Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Jalal Talabani was sworn in as Iraq’s President just now, and he then immediately (or, not quite immediately enough) named Ibrahim al-Jaafari as Prime Minister.
According to the TAL, this is what now happens (that link goes to an AP summary, not the original TAL):

The prime minister has one month to recommend his Council of Ministers, or Cabinet, to the President’s Council. The prime minister and President’s Council will then seek a vote of confidence by simple majority from the National Assembly before starting their work as a government. If the prime minister does not nominate the ministers within one month, the President’s Council names a new prime minister.

We are still therefore some distance from having a government that is answerable to the National Assembly elected January 30 in place, and exercising executive power in Iraq.
The “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter will continue.
Who knows whether Jaafari and Talabani will be able to agree on a government list rapidly, slowly, or indeed at all?
Meantime, the Bremer-appointed Allawi continues to “run” things. (I.e., control the patronage machine, rake in the dough, and try to keep his hangers-on in and his enemies out of sensitive and/or lucrative positions.)
It looks as though– under the TAL– Jaafari still needs to go through Talabani to get his list to the Assembly. Will Talabani be helpful or obstructive in this process? Let’s hope the former.
But it wasn’t a good omen that he “forget” to even mention the naming of Jaafari until after most of the assembled t.v. cameras had stopped rolling.

So finally today, 66 days after the January 30 election, the members of the National Assembly elected that day were able to reach agreement on an interim President, veteran PUK leader Jalal Talabani, and two Vice-President, slippery Shiite pol Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Sunni stuffed shirt (okay, stuffed jallabiya) Ghazi Yawar.
This article by Ed Wong on the NYT website today gives some interesting details about the Assembly session, including this:

new problems erupted at the assembly meeting, as many Shiite members called for the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to be dissolved as soon as Mr. Talabani and his deputies were sworn in. Shiite officials have been particularly critical of Mr. Allawi’s rule, saying he has brought back into the government former senior members of the Baath Party who played key roles in oppressing ordinary Iraqis, especially Shiites and Kurds. The debate today foreshadowed what many people see as a potentially harsh purging of former Baathists from the government once the new rulers are installed.

Wong reports that interim human rights minister Bakhtiar Amin had insisted that Saddam Hussein and his imprisoned cronies be “forced” to watch a televised version of the proceedings inside their jail cells over near Baghdad airport:

“I thought it was a very sensible idea for Saddam and his aides to watch with their own eyes Jalal Talabani, who had been excluded from all amnesties issued by Saddam, being elected today as president,” Mr. Amin said.

Wong also hinted strongly that Yawar (who had previously been named by Paul Bremer as one of the two key deputies to Iyad Allawi) might not be the best person through whom the new Transitional Government leadership could reach out to the Sunni Arabs… On the other hand, the “evidence” he adduces for that comes from disappointed candidate Adnan Pachachi, so it’s not clear how much value to give to his view.
The appointment of the three-person Presidential Council was a major “hump” in the road to government formation, since it required the Bremer-imposed two-thirds super-majority. That hump has now been passed. The Prez Council will now, I think, present its nominations for the prime minister and other ministers to the Assembly, where only a simple majority is required for passage.
That may happen as early as Thursday.
But will Iraq then get a Transitional Government that is both domestically legitimate and empowered (by the occupying force) to start ruling the country? That is really the question.
Until that happens, I think I’ll keep the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter going.
By the way, in that AP/Yahoo story I linked to above, there’s a fascinating little quote from Talabani that I consider to be a hopeful sign:

Speaking after his election, Talabani … made a gesture toward those who side with the insurgency.
“As for the Iraqis who are carrying weapons out of patriotic and anti-occupation motives, those people are our brothers and it is possible to talk with them and to reach a solution,” Talabani said.
He added that his government would work to provide security so that U.S.-led coalition forces “could return home after the completion of building (Iraqi) armed forces that are capable of finishing off terrorism.”

In other words, Talabani is declaring that those “insurgents” (a completely anti-political term that US spinmeisters have tried to apply to militants from a range of different political orientations) whose motivations are “patriotic and anti-occupation”– as opposed to being anti-Shiite or anti-Kurd– are people whom he is ready to work with.
It’s great that, in rhetoric and also possibly in reality, Talabani is not presenting himself merely as a patsy for the occupation forces.
Also, that he seems to be aiming for, or prepared to accept, a complete withdrawal of US forces.
So the intra-Iraqi politics of this are getting interesting.

I’m afraid I have been too busy with other things to write much about Iraq recently. From one point of view, though, the ever-rising number on JWN’s “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter says it all…
65 today!
So now, 30.5% of the total time allocated to reaching agreement on a permanent Constitution has already passed.
I strongly believe it is important that the Iraqi parties get this permanent Constitution “right”– that is, to make sure it is one that the vast majority of Iraqi citizens feel comfortable with, going forward for– say– the next three generations. Crafting this Constitution should not necessarily be rushed to fit a Bremer-dictated deadline. I’m just hoping that a lot of the intra-Iraqi discussions and contacts that are going on now are about this extremely important topic.
But in the meantime there are many, extremely pressing issues of governance of the country that need to be attended to, and this should preferably happen at the hands of an empowered and legitimate Iraqi administration. That is the function that the yet-to-be-named “Transitional Government” is supposed to serve.
But if the convoluted and anti-democratic strictures of Bremer’s TAL should continue to prevent the Iraqi parties from forming this administration, then who the heck is is in charge?
Under international law, it is still the occupying military that’s in charge… Right through to the time of the conclusion of a final peace agreement between a legitimate Iraqi successor government and the governments of the occupying armies.
But with the “privilege” of running Iraq as a “foreign occupying power” comes an enormous amount of responsibility, too: responsibility for the wellbeing of all residents of the occupied territory (hah!) and responsibility to operate completely within the bounds of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rest of the provisions of International Humanitarian Law that govern the conduct of “belligerent military occupations”…
So far, the US/UK occupiers have contravened IHL in numerous ways in their conduct of the occupation… Not least by seeking already through the TAL and through the CPA’s many “Orders” and “Regulations”, which still remain in force, to completely change the juridical and governance underpinnings of the country’s administration in many, very serious ways. IHL completely forbids that.
Once there is an empowered and more-or-less legitimate (from the Iraqi citizenry’s viewpoint) Transitional Government, the TAL says it should stick by all those earlier Bremer-dictated laws and regulations. But what standing does any of the TAL have under international law? As far as I can see, very little indeed.
Anyway, I hadn’t meant to write much here. Mainly, I’ll leave an open thread here for y’all to put links and discussion into.

A combination of physiology and Real Life have taken over Helena’s brain and ability to blog today. I was going to post an open thread so y’all could post comments about Iraq (like Yankeedoodle used to before he brought in Matt and friendly Fire as his excellent ‘guest writers’.)
But then I moseyed (?sp) over to Riverbend’s blog and just loved this post on Iraqis’ new exposure to US Big Media:

The first time I saw 60 Minutes on MBC 4, it didn

I don’t for one moment enjoy being a Cassandra-like bearer of bad news when it comes to the democratization project in Iraq. I would love to have had my earlier forebodings about the project proved wrong. (Indeed, throughout 2004 I wrote a lot about how credible progress in just such a project could help to de-escalate tensions in Iraq while also disentangling the occupying army from its continued presence there…)
But no. There they were again today, the 275 elected members of the National Assembly– meeting, but once again quite unable to reach agreement on forming a government.
AP’s Mariam Fam was writing there, at 1 p.m. EST, about,

the interim prime minister and president storming out of the chaotic session that exposed deep divides among the National Assembly’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish members.
The short session

The steady passage of time has now eaten up 25.8% of the time allowed in Paul Bremer’s dysfunctional “TAL” regime for Iraq’s elected leaders and Assembly to come to agreement on a new permanent Constitution for the country… And yet, because of the restrictive, anti-democratic government-formation rules also included in the TAL, the elected lists have still not been able even to form a Transitional Government.
Delay, delay, delay… We have had so many promises already that government formation was “on the point” of being completed and announced! The latest one was this AFP report, March 25 from Baghdad, which warned that the coalition talks could drag on for a further week.
Meanwhile, the NYT’s Ed Wong is reporting that: “The delay in forming a new government in Iraq has stalled important projects at ministries and is sowing confusion among current government workers about their duties… ”
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
It really does seem as if what is happening now is a resumption of the policy Bremer pursued during his roughly one year in charge in Baghdad, of in effect destroying the internal structure of the Iraqi state.
Destroying the existing structures of governance and economic organization is a classic strategy of colonial powers throughout history. In recent times we saw the campaign of actual, phsyical destruction that Ariel Sharon waged in spring 2002 against the facilities of the still-fetal Palestinian Authority. Throughout most of 2003, Iraq was ruled by Bremer with the same philosophy, though using slightly different means.
And now, it has resumed…
Yesterday, btw, I had the good fortune to attend part of an excellent one-day conference at the University of Virginia on the past, present, and prospects for democratization in the Middle East. The panel I went to had as the main presenters the Turkish scholar Soli Ozel and Saad Eddim Ibrahim, a dear old friend who is a pioneer of the democratization movement in Egypt and indeed has announced his candidacy in Egypt’s presidential election, if there is to be one. The commenters on the panel were UVA profs Bill Quandt and David Waldner.
The whole discussion was excellent– there, and at the Al Dente restaurant afterwards. But what was particularly à propos for the present post was an excellent point that David made, namely that for democratization to work, the democratically elected leaders actually have to have at their command existing and empowered state institutions through which they can implement their decisions.
It seems like a self-evident point, doesn’t it? But it is not, it seems, at all evident to the Bush administration supporters who keep on crowing about the great success of the Iraqi elections some eight weeks ago (which more or less, I grant), while also claiming that those elections actually constituted some form of a successful “democratization” of Iraq….
I don’t think we should grant that yet, at all.

So today, 51 days after the election in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani is finally reported as expressing his “discontent” over the delay.
51 days is no small matter. According to Paul Bremer’s unilaterally imposed and and excessively complex “Transitional Administrative Law” scheme, Iraq’s Transitional Government and the elected National Assembly have 213 days between the election (Jan. 30) and the deadline to reach agreement on the text of a permanent Constitution (Aug. 31, at the latest).
We have now seen nearly one-fourth of that time period go by– 23.94%, to be precise— without the system even having generated a Transitional Government.
No wonder Sistani’s getting impatient.
How long, I wonder, till he brings his people out onto the street again to demand the implementation of the people’s will?

Time out for small authorial rant here: I was, I think, one of the first, back in February, to point out that the complicated system put in place by the TAL was seriously hampering the ability of Iraq’s elected leaders to form a government. Then on March 2, I started the “Democracy denied in Iraq” watch on the main JWN sidebar.
It seems to be only recently that the mainstream US media and other bloggers like Juan Cole have noticed that this delay is indeed, in itself, an issue.
Does anyone cite or give credit to my earlier work on this?
Or, on the whole issue–now much remarked-upon in the US MSM and blogosphere– of the disgraceful absence of women’s voices from the op-ed pages of major US newspapers. I wrote about that, and started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch back on Dec 21. Wrote about it a bit more in January, including Jan. 3rd.
Do I get any mentions, any citations, any respect for my pioneering work on that, either?
Hah! (That was a snort of disgust.)
Some respect, “guys”, please!

This piece of reporting, by Awadh al-Taee and Steve Negus of the Financial Times, is worth reading every word of.
It adds another dimension to the “First shoot, then lie” story I posted here ten days ago. Namely, that it’s not only the US troops who do this, but also the many private “security contractors”, i.e. foreign mercenaries, now rampaging their way around Iraq.
One particular twist in this story is that the miscreant mob was, as Taee and Negus wrote:

a three-vehicle convoy belonging to a private security company, transporting a foreigner working to facilitate Iraq’s parliamentary elections

The mercenaries in that convoy shot their way through a crowded intersection, leaving behind them two bullet-injured Iraqi motorists, one of whom died of his wound later that day.
Is this a case of “we had to kill this Iraqi voter in order to save his ability to vote?”
How on earth does the foreign “electoral specialist” in question feel about this incident? How should he or she feel? (Actually, does she or he even know about what happened there?)
But do please read the whole of Taee and Negus’s fine story, which incisively shows how the stark power imbalance between Iraqi citizens and armed foreigners in their land impacts upon the Iraqis.
At one point they write:

Under constant threat from suicide attackers driving explosive-rigged cars, coalition soldiers and contractors follow combat zone rules of engagement to protect themselves: warn drivers who stray too close, but if that fails, shoot. With procedures designed to protect the identities of anyone who might be singled out for retaliation, the victim’s families may never know what happened, let alone obtain justice. [And who keeps those ‘procedures’ in place, I wonder? ~HC]
In this case, the situation was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of the victim’s family after negotiation with the security company. However, it is not clear if the parties would have found each other had foreign journalists not been involved.

Huge kudos to Taee and Negus for their reporting, and to the FT for publishing this piece.
I wonder (!) why we have seen no such careful and hard-hitting reporting in the US media?
I also note that even though Taee and Negus work for the grand “Pink old lady” of pro-capitalist journalism, they admit that they and their paper still felt intimidated enough by the “security company” involved that they did not actually use its name in the story: “its country manager, “John” (a pseudonym) preferred that it not be named. Given the very real risk of retaliation, the FT agreed not to do so.”
Pseudonymous foreign managers, anonymous western companies, lies, evasions, and killings… Yes, welcome to the “New Iraq™”.
By the way, Taee and Negus give us this very poignant little portrait of the man killed:

The unarmed victim of the January 23 shooting was Abd al-Naser Abbas al-Dulaimi, age 29. Unmarried, he worked in the power station across the river to support his mother, two sisters, and the two children of an older brother who went missing in the 1991 Kuwait war. When he was shot, say police, he was out looking for petrol, which most Iraqis are forced to buy on the black market because of a recent shortage at the pumps. They found no weapons on his body, nor in his car.

Ullah yerhamu (God have mercy on him.) But what about all the dependents he left behind? Who will have mercy on them?

My “democracy denied in Iraq” counter now stands at 44 days since the Iraqi elections with no elected government in place there yet. (Yes, I just learned that the elected Assembly is supposed to have its inaugural meeting on Wednesday. That may or may not happen; but even if it does it’s not the same as having a working transitional government sworn in. Addendum Wed. a.m.– the Assembly did convene.)
Not having an Iraqi transitional government in place 44 days after the election is a scandal. Yes, perhaps a small portion of responsibility for that might lie in the hands of the political leaders (UIA list heads and Kurdish parties) who’ve been unable to reach agreement yet on the very tough issues of Kirkuk and sharia. But much more responsibility, surely, lies in the hands of the occupying power which arrogantly and virtually unilaterally decreed the “rules” for this whole transitional process on its own, with minimal consultation; which prior then delayed the voting quite unnecessarily for more than 6 months; and which has apparently done little or nothing since January 30 to help the different Iraqi list heads come to a working agreement.
So between the results of the election not having been translated into any degree at all of self-governance, and the security and service-provision aspects of daily life in most of the country still being quite horrendous, is it any surprise that popular frustration with the whole process of “transition” is building up fast?
In much of Iraq, the “security” situation since the elections has been one long nightmare. Nearly all of the victims of recent violence seem to have been Shiites, most of them civilians but also some members of the ever-“rebuilding” security forces…
I’ve been writing a lot about Lebanon recently. So since I need to write something on deadline about Iraq today, I thought I’d go back quickly through Today in Iraq and Juan Cole’s blog to collate a general picture for myself of the incidence of atrocities there in recent weeks.
Scrolling ultra-fast back through those two wonderful resources was a shocking experience. Most of the following comes from TII. A big “chapeau” to Yankeedoodle and his collaborators Friendly Fire and Matt for the work they
do there!
I thought that here I’d list only those recent incidents that involve more than 12 Iraqis killed. Of course, there were many, many more incidents that involved fewer than 12 Iraqis killed– and it’s quite likely that the total number killed in those attacks would be even greater than the numbers killed in the “big”, multi-casualty attacks. (Plus I’m sure I missed some of the big ones, too.)
Anyway, friends, please join in remembering the victims of these incidents from recent weeks:

March 14, Babel: 12 corpses found
March 13, north & south of Baghdad: 16 killed
March 11, Mosul: >50 killed at funeral
March 10, Mosul: >50 killed
March 9, Rumana: 26 corpses found
March 9, Latifiya: 15 headless corpses found
March 8, Balad: >15 killed
March 8, Baquba: 15 killed (in a number of incidents)
March 7, Baquba: 12 Iraqi police killed
March 7, Balad: 15 killed
February 28, Hillah: 125 killed in attack on medical clinic
February 19, Latifiya, etc: >80 killed in a number of incidents on the occasion of Ashoura rites

God have mercy on their souls and bring some measure of comfort to their loved ones.
… I see two possible political effects of all this suffering:

Continue reading “Post-election terror in Iraq”

Two great new posts from Riverbend this week. This woman’s phenomenal! (Where did I read she’s having a book come out soon? Oh, here— it’s due out next month…)
So, Wednesday’s post was an important one about the tone of internal political debate in Iraq. Along the way, she expresses her scorn for the idea of nominating Sistani for the Nobel Peace Prize… And she nominates Ahmed Chalabi instead!
Read that whole, beautifully written post to find out why.
Tuesday’s post was about the shooting of Giuliana Sgrena’s car and other even more terrifying violence in Baghdad today…

I