spain has, I think 15 or 17. Each of those democratic countries nowadays supports a very diverse population in which a range of ethnic/linguistic (in both countries) and religious (in South Africa) groupings can feel well represented.
So why should we imagine that the Iraqis would be incapable of working out some analogous arrangement that would suit them? Of course they can do it.
They can’t, however, be expected to do it so long as they’re under the heel of a foreign military occupation. (And sorry folks, that still is the technical term for what the US is running in Iraq, despite some deluded self-descriptions that it is there solely as a “liberator”. Check out some of my earlier posts about the nature of occupations.)
No, clearly what is needed in Iraq is an immediate handover to UN legitimacy and authority in Iraq, and then a speedy transition to self-rule. Self-rule, that is, for the one country of Iraq. Enough of these crass schemes to split the country up!

Great piece in the WaPo today aptly titled “Hope and Confusion Mark Iraq’s Democracy lessons”. It’s by Ariana Eunjung Cha–another great Post discovery, along with A. Shadid.
Cha went to a bunch of meetings in an area of northern Baghdad province called Taji with an American anthropology prof of Iraqi heritage called Amal Rassam. Rassam was trying to advise the local U.S. commander on how to establish the “provincial council” called for in the Bushies’ latest “quick exit” plan.
“Establish”, in this sense, being a euphemism for a Rube-Goldberg-like scheme whereby the US military seeks to select participants in this process at various levels up to the province.
Trouble was– as Cha apparently knew but Professor Rassam had yet to discover–that in Taji the people already had a fairly well-developed system of more-or-less elected local councils in place.
As Cha writes: “That Taji has had its own tentative representative system for months throws … Rassam off; no one had told her this.”
Rassam is working on this project as a sub-contractor for a North Carolina contractor called the Research Triangle Institute. Cha writes of the latest democratization scheme that, “Local leaders will be consulted, and some groups will actually cast votes to select neighborhood leaders. But the final decisions will be made by the military and the RTI.”
Cha describes Rassam as “one of more than 650 consultants” currently working on “civil society projects” in Iraq for RTI.
So this is where our $87 billion is going! I’m trying to figure how much it actually costs to keep one “New York professor” active in the field for say, six months or however long Rassam’s contract is for. Say, conservatively, $150,000? Multiply that by 650 and you get $97.5 million…
Nearly all that dosh would end up in the bank accounts of the profs or other US-based contractors themselves plus the other (mainly, US-based) suppliers of support services for them. Oh, and then there’s the RTI’s profits… So the vast majority of this cut of the “aid for Iraq” cake will be recycled straight back into the US economy, rather than into Iraq.
As a close family member commented to me today, “Why don’t they hire Iraqi schoolteachers or other professionals to do these kinds of jobs, and spread this amount of money around inside the Iraqi economy instead?”
Plus, Iraqi people who know the country might actually be a little less clueless when it comes to doing their job than Professor Rassam has been made out to be?

This was my first attempt to post this text, which is from a speech given November 4 by my old friend Ghassan Salameh. But I only had a highly imperfect version of it, as published in The Daily Star (Lebanon). Shame on them! Evidently editing standards there must have plummeted since I worked there back in 1974-75…
Anyway, I’ve now cut out the whole substance of this post, and direct you to the next post, where a better version of the text is now posted. (Sadly, though, I couldn’t do the whole line-break thing for such a long text there.)
Still, it’s an interesting text. Check it out. I’m keeping this one here as a placeholder only because Advanced Calc already posted an interesting Comment on it, which I didn’t want to lose.

I got some nice reactions to the CSM column that came out today. Of course, Iraq-iffy-cation has become quite the big topic, all of a sudden.
It’s very hard to tell what-all the Bushies’ plans (if they have any) currently are. Is the huge military escalation a sort of “last gasp” before they all ignominiously “redeploy offshore”? A precedent for that would be having the battleship New Jersey hurling Volkswagen-size marine munitions into villages in Lebanon in late ’83/early ’84 even as the brass were actively preparing for-indeed, even as they undertook– the withdrawal of ground forces from the whole country.
A sort of petulant, retributive, and very shortsighted way to exit any country, let me note. I wrote about that whole episode not long ago, here.
But nah. I don’t think that “covering a withdrawal” is what the present bombardments and escalation in Iraq are all about. (Though I would truly love to be wrong on that.) So far, it looks to me more like the petulant, retributive, and shortsighted part of what happened in Lebanon, but without any underlying strategic plan.
Looks like they’re trying to bomb the bejeesus out of the Iraqis while saying they want to build a democratic constituency of Iraqis with whom they can peacefully negotiate Iraq-iffy-cation as soon as possible?
And this fits together how????
You know what? People have been mainly looking at the challenges of Iraq-iffy-cation through some very limited lenses. In the mainstream discourse, most people’s memories only seem to go as far back as– oh, Afghanistan, 2002.
So that’s why you get all these mainstream headscratchers saying oh, so, “wisely” things like, “What we need in Iraq is a Hamid Karzai figure!” or, even more pretentiously, “Maybe we should move to a loya jirga model there instead.”
What horse-@#$%. People, let me say, “I know something about Iraq, and Iraq is no Afghanistan!”
They tried the Hamid Karzai model there already, remember: the suave westernized long-time emigre who could work smoothly with the Americans…

Continue reading “Iraq-“iffy”-cation– yet more”